Minority Report: Season 1, Episode 8 “The American Dream” (B)
This episode was a more involved hour for Will, who often stands on the sidelines and shows up to make a snide mark to Lara or to cast suspicion on Dash’s credentials. In this case, he was fully committed to a case that meant a lot to him, and he was far more perceptive than anyone else gave him credit for. It’s interesting to see how this show approaches the concept of precrime and other legal advancements which set people up for a lifetime of hopelessness based on something that either was supposed to happen or was simply number-based. Identifying Will as a “14” who came back up from a damning sentence of diminished rights and who thought that the precrime police were there to arrest him for the future murder of his abusive stepfather helped to humanize him quite a bit. It didn’t take him long to figure out who Dash was and to confirm his suspicions when Dash knew exactly how many robbers there were and even told him to move to avoid a bullet at just the right moment. Meeting Arthur and painting him as the source of all the intelligence that Lara and Dash had gathered was an intriguing interaction, and it certainly seems like Arthur isn’t going to let some pesky detective ruin his livelihood. Let’s hope that it’s not too late for him to stop whatever aggressive action he’s planning that could tip Will over the edge and lead to this inevitable vision of precrime being reinstituted that Agatha has seen over and over becoming a reality.
