Season three of CBS’s summer series Under the Dome turned the story on its head, with the first episode setting up a time jump that introduced new characters including Marg Helgenberger as a therapist. The third season also finds Dale ‘Barbie’ Barbara (Mike Vogel) involved in a new relationship one year after the citizens of Chester’s Mill were freed from the dome.
Meanwhile, Joe McAlister (Colin Ford) has failed to get on with his life and seems trapped under the dome long after it’s actually disappeared.
At the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con, Helgenberger, Ford, and Vogel were teamed up to discuss the current season of the series airing on Thursdays at 10pm ET/PT. Helgenberger explained during our roundtable interview that we’ll be learning more about her character’s background as the season progresses.
“I’m actually doing 10 out of the 13 episodes,” said Helgenberger. “She comes in with an agenda, which is to get this community to work as a collective. Some people agree to it and some don’t, and that’s the divisiveness that happens in Chester’s Mill, which causes a lot of the drama to take place. It’s been a lot of fun to play.”
Asked about that alternate universe introduced in the first episode of season three, Vogel says we’ll be revisiting what happened during that time throughout this summer’s shows. “I mean, it sort of presents itself throughout the season just because of the fallout and damage that it’s done. But it was a finite thing so now that we’re out of that…because to all of us that were cocooned, we lived a full year’s worth of experiences. For Julia and I that clearly poses a problem because her and I had only been together for a little over three weeks. So, three weeks versus a year – even though it didn’t happen, to us two it feels like it did. So getting past those hurdles becomes a big deal.”
Vogel admits that when they told him they were introducing a love triangle, he was leery about how that would play out. But after the alternate universe was introduced, it became an interesting dynamic to play. “I was, ‘How are we going to bring yet another beautiful woman into town that we have not seen before? How is that going to happen?’ But I think the way that Marg and Kylie (Bunbury) weren’t just popping out of a barn one day like they’d been hiding there the whole time, I think that the way that they introduced everybody this year was really great and believable. It’s been fun to play and it’s been fun to see the fans’ reactions. It kind of reaffirms that it’s nice to have them supporting that Barbie/Julia thing. It shows that we’ve really struck a cord there and when they see that challenged, they start resisting and fighting back against it. It’s kind of cool.”
Watch the entire interview for more on what we can expect this season:
