Minority Report Season One

[JD]

If shows like Weeds are to be believed you can pretty much get pot anything these days.

As for the show, I thought this one was pretty good. Putting Dash in the Hawkeye program was a pretty good cover for him. I don't think it's a horrible idea to watch for people showing signs of dangerous behavior, but where they start to lose me is when they get to suspending habeas corpus and other rights.
It was nice to get a bit more Agatha this week. She also gave us some nice movement the arc about the future her and Arthur saw. I was glad that Arthur did actually tell him what they saw. It always drives me crazy when characters keep those kinds of secrets from each other.
The case was pretty interesting, but still nothing that original. People have been doing mind control stories like this for ages.
I like the fact that they actually told Akeela about Dash, I always like it better when more people are in the know.

 

[Christopher]

The case was pretty interesting, but still nothing that original. People have been doing mind control stories like this for ages.

But it wasn't really mind control. The doctor didn't intend for his patient to become violent and suicidal. It was a therapeutic behavior-modification technique gone wrong. More malpractice than anything else.

 

[Kor]

How did they get away with using the word Hawkeye? I would think Marvel had it trademarked.

How? "Hawk-eye" or "hawkeye" is a real word in English, predating the comic book character by a long time. It was also used as a nickname in real life and in fiction way before the comic hero.

Kor

 

[Guy Gardener]

You're being reasonable.

That has nothing to do with Lawyers being assholes.

 

[Kor]

^ That's so true.

The Minority Report series is slowly starting to grow on me. The characters seem a little generic, though.

Kor

 

[Guy Gardener]

Dash on a bike.

I finally see him as a sexual being, and not Gollum.

Dude had a serious Gollum vibe going on.

I'm sure there's someone out there who wants to #### Gollum, but the Gollums of the world have too much self respect to go there.

Viva Virginity!

 

[Christopher]

How did they get away with using the word Hawkeye? I would think Marvel had it trademarked.

How? "Hawk-eye" or "hawkeye" is a real word in English, predating the comic book character by a long time. It was also used as a nickname in real life and in fiction way before the comic hero.

Most famously as a character in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. And of course there's Hawkeye Pierce from M*A*S*H, who I believe got his nickname from the Cooper character. There's also a city called Hawkeye in Iowa, whose nickname is the Hawkeye State. And the University of Iowa's sports teams are called the Hawkeyes.

Besides, trademarks only matter in cases of direct competition or conflict, where one thing could be mistaken for another. Marvel's trademark would prevent someone else from creating a crimefighter named Hawkeye or publishing a comic book with the name in its title, but that doesn't preclude its use in other contexts. Nobody's going to mistake a predictive computer program for a guy who shoots arrows. (Although the makers of the Hawk-Eye computerized camera system that tracks the ball in various sports might have grounds to complain.)

 

[Locutus of Bored]

The whole "cryogenic prison" trope makes no sense. The purpose of prison is supposed to be to rehabilitate people so they won't want to commit crimes anymore. If you just freeze them for years, then they come out no different than they were before (assuming it doesn't fry their brains).

Being Halo'ed is not cryogenic freezing, it's more akin to being put in a permanent comatose state but with lucid or very intense dreaming. You age normally, there's no stasis system involved, and you're just sleeping while you relive the key moments of your life and your wildest dreams.

As the warden said in the film:

"It's actually kind of a rush. They say you have visions. That your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true."

That's what's lead to the speculation that everything Anderton experienced in the happy ending after escaping being put under the Halo was actually just wish fulfillment for how he would have wanted things to turn out (capturing the bad guy, reuniting with his wife and having another child, freeing the Pre-Cogs from enslavement...), while in reality he continued to whither away in a coma under the Halo. Of course, now that the show exists we've learned that those events really did take place and Pre-Crime really was disbanded.

Of course, the warden is potentially a sketchy and unreliable source of information about how nice things are in the dream state, since as we see in the show, people come out of the Halo coma even more messed up then when they went in, and Pre-Crime had no problem lying or making excuses for their oppressive actions. Although, it could also be a ST Nexus type thing where being exposed to the reality that you've been in a coma for years again after living out your wildest dreams devastates you mentally.

Come to think of it, if they have TMS to reprogram people's behavior, why didn't they use that on Precrime arrestees?

While TMS is already in use in the real world today, I got the impression that the techniques used by the doctor and Narcissus Corp. were proprietary and relatively new and experimental, so they may have come into use in the decade after Pre-Crime was disbanded.

The case was pretty interesting, but still nothing that original. People have been doing mind control stories like this for ages.

But it wasn't really mind control. The doctor didn't intend for his patient to become violent and suicidal. It was a therapeutic behavior-modification technique gone wrong. More malpractice than anything else.

But Dr. Zelenka guy from Narcissus forced the psychiatrist to increase the dosage, knowing it would completely remove all inhibitions and cause the patient to get involved in riskier and riskier behavior until he was severely injured or died. So it wasn't accidental, hence the murder arrest.

On a side note, it was a little odd seeing William Mapother (Tom Cruise's cousin) in this as the guy who stole the money that Agatha confronted, since he played the concierge of the hotel/low-income housing high rise where Agatha and Anderton found the man Anderton was supposed to kill in the movie.

