Minority Report - S1E3 - Hawk-Eye

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Previously on Minority Report, ‘Mr. Nice Guy’

My rule of thumb is to give new shows three episodes before I decide to stick with them. If you have a similar rule, you would be well rewarded because “Hawk-Eye” is the episode where you can actually see this cast really gel and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This week’s story focuses on the Hawk-Eye program that the new mayor is trying to implement in the police department. Hawk-Eye is a predictive program that flags potential threats to public safety based on an algorithm. Since cameras track everything in this future, Hawk-Eye notices patterns and flags suspicious behavior and puts that person under close scrutiny for 48 hours. As a Black woman, I’m pretty skeptical of anything that flags “suspicious” behavior and so is Lara cause she makes this face.

The first person Hawk-Eye flags is a tech millionaire named Mark Massero who’s reckless driving has flagged him for surveillance.

Although Lara is skeptical of the new program, it gives her a way to bring Dash into her investigations legally since Hawk-Eye is hiring civilian analysts. When Dash also has a vision of Massero killing someone, Hawk-Eye gives them the cover they need to work together. This is actually a brilliant way to make Dash and Vega official partners and good on the show for recognizing that having Vega solve these cases out of thin air wasn’t going to fly for more than a couple of episodes.

Lara and Dash go to Arthur to get a new identity for Dash so he can apply for the job and Lara tells Akeela the truth about Dash since she’s doing the interviewing for the Hawk-Eye program. It’s a cute scene where we see these two professional women bonding outside of work and it seems like Akeela may have some backstory coming because she’s really stresses how afraid she is to lose her job for helping Dash and Lara.

Dash awkwardly makes it through the interview, and he and Vega start openly investigating Massero. It’s fun to watch Dash and Lara play off each other as partners. Dash starts to pick up Lara’s forcefulness and Lara has to temper his eagerness. One thing that’s hard for me to stomach is how forceful they can be with suspects. They’re working off of Dash’s visions, so in their minds, they’re questioning murderers but we know that the visions are fallible and some of these people are just potential murderers. The future can change if they make different decisions.

Lara keeps trying to establish a connection between Massero and the potential victim, but nothing pans out because as it turns out, this is a completely random altercation. Lara and Dash are able to stop Massero from killing the cyclist, but Dash then has a second vision of Massero killing himself. This gives us a little more insight into the visions. The precogs can’t see suicides. Their visions are based on how forces may interact with each other; therefore it’s the decisions that people make which lead to the taking of a life that the precogs see.

So, since Dash saw Massero committing suicide, someone else must have manipulated it. Turns out that his therapist and a co-worker colluded to alter Massero’s frontal lobe and lower his inhibitions, which led to his reckless behavior. In the end, Dash, Lara, and Akeela, who is now apart of the team, close the case (legally) and Dash is an official consultant.

In other plots, on the Island of Misfit Toys as Arthur refers to it, Agatha is trying to come up with a back up plan to stop her vision of Lara putting them in the milk bath. Her plan involves blackmailing William Mapother (isn’t he always cast as the go-to creepy guy?) into doing something we will find out about next week.

This week was really great. The cast feels really cohesive, even the characters that were interacting for the first time, and the cases are becoming more complex. I thought the twist would be that the constant surveillance and pressure from Hawk-Eye drove Massero to his reckless behavior, but it looks like Hawk-Eye is here to stay and it’s good cause it gives Dash and Lara the cover they need to work together.

Cool Future Tech:

• The therapist Massero sees actually alters his brain. They use machines to fix neural pathways and brain tissues to help with mental illness.
• When Lara and Dash visit Massero’s tech company a blue arrow guides them through the building. It felt a little SIMs.

Mentionable Mentionables:

• Arthur tells Dash about Agatha’s vision. This was a secret I thought would drag through the first half of the season but it seems like they’re revealing and setting up new secrets at a faster pace.
• Although Vega has given them some cover by bringing Dash in officially, Blake (Wilmer) is scrutinizing them and Dash’s awkwardness has his antenna up. I doubt that secret will last much longer.
• Wally has created an armband that reads Dash’s vitals and can warn him when a vision is coming. This should help alleviate Dash falling down in agony in public places.
• Hawk-Eye, like the former Pre-Crime program, is still suspect. Even though it may be unbiased since it’s a computer program, flagging people for suspicious behavior and then sending people to
  investigate them is shady. Lara was even able to bypass doctor-patient confidentiality because her suspect was flagged as a potential threat. The show doesn’t seem to be shying away from these issues so we’ll see.
• Lara and Dash have both suggested to each other that they may need therapy. Lara to deal with the trauma of watching her dad die and Dash to tell with the trauma of watching everyone