Minority Report episode “Mr. Nice Guy” gives us a little more insight into Dash, but is it capable of making us actually care about the pre-cogs?
“Mr. Nice Guy” does a lot to help tie the series into the previous movie with plenty of reminders and flashbacks to the pre-crime era “milk bath” that the pre-cogs spent the majority of their life under. Unfortunately, the episode as a whole seems to fall flat on its forced need to be nostalgic and clever.
The focus on the episode is to bring a bit of background into the motivations of Dash and is quest to help stop murders again. The problem with the episode is that it falls into the deep trap of ham-fisting both moral consequence as well as tired buddy-cop relationship drama into a situation where it doesn’t make too much sense.
Dash, while noble, clearly doesn’t have much of an understanding of how the world works. As a complete idealist, he’s demonstrated on multiple occasions already that he’s at most oblivious, or at worst indifferent, to the consequences of his action. His single driving motivation to save the people he sees in his vision ends up being a cliche greatest danger to those around him. His juvenile impulse to act upon extremely limited data clearly shows a lack of logical thought.
The worst part of Dash’s impulses is that it basically leads into a horrific (and somewhat expected) level of predictability in a show about pre-cognition. From the onset, any experienced viewer is going to get that Dash’s limited abilities are going to false positive on someone. Furthermore, we have the typical crime show situation where our characters are so sure of someone’s guilt that they completely miss the true culprit. The show even takes this to an extreme by pushing the situation where Dash’s zealousness directly puts the woman he’s attempting to save directly in the line of harm. Had Dash done nothing as Detective Vega asked, none of this situations would have occurred.
While we can argue that through his efforts, they have prevented a future crime from happening at a later date, all the actions he’s taken really just reinforce the fact that had everyone just did nothing, everyone would have been fine.
But despite the annoying premise flaws of the series, it still have the crippling issue of being brutally generic for a crime procedural. Protagonist investigates a crime (or future crime), compiles evidence, seeks out perpetrator, spends relationship time with partner to get to know them and each others motivations, and targets the wrong perpetrator for most of the episode until a last minute reveal to save the day.
Strewn throughout this even is even more heavy-handed references to an impending privacy invasion of the predictive “Hawkeye” system, which is ironic considering the entire premise of the world is based on a compete lack of privacy boundaries between advertisers and consumers.
But in the end, the basic and most glaring flaw of the series has to be its main character Dash, who is not only unlikable, but also uninspiring.
Other Observations
- There is a never ending onslaught of showing us how clever technology will be in the near future, with a healthy dose of idiotic ideas that make the show seem like a bad future science envisioning from the 1950s.
- PHD from Harvard in Pickup Science
- Beyonce is a classic oldie.
- When does Vega need to say “lenses” to activate? Sometimes she just says a command and it works, sometimes there’s an explicit “lenses” precursor.