 

[Christopher]

Being Halo'ed is not cryogenic freezing, it's more akin to being put in a permanent comatose state but with lucid or very intense dreaming. You age normally, there's no stasis system involved, and you're just sleeping while you relive the key moments of your life and your wildest dreams.

Even so, how does that rehabilitate someone? It's still just a way of warehousing inmates for the convenience of the system, rather than reforming them for their own good and the good of society. As you say, the show demonstrates that it actually caused profound damage to the incarcerated subjects.

Come to think of it, if they have TMS to reprogram people's behavior, why didn't they use that on Precrime arrestees?

While TMS is already in use in the real world today, I got the impression that the techniques used by the doctor and Narcissus Corp. were proprietary and relatively new and experimental, so they may have come into use in the decade after Pre-Crime was disbanded.

I got the opposite impression, that it was a fairly routine medical practice by that point, or at least one that had already been licensed and accepted.

But Dr. Zelenka guy from Narcissus forced the psychiatrist to increase the dosage, knowing it would completely remove all inhibitions and cause the patient to get involved in riskier and riskier behavior until he was severely injured or died. So it wasn't accidental, hence the murder arrest.

Oh, I forgot that part. (I thought that was David Nykl!)

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Being Halo'ed is not cryogenic freezing, it's more akin to being put in a permanent comatose state but with lucid or very intense dreaming. You age normally, there's no stasis system involved, and you're just sleeping while you relive the key moments of your life and your wildest dreams.

Even so, how does that rehabilitate someone?

It doesn't, other than if it truly lets you control the outcome of your dreams, possibly grants you the chance to give your crime a different result and see how it would have turned out had you not tried to kill the person, or alternatively, it could show you the devastation you would have caused if Pre-Crime hadn't stopped you from killing the victim, causing you to feel regret. There could POSSIBLY be some therapeutic value in that, but it could just as likely drive you insane reliving this stuff over and over again.

The only thing I was objecting to was the cryogenic thing, since they're basically just induced comas.

 

[Christopher]

The only thing I was objecting to was the cryogenic thing, since they're basically just induced comas.

But that's just a variation on the broader sci-fi trope of cryogenic prisons, which is what I was addressing. It's not just this movie, it's Demolition Man and TekWar and every other work that's used the trope -- heck, it goes back as far as Lost in Space and Silver Age Superman comics. It's the very commonality of the trope that I find annoying, because it's just such a stupid and futile approach to the idea of prison. It's not solving the problem of criminals, it's just foisting the problem off onto the next generation, which is selfish and depraved. (Although apparently Demolition Man did include a rehabilitative aspect in the form of some kind of mental programming, but it clearly didn't work very well.)

 

[Guy Gardener]

Demolition Man could knit circles around you Jack.

 

[Corran Horn]

I remember Knight Rider 2000 having a character basically saying the same thing.

 

[Kor]

What if the cryogenic stasis (or whatever) includes a neural interface that subjects the person to torment, such as an illusion of a harsh prison life that lasts much longer than real time, or being forced to endlessly listen to Celine Dion songs?

Kor

 

[Richard Baker]

What if the cryogenic stasis (or whatever) includes a neural interface that subjects the person to torment, such as an illusion of a harsh prison life that lasts much longer than real time, or being forced to endlessly listen to Celine Dion songs?

Kor

Sounds like something O'Brian went through in DS-9

 

[Christopher]

What if the cryogenic stasis (or whatever) includes a neural interface that subjects the person to torment, such as an illusion of a harsh prison life that lasts much longer than real time, or being forced to endlessly listen to Celine Dion songs?

You're kidding, of course, but obviously that would be even worse. Torture is not rehabilitation. It just causes people more damage and makes them more prone to criminal or antisocial behavior in the future. Abuse creates abusers.

 

[Taylirious]

A sad lesson our current corrections system has yet to learn.

 

[intrinsical]

Fox has cut 3 episodes from Minority Report. Only 10 episodes will be produced.

http://deadline.com/2015/10/minority-report-order-cut-fox-cancelation-1201572471/

 

[DWF]

The only thing I was objecting to was the cryogenic thing, since they're basically just induced comas.

But that's just a variation on the broader sci-fi trope of cryogenic prisons, which is what I was addressing. It's not just this movie, it's Demolition Man and TekWar and every other work that's used the trope -- heck, it goes back as far as Lost in Space and Silver Age Superman comics. It's the very commonality of the trope that I find annoying, because it's just such a stupid and futile approach to the idea of prison. It's not solving the problem of criminals, it's just foisting the problem off onto the next generation, which is selfish and depraved. (Although apparently Demolition Man did include a rehabilitative aspect in the form of some kind of mental programming, but it clearly didn't work very well.)

Prisons are as much about punishment as anything else, you can't allow prisoners ot have better lives in the prison than they do on the outside,that kind of defeats the purpose of the punishment in the first place.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Well that's just scary.

You are advocating torture?

(In a sense.)

And what about people that live much better lives than you, surely then it would only be fair to only down grade them into living slightly better lives than you? As long as they're feeling a pinch it doesn't matter that they are still eating better than you DWF and watching Netflix on a slightly bigger IPad than you can afford?

Think how crappy any IPad must seem to a a former drug tzar who used to pay women to fight each other to death for his entertainment?

We have to keep everything proportionate to their fears and expectations.