The Miss: Is 'The Mist' This Summer's 'Under the Dome'?

IT was such a big movie that I haven't seen it, but I have heard of it. I've seen the memes. The memes are OK, and I watched the 80s movie which is frankly a pretty effective if silly horror movie. Stephen King is doing alright lately. But for every good media product, there is a subpar product created as reaction. Stephen King has provided society with a fair amount of media products as his bestselling books regularly get reconfigured into television and film, and that makes sense: King is a prolific writer with a huge audience. Sadly, his admirers often fail to elevate the material, and a recent case is all the example we need.

Today, we are gathered at this sloppy blog to discuss and explore The Mist - the 2017 Netflix special. Apparently it started its sad life as a new series for Spike TV. Spike TV's last major show was MXC and that was over a decade ago. You're going to ask something about why I would watch a show made for Spike TV. Because, let's face it: I should've known better, right? Let me answer for my actions: sometimes you know the trainwreck is coming and you just have to make sure you see it happen. I saw it on Netflix (where it had been dumped fairly quickly for an American exclusive), knew it would be pretty bad without any research, and dove right in.

I vaguely recall a movie of The Mist released in 2007, based on Stephen King's novel by the same name (at this point I won't read it anytime soon). The movie had weird bugs that the protagonists had to shoot when they were in a supermarket. Big things loomed in the dark. Were they dinosaurs? Then, at the apportioned time, the mist blew out of town, and everyone had endured personal struggles, survived, and grown as people. I assume this TV series is aiming to do the same, but since it was written by committee with little regard for coherence or impact, I also assume it will kind of spin around in annoying circles for 10 episodes.

All you need is a coping mechanism, and you can watch this show.

It opens, kind of like Under the Dome did, with the destruction of an animal. In Under the Dome it's a cow that gets split into two steak-like halves, in The Mist it's a dog that gets eviscerated. And a soldier wakes up without any memory of what's going on... oh yes, friends, you've entered a zone of mass entertainment you've probably stumbled over before. The dead dog looks a lot more realistic than the dead cow, though. If you have Netflix, you can see for yourself. Actually I'll spare you the trouble:

Big mystery: who did the dog piss off to get done like this? Also: nice one, SFX people.

The same team is responsible for The Mist as made Under the Dome. I'm sure that the key people are unchanged. There's a deep connection between the shows. I can sense these strange coincidences... the casting seems similar. The locations seemed to have been scouted the same ways. The special effects: again I'm getting some deja vu. The writing is what really seals its fate. Something about the situations and the handling of characters and the bizarre missteps they have to take in order to make plot lines viable just reminds me of the 8 or so episodes of Under the Dome I watched.

The pilot episode was difficult to watch. It was an appalling collection of clichés and stereotypes that lands so flat that it's nearly funny, but takes itself so seriously, offers so little horror, and gives the audience such a 20 minute head start on the fog that by the end of the episode you're not even sure that it's awful, funny awful, or purposefully awful. It might just be unremarkable.

A plethora of pointless violence (at one point a man shoots another to death, apologizes, and shoots himself to death in the space of a minute) and deaths add nothing to the sense of crisis. They get in the way. The crisis is handled annoyingly, but at least it doesn't take 3 episodes to arrive. Pacing, however, is pretty horrible. The bottle episode is strong with this show, because people have to seek refuge indoors and then all the usual shit you know from zombie movies and TV is coming in as well. Bland and lengthy, with little originality to keep the plot involving, means that I quickly found myself with no reasons to watch — except to learn more about these rich characters and their intriguing town.

The smidgeon of promise in episode 1, when there's a lot of gendered speech so you think, "ok what's going to go on with the gender roles of small town America?". Kind of like in Dome. It's important to note this caught a lot of criticism from disgruntled Gen Xers but in the end it plays out that the genderfluid kid is a rapist and the football player actually a decent person, so it's a tasty bit of a misdirection. That might be the only half decent piece of plot in the show and I gave it to you for free.

