“If only we had another Precog.”
Warning: spoilers follow for the episode below.
Line up those chess pieces and slip on those glass shoes, because Minority Report continued its TV adaptation on Monday night with plenty of cliched storylines and obvious setup to go around.
While the pilot introduced several elements from the movie that served as Easter eggs for fans of the original film, the second episode, “Mr. NIce Guy” continued playing them up to excess. The introduction, while serving as a quick refresher for any fans who might not have caught the pilot, felt repetitive in its second go-around and only worked to bog down the overall story.
We picked up with Dash — the series’ proverbial “Nice Guy” hustling at a chess park for cash (because obviously hip young people play each other at chess in order to make a buck), who was quickly overcome with another vision of a murder. Naturally, he needed to figure out what this meant and tell Vega right away so that they could continue this case-of-the-week setup that’s so integral to these types of shows.
In the pilot, that relationship was fresh because it was setting up the season and the dynamic that would carry over for the rest of the first season. Unfortunately the writers took the opportunity to lay out cliched dynamics in the second episode rather than serve up fresh twists. Dash is told to wait in the car because he’s not a real cop, despite saving Vega’s life. Vega thinks she can do everything by herself and refuses to tell her partners and friends that she’s working with a precog. Vega and Dash have to work to convince Arthur to participate in the case. And so forth and so on.
We want to hear it.
The FBI storyline didn’t help, with Vega’s new boss pushing her for information and the pair of them continuing that rivalry that clearly insinuates he has a thing for her but doesn’t want to say it. The entire training scene, in which Vega counted down her casualties in Spanish was just plain painful. The actors do what they can with the lines, but the lines are still completely cheesy. Meanwhile it felt as though the audience was being forced to like the Vega-Dash relationship as it started to set up potential romantic undertones.
Having a pick-up master as the episode’s central suspect also didn’t help matters — the scenes in which Dash attempted to learn how to have a normal relationship, platonic or romantic, were meant to inject humor but they fell short and also landed in the cheesy category instead. There’s an innocence there that could be played for laughs, sure. But whereas that worked in the first season of a show like Sleepy Hollow, so far in this show it feels awkward and jarred, like two separate shows trying to combine into the same thing.
Where the show maintained my interest was in setting up the potential return to the “swamp beds” for Dash, Arthur and Agatha. Obviously this is going to be a season-long twist and a way to incorporate the other precogs into the story as Dash works against them. Whether it’s interesting enough to maintain our interest for an entire season remains to be seen.
As for the case of the week? It was fairly obvious from the beginning that the bartender was the real killer in this situation, although it was fun to watch Vega be rejected by the relationship expert. Clearly she’s not as street savvy as she thinks she is, which is why she needs to start letting other people in. That will happen in due time (you can only keep a secret like this for so long), but we’ll be thankful when it does, because then we won’t have to sit through another painful “just tell me your secret already, you can trust me” scene.
Whereas the pilot episode showed much promise in developing a strong series, the second episode flopped. Instead of building towards an interesting new world the show relied on cliched plot and characters, an obvious murder twist and an overarching mystery that’s only mildly interesting.
