Minority Report: Season 1, Episode 3: Hawk-Eye
I still feel like Minority Report needs a momentum boost. I get that it’s really early, but as promising as it is, I’m worried that it might lose its viewership before it hits its stride. Meagan Good still seems like she’s getting comfortable with the role, but she’s carrying herself very well in a show one would not have normally expected her to be the star of. Seeing as how I only have a passing familiarity with Stark Sands, I can’t rightly judge his performance against others, but he is doing a decent job of selling the whole fish-out-of-water.
The biggest issue I’m having now, is with how ineffectual this excessively thorough police force is. They are omnipresent, that was the point of the movie the show is based off. The Anderson had to get a friggin’ eye transplant just to move around for crying out loud! How is it that confidential informants still exist? How can they not know who she has been getting her information from? I get that the precogs were granted anonymity, but there’s still a lot to ignore.
Did the eye scanners go out with pre-crime? They have so many other insane technologies (like the hypnosis machine thing they used and a machine that shows dreams on a monitor), so what’s going on there? This Hawk-Eye system they use has to be the evolution of what came before, which means the eye scanner. Speaking of Hawk-Eye, which is a highly sophisticated computer program mind you, wouldn’t it keep records of its readings? Shouldn’t they know Vega and Dash “Parker” are lying when they look for the Hawk-Eye files?
Despite this jumble of plot holes, the episode wasn’t terrible. Hawk-Eye has the ability to take the show in the right direction. The future of law enforcement seems hell-bent on predicting crime that isn’t necessarily inevitable. The very fact that they can stop these deaths should be enough to let them know the systems are ineffective. That’s the point though, the questioning of free will versus destiny. That was a much easier theme to follow in the original movie, but the show seems to be slow in getting there. Hopefully we will get more subtext and fewer red herrings in future episodes.
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Jonathan Thomas Jones is a speculative fiction author and founder of geekhavenreviews.com. He has been passionate about all things geek for his entire life. See more about him at jonathanthomasjones.com and follow him on twitter @jtgloryjones.
