TV Reviews: Minority Report
Sep. 27th, 2015 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
djgrayThis was supposed to go up sooner, but there've been some fun power outages in the area that I live in, which is why this is going up late. Which happens sometimes when you live in the backwoods in a hobbit house.
ETA: And then I also got distracted by the moon. Oops.
So the pilot of Minority Report was very good. I'd seen some small promos for it and the fact that it had both Meagan Good and Stark Sands was enough to get me to record the pilot at least. I was not disappointed. It was a fairly solid episode, you don't actually need to have watched the movie or read the book to understand what's going on.
You start with the opener which tells you all about these three children, Dashiell, Arthur, and Agatha, children from a drug addict mother who were brought back to life/given back their minds by an experimental treatment that also gave them precog powers.
The kids were undergoing trials and tests in Woodhaven Clinic in the year 2040. Those tests however, led to the doctors and research team also becoming aware that the three kids also were seeing every murder within 100 miles. That was the last time they were out in the open.
The Precogs were taken by the government for a division called Precrime. Sacrificing their own lives in order to preserve others. But the program was abolished and the Precogs were sent off to an undisclosed location to “protect” them. Which is how the movie ended. Good solid way to introduce the three Pre-Cogs and explain what’s happened in the movie to lead us to this point now.
But nothing can remain hidden forever.
So we see a figure with hunched shoulders, playing a random game in a bar, and then telling the bartender she’s going to need a mop right before one of her servers trips and spills a drink. This is our introduction to Dash, one of the three Pre-cogs. The youngest as we find out later in the episode (by seven minutes, as the twins are quick to tell Detective Vega).
Then his body seizes and he stumbles his way out of there, it’s a vision and he pulls out a notebook to sketch out some of what he sees, mumbling to himself as he goes along. 842am at Bartlet Plaza, room 1313, and then a sketch of what the murderer's face looks like. No names, just fragments of what's going to go down.
He's got 40 minutes to stop whatever's going on and so we see him running and heading for a train and it leads us to our first official realtime datestamp, Washington DC, 2065 and it looks like Chinatown (So he probably took either the Green, Yellow, or Red Metro lines to get to that particular stop. And based on the time he had available to him to get there...he was maybe three stops away. Depending on the time it takes him to get to the metro stop and hop on the right train and then hop off at the correct stop).
There are ads about Precrime ending - as the Pre-Cog is trying to stop the murders from happening. But he’s too late and he doesn’t watch because he’s already seen it.
And that right there is a very good hook. You automatically want to know more about this guy and about this world and what’s going on in it.
When we tune back in, we have two ladies on the screen discussing the crime scene, one that looks like an ME and one that is clearly a cop. Meagan Good is Vega, the cop and she’s fantastic. She cares about her job and about stopping crimes before they happen. Getting to the bad guy before he creates a mess for them to clean up. And that dovetails nicely with Dash’s need to get to one of these visions before they become a reality.
Throughout out the pilot, you get to see Dash’s siblings and the interactions they have give some fascinating glimpses into how they work. We find out that the two twins were a hive, that Arthur gets all the names, Dash gets all the other details, and Agatha is the strongest one, who gets more than the other two. Because of them being off the grid, the Pre-Cogs don’t have great soclal skills. Dash has almost none to speak of and that comes across really clearly in the episode. Arthur’s are better, but he’s been out in the world longer. Agatha remains on the island away from it all, but she’s also got much better skills than Dash does. He’s the youngest and the weakest
You also learn that Vega’s dad was a cop and that she lives with her mom and her baby brother and her dad died on the job. I really love how the show is setting both Dash and Vega up as protagonists and we’re getting information about both of them and their lives and backgrounds. So far I'm pleased by the representation so far I've seen.
I think one of my favorite things about this pilot is all of the little details that tell us about the setting and time. The ad on the train for Hart’s Totally Baked Goods - pot is legal now. Dash’s baseball cap - World Series cap from 2054 where the Nationals won/played. The fact that that apparently the name changes did happen and the Redskins became the RedClouds. Season 75 of the Simpsons. The fact that pigeons had actually gone extinct until our perpetrator brought them back.
Which yes, the major plot that Vega and Dash have to stop is a former Precrime convict attempting to murder the former Deputy Director of Precrime who is running for Mayor via trained evil pigeons infected with a biochem agent.
Which is just spectacular. We're left with a tantalizing hook at the end of the episode of Dash's siblings talking amongst themselves and Agatha reveals that she's had a vision of them being taken again and used.
