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Sep 21, 2015 Web Exclusive By Zach Hollwedel

It has been 10 years since the PreCrime division was shuttered in Minority Report, FOX’s serialized sequel to Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film of the same name. Prophetic twins Arthur and Dash, and their older and more powerful sister, Agatha, had been known as the Precogs, a trio of siblings able to predict—and therefore help the police prevent—future murders. The program was deemed a violation of peoples’ rights, and after flaws were exposed in it, the system was shut down. Now, the siblings try to live normal lives, only Dash cannot stop having visions of killings to come. After failing yet again to prevent a murder, Dash teams up with detective Lara Vega, and the duo begins secretly preempting homicides.

Minority Report (the film) was an incredibly strong, successful example of sci-fi cinema. It presented a unique scenario in a well-developed future world. Minority Report (the show) takes as its foundation that world and everything it established and…tells about the most banal story with it as possible. As characters in the film—for, truly, that’s the basis for who they are in the show—Arthur and Dash were the least interesting of the pre-cogs. Agatha was the augur with the most potent abilities. She was the one Tom Cruise’s Chief John Anderton liberated for her potential to help him. She was the one who most frequently saw the minority reports, discrepancies in the visions shared by the siblings. And yet, she’s not the pre-cog protagonist here.

Dash (Stark Sands) is a two-dimensional “hero” at best, an uninitiated oracle-type figure prone to seizure-like visions who, because of his upbringing as essentially a police department prisoner, has social development disorders. He’s been free of the Pre-Crime program for a decade, spent a lot of that time on a remote island, and now wanders about Washington D.C. trying to stop crimes from happening. But he doesn’t know how to interact with people, filter what he says, or mask his feelings. He’s yet another in a long and recent string of TV cop protagonists with Asperger syndrome (or some variant thereof), and the trend is wearing quite thin. His partnership with Vega (Meagan Good) is equally uninspiring. The show’s writers try to mine some humor out of their interactions—namely, her need to instruct him on his people skills—but she’s about as lackluster a small screen detective as they come, and the resulting partnership is just meh.

The show does a relatively commendable job mimicking the film’s aesthetic and building upon its world (at least some of the time), but that’s far from enough to earn Minority Report a cemented spot in your Monday night viewing lineup. And yes, some of the action sequences are fun, but there are scores of other action-packed programs on television that engage on deeper and other levels. Yet, at the end of the day, all we really have is a pair of cops (well, one cop, one wannabe) chasing visions one at a time. Perhaps Dash and Vega stumble on a larger conspiracy in future episodes, but as it stands now, the case-of-the-week approach is as hackneyed a take on Minority Report as FOX could have come up with. (www.fox.com/minority-report)

Author rating: 4.5/10