Those bastards! They killed – waitaminute. Did anyone die this week? Lots of threats of death and violence, but I don't think the body count actually grew for once! Weird. Got to keep the remaining cast alive for next season I suppose.
The question is, will we come back after this non-conclusion? Fulfilling the worst expectations relating to their surprise renewal, "Curtains" reveals absolutely nothing. It employs many cool special effects to distract us, and some of the personal story arcs imperceptibly move slightly. But, face it, most of these characters are ciphers, subject to the whims of the plot, and nothing really gets even close to resolution in this finale of cliffhangers.
The town wants Barbie's blood, for little reason other than he's an outsider. The Seizure Club think he's the Monarch, for little reason than it sounds as good as everything else they don't know. Save for Junior, who hates him because he and Angie are smoke buddies. And for little other reason than he's crazy.
As was Junior's mom, apparently, as Big Jim takes Linda to her studio to show that she knew all about pink stars falling upwards and Junior being one of the chosen and evil black eggs long ago.
So that's a little cool and creepy for a moment, as is Samantha Mathis' triumphant return as an alien (or something) using her form to tell the Seizure Club they need to protect the egg or they won't be worthy of the light ever coming back. Don't go into it, Carol Anne! Oh, yeah, the monarch butterfly hatched and wherever he battered the mini-dome trying to get out, both it and the Big Dome turned black.
Just as the townspeople didn't freak out enough over the Dome, they don't really lose it at the black shroud spreads, either. Some go to church and others worry about their crops, but most just turn on their electric lights. Apparently everyone in small New England towns has seven or eight floodlights on their property at all times, keeping those Nerf basketball hoops as safe as houses.
The butterfly likes Julia better than Barbie, so maybe she's the monarch. She's certainly very active for someone with a gaping chest wound. She decides to protect the egg in one of probably infinite random ways, and the black dome lightens up to blinding white – the end. No, really. Tune in next year. It'd be an anti-climax, if it in fact made even disappointingly bad sense. Instead, it's a half-episode, for a half-series, for a book that it's long abandoned, that wasn't one of King's best, anyway. So, thanks for nothing, CBS.
Cool bisected cow, though.
Shawn Hill knows two things: comics and art history. Find his art at http://cornekopia.net.