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The season premiere of Under The Dome kept millions and millions of people captivated last week on CBS, and tonight is back for more at 10p. So before you watch the second episode of the show that makes us feel like we are trapped under a dome and can’t escape it (in a very good way), find out what the show’s executive producers, Neal Bear and Brian K Vaughan want you to know about summer television’s biggest hit in over a decade. Recently I was at a press event with them and here are some of the burning (hint about tonight’s episode) questions they answered.
What will we learn about The Dome tonight?
Brian K Vaughan: (Tonight) we’ll answer that very same question (How deep is The Dome?). We promise you that that will be answered. The dome is so huge, and it is so beyond anything that these people have seen before, that it won’t just be one episode of figuring out the rules, but several. You’ll understand a lot about it by the end of the second episode.
Are the characters what they seem to be?
Neal Baer: The characters are complicated. The people you think are bad, may not be so bad, and the ones you think are good, may not be so good. That’s really what Stephen King has always done so well and we’ve really embraced that too. So don’t believe everything you see.
Who’s safe?
BKV: The great thing about having a town with a couple thousand people in it is that we have our central cast, but none of them are safe. We can very easily bring in a new Chester’s Mill resident to fill in their place.
So people will die?
BKV: I think, on a Stephen King show, it is not a spoiler to say there will be deaths.
BB: In our writers’ room, we have our heaven board.
BKV: It’s nothing personal, though.
NB: There is at least one person in heaven that left the dome…maybe.
Since Brian K Vaughan worked on Lost, can we expect a lot of unanswered questions?
BKV: I think we’ve done a pretty good job, not stringing everyone along. We made a conscious decision that, if we present a mystery we will solve it for you before we start introducing new ones.
Will there be flashbacks?
BKV: We didn’t necessarily want to do a lot of flashbacks to the characters’ pasts. We won’t be cutting to someone who has a boyfriend in New York just to shake things up a bit. We really wanted to challenge ourselves and set it in this one location and find all the different things we could do with it there.
How did Stephen King react to seeing the cow get cut in half?
BKV: When I met him for the first time in North Carolina, he almost giggled when the cow gets cut in half.
What’s like working with the two Stephen/Stevens?
BKV: We have light and dark together in this show which is really fun. Steven Spielberg sees the best in humanity and Stephen King has always seen the worst. But they’re both really aggressive humanists. They just love people so much and throwing them in extraordinary situations and seeing what happens.
Is this show a one season event?
NB: In 10 years, we’ll have the answer to that. This is not a mini-series. Some people have said it’s a mini-series, but it’s not a mini-series. It’s a 13-episode series.
BKV: Yeah it takes place over a relatively short amount of time. When we first started talking with Stephen, he said, “When I came up with this idea, I envisioned a town potentially being trapped for years, and that’s something that you guys could get to do, that I didn’t, and that might necessitate a different ending.†So we pitched Stephen a far-out, big swing idea for if we’re lucky enough to go several years. He was really excited by it and so generous in saying, “I wish I thought of that. That’s killer!†He’s been so supportive. He knows that that book is his own thing. It would be boring to translate the book exactly for the screen. He wants to see something new that hopefully still has the themes and the heart of the book in it.
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