I mean, you can go and watch it. The Mist has a drone scene. A pretty prominent drone scene. A shocking and creepy drone scene you won't believe. Under the Dome had kids on phones but the idea is pretty similar. The characters feel very similar. They've just fallen through a wormhole into an alternate reality, where an unexplained dome is replaced with an unexplained fog, their faces and backstories have changed a little, but most of the rest of it is striking this viewer as familiar.

Hope you like these three faces in particular.

By the second episode's ending, when a montage set to music takes place, I am convinced that too many people's careers survived Under the Dome, and maybe even thrived. One of the few things Under the Dome missed (in the 8 episodes I watched) was a montage set to a bad song, and it is so strikingly reminiscent (minus the sense of fun) and in concert with every other naivete, narrative shortcut, and truncated characterisation it strongly reminded me of that sweet, bland, and dumb Dome Life. This show is a great study in how to make every character completely unlikeable, by being ham-handed with them or just by writing them like violent, irrational, gigantic-headed, floppy-necked babies.

The main character is a supposedly emasculated (according to the regressive hick males of the town) guy who likes to smirk and look intense. His wife starts out as unfairly maligned until her true identity, stupid bitch, gets revealed. Her daughter is an ethereal victim who has a bright future in anti anxiety medication advertisments. Her best friend is Queer™️ in one of the laziest depictions I've ever seen (every character calls him 'freak' as if it's still 1997, the writers lay it on a bit thick). The characters manage to get every generation wrong. I think they were written to offend the largest number of people possible, so that we'd keep watching in order to see them all killed. The dialogue is so bad that you can tell the actors don't really want to deliver it, but also don't care enough to try to ad lib some life into it.

"Sheeeeeit. My careeeer..."

Not sold on these characters. The nature lady starts out strong and then becomes a vicious, vacuous dipshit (deep commentary on 'ecofascism' there). The sheriff begins the show as irredeemable fuckwit but grows more than anyone else to become a plain and simple fuckwit by the end of the season. The pastor is a bad person, of course. His altar boy is a zealot. The black soldier who starts it all is Mysterious (so get ready to never learn what makes him important, just that he isn't who he thinks he is). The junkie chick is my favorite character because she doesn't need rationale like the others. All her actions make a lot of sense to me, even the stupid ones, because she's a TV show junkie. (Sidenote: remember how awful Fear the Walking Dead was? No show squandered more promise in 2 episodes, not even The Mist.)

The real mystery isn't the titular mist. It's how they got the guy from the Wire to play the spineless mall boss. That's right. There's a mall boss. There's a bunch of bad characters locked up in the mall, it is a prominent part of the show, and it is as flat and disinteresting as it sounds. Why malls? Because the ideal viewers of this show lived in malls over 10 years ago. You know what made me really sad, though? The thought that it had been so long since Under the Dome. I wonder where all those actors and crew ended up... it's been such a long time. And TV is as shitty as it's ever been, even when the critics and thinkpiecers are saying it's the new Blockbuster Movie. But then duds, bombs, and overflowing garbage bins are nothing new in either medium.

Is The Mist the Under the Dome of summer 2017? Almost certainly. It has that pedigree about it in overwhelming amounts. It has tense moments collapse into absurdity, it has promising moments devoured by inanity, and it killed an innocent dog in a cold open just to be shitty. It takes the relatively interesting premise (which it shares with The Dome) of a crisis revealing the darkness lurking in small town life, and just kind of squanders it for blockbuster moments and circuituous plot points and padding.

I just fear that The Mist won't be as slow, and not as self-indulgently stupid. Instead it will be twice as slow, and plain stupid. I also fear the creators won't be making 2 more seasons, as was bafflingly the case with Under the Dome. If you want to get a taste of what this summer was about, and watch a 'funny' microcosm version of America where the Trump Presidency is the mist and the townspeople are America trying to cope... too dark, actually. I'll let you make the call.

Addendum 1: I can't wait for season 2. Season 1 had the following line in it: "You know your father can't hear you when you're wearing makeup." It was the one bright spot in the otherwise dreary premiere. I do hope whoever thought up that gem gets a second kick at the can.