So this definitely goes into the category of Shows We're Keeping Around. Airs on Mondays and I'm looking forward to what tomorrow's episode brings.
ETA: And then I also got distracted by the moon. Oops.
So the pilot of Minority Report was very good. I'd seen some small promos for it and the fact that it had both Meagan Good and Stark Sands was enough to get me to record the pilot at least. I was not disappointed. It was a fairly solid episode, you don't actually need to have watched the movie or read the book to understand what's going on.
You start with the opener which tells you all about these three children, Dashiell, Arthur, and Agatha, children from a drug addict mother who were brought back to life/given back their minds by an experimental treatment that also gave them precog powers.
The kids were undergoing trials and tests in Woodhaven Clinic in the year 2040. Those tests however, led to the doctors and research team also becoming aware that the three kids also were seeing every murder within 100 miles. That was the last time they were out in the open.
The Precogs were taken by the government for a division called Precrime. Sacrificing their own lives in order to preserve others. But the program was abolished and the Precogs were sent off to an undisclosed location to “protect” them. Which is how the movie ended. Good solid way to introduce the three Pre-Cogs and explain what’s happened in the movie to lead us to this point now.
But nothing can remain hidden forever.
So we see a figure with hunched shoulders, playing a random game in a bar, and then telling the bartender she’s going to need a mop right before one of her servers trips and spills a drink. This is our introduction to Dash, one of the three Pre-cogs. The youngest as we find out later in the episode (by seven minutes, as the twins are quick to tell Detective Vega).
Then his body seizes and he stumbles his way out of there, it’s a vision and he pulls out a notebook to sketch out some of what he sees, mumbling to himself as he goes along. 842am at Bartlet Plaza, room 1313, and then a sketch of what the murderer's face looks like. No names, just fragments of what's going to go down.
He's got 40 minutes to stop whatever's going on and so we see him running and heading for a train and it leads us to our first official realtime datestamp, Washington DC, 2065 and it looks like Chinatown (So he probably took either the Green, Yellow, or Red Metro lines to get to that particular stop. And based on the time he had available to him to get there...he was maybe three stops away. Depending on the time it takes him to get to the metro stop and hop on the right train and then hop off at the correct stop).
There are ads about Precrime ending - as the Pre-Cog is trying to stop the murders from happening. But he’s too late and he doesn’t watch because he’s already seen it.
And that right there is a very good hook. You automatically want to know more about this guy and about this world and what’s going on in it.
When we tune back in, we have two ladies on the screen discussing the crime scene, one that looks like an ME and one that is clearly a cop. Meagan Good is Vega, the cop and she’s fantastic. She cares about her job and about stopping crimes before they happen. Getting to the bad guy before he creates a mess for them to clean up. And that dovetails nicely with Dash’s need to get to one of these visions before they become a reality.
Throughout out the pilot, you get to see Dash’s siblings and the interactions they have give some fascinating glimpses into how they work. We find out that the two twins were a hive, that Arthur gets all the names, Dash gets all the other details, and Agatha is the strongest one, who gets more than the other two. Because of them being off the grid, the Pre-Cogs don’t have great soclal skills. Dash has almost none to speak of and that comes across really clearly in the episode. Arthur’s are better, but he’s been out in the world longer. Agatha remains on the island away from it all, but she’s also got much better skills than Dash does. He’s the youngest and the weakest
You also learn that Vega’s dad was a cop and that she lives with her mom and her baby brother and her dad died on the job. I really love how the show is setting both Dash and Vega up as protagonists and we’re getting information about both of them and their lives and backgrounds. So far I'm pleased by the representation so far I've seen.
I think one of my favorite things about this pilot is all of the little details that tell us about the setting and time. The ad on the train for Hart’s Totally Baked Goods - pot is legal now. Dash’s baseball cap - World Series cap from 2054 where the Nationals won/played. The fact that that apparently the name changes did happen and the Redskins became the RedClouds. Season 75 of the Simpsons. The fact that pigeons had actually gone extinct until our perpetrator brought them back.
Which yes, the major plot that Vega and Dash have to stop is a former Precrime convict attempting to murder the former Deputy Director of Precrime who is running for Mayor via trained evil pigeons infected with a biochem agent.
Which is just spectacular. We're left with a tantalizing hook at the end of the episode of Dash's siblings talking amongst themselves and Agatha reveals that she's had a vision of them being taken again and used.
So this definitely goes into the category of Shows We're Keeping Around. Airs on Mondays and I'm looking forward to what tomorrow's episode brings.
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Date: 2015-10-11 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-15 12:47 am (UTC)