Minority Report Television Show Pilot review

 Minority Report Television Show

Pilot

So most of the time, I try to get a whole season or so in for these but the only way to view this series is to buy the episodes on iTunes. So I coughed up for the pilot and if people want more they can join Patreon and help me pay for it. That may be a bit ungracious but it is gonna be my position folks. Anyway, Minority Report started production in September 2014, was approved in May 2015, and aired on Fox from September 21st to November 30th, 2015, all 3 months. Fox even canceled three episodes dropping the season from 13 to 10 and then canceled it altogether in May 2016 after leaving it in Limbo for half a year. So let's take a look at the pilot.  Warning: I will be spoiling the plot of an 8-year-old television show. 

The show is set in Washington D.C. 2065, 11 years after the precogs have been freed and relocated and Precrime has been shut down. One of the precogs, Dash has returned to the city to try and use his ability to prevent murders. He's aided by a truly amazing artistic ability to draw what he sees and is smart enough to put together fragmentary details shockingly fast. He however has a problem: his visions never convey enough information for him to get to the right place at the right time to actually save anyone. 

 Detective Vega of the DC Police has a similar issue in that she joined up hoping to get into Pre-Crime and is tired of just showing up after a crime and cleaning up after it. She also has the rather cliché motivation of her father, a cop, being murdered and his killing never being solved. Now to be fair, the show does a good job of displaying that she's actually fairly good at putting information together and coming to correct conclusions. Like figuring out a murder victim had a daughter they were trying to protect when they were killed. So when Dash tries to pass on some information to Vega on the sly, only for her to hunt him down it's not a shock. They of course decide to team up and fight crime. 

Using Dash's visions and a terrifying police surveillance network (What in many places already exists, or has the technological capacity to exist.), they're able to narrow down a threat to a former Pre-Crime officer now running for mayor. His platform is promising to bring crime back down to pre-crime levels using technology as a substitute. The Hawkeye program uses the already massively common and intrusive surveillance systems in DC paired with an Algorithmic search engine to figure out who might be committing a crime in the near future, flag them for law enforcement, and place them under close surveillance (Some counties in Florida actually do this. You can imagine how racist the results are because it is very easy to build a racist classification algorithm.  The result is black teenagers having surveillance vans in front of their homes, being randomly searched, etc.). Speaking as someone who has to deal with Google and YouTube algorithms fairly regularly? That's terrifying. 

The threat is of course from two victims of Pre-Crime, suffering some brain damage from the method of detention that Pre-Crime used. Which leaves me asking, why did anyone think putting people in some bizarre torture coma was even a good idea? Let alone people who couldn't be formally charged with a crime! (I mean, they're already arresting it and prisoning people who haven't actually done anything. Why not torture them at that point?)So it's not enough to put them away for life without a trial but to use a method that torments them and leaves them brain-damaged? Why!?! Just Why!?! (Our criminal justice system already does this to the limits of technology. Pre-trial inmates in tent cities in the Arizona desert, pretrial inmates on Rikers Island … being on Rikers Island.  Often in solitary confinement for months or years at a time for no reason…) Of course, our two villains are men who despite their brain damage are capable of working together to create a rather complex plot to conduct what I can only call a terrorist strike to kill not just the guy running for mayor, but his wife, his 2-year-old son and hundreds of innocent bystanders in a political rally.

Now points for novelty because their plan to pull this off involves a homemade bio weapon delivered by computer-controlled passenger pigeons. Because the species was deextinctified by one of the men in question before being arrested for being in a vision of committing murder. Seriously, I used a bunch of creatures I wrenched from the oblivion of extinction and controlled through computer chips in their brains to deliver a bioweapon I cooked up on the sly while suffering brain damage is one hell of a science flex and I respect that. It's a completely evil and kinda depraved science flex but a science flex it remains. Also readers, yes I enjoyed every moment of typing that sentence.

Our heroes of course save the day, but the plotters are killed. Which left me sighing and points I think to what went wrong. Well, several things went wrong. Well, the pilot has this theme of surveillance and the use of it by authorities but doesn't engage with it. There's no debate if the Hawkeye system is a good idea or a bridge too far, it just sits there. Now maybe future episodes will engage that but this would be the time to establish that as a theme of debate of the show if you were going to do that. Instead, the pilot seems to quietly suggest that it would be great if our protagonists had this power because then they could stop all these murders but I have to ask... What else would be done with it? If you haven't realized by now that that is a question we have to ask about any power we hand our government or any other organization, I have to ask if you slept well through the last 2 decades.

Also, everything wraps up a bit to neatly. Our heroes don't ask, where did these guys get the resources to pull this off. They weren’t holding down jobs, and even homemade bioweapons that kill hundreds quickly can't be cheap. It's also odd that no one asks Detective Vega how she got all this information, either (does this seem like a society that cares over much about evidence to you?). Now beyond that, the acting is decent, although the dialogue suffers through sad attempts at Joss Whedon-style banter and comedy. Not to mention hit-or-miss humor using precog powers. As an adaptation, it comes in at D+ because it is rather far off the field of the original short story. As a stand-alone product? Honestly, the show is rather mediocre, coming in at a C at best. It's not awful or bad but it's not good either. I don't hate it but I can certainly think of a better use for 45 minutes of my time. 

Well, I hoped you enjoyed this review.  If you did consider joining the ranks of the ever-wise patrons at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Where for a dollar a month you can vote on upcoming reviews and content, get access to special patron-only content (for example a podcast discussing the Minority Report movie) and more.  Next week we’ll be reviewing the book Anglo-Saxon Myths: The Struggle for the Seven Kingdoms by Brice Stratford, and the week after I’ll be releasing a video on Anglo-Saxon mythology. Hope to see you there, until then take care of yourself, take care of each other, and of course, keep reading! 

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders