The new FOX series Minority Report had its panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. The show takes place 10 years after the end of Pre-crime in D.C. The show is a direct sequel to the 2002 film by Steven Spielberg, and follows Dash (Stark Sands), a young precog, and younger brother to Agatha (Laura Regan), played by Samantha Morton in the film. The precogs have been sent into a sort of witness protection program and have been sheltered from the world. Dash is trying to lead a normal life while trying to deal with his visions of the future. He meets a detective named Lara Vega (Meagan Good), who was in Pre-crime training, and found it canceled as soon as she was ready to go. They form an alliance to help stop crime.

At the panel, Fox showed the first 20 minutes of the pilot, which gave us a look at future tech, introduced the characters and gave us a look at what this procedural will be all about. Then there was a Q&A with Regan, Sands, Good, Wilmer Valderrama who plays detective Will Blake, boss of Good’s Vega, and executive producers Darryl Frank, Max Borestein and Kevin Falls.

Panel Highlights

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    Image via FOX
    Nick Zaro was just announced as the actor playing Arthur, the brother of Dash. In fact, he’s his twin. His fraternal twin this time around. (He was identical in the film).
  • Borestein talked about making the procedural fresh. He said, “I loved the film so much and I loved it vividly.” He wanted to do it justice. He talked about how this is a direct sequel to the movie and takes place 10 years after the end of the Pre-crime program.
  • Stark talked about how exciting it was to be a part of the sequel to a film he was a huge fan of. He said he was really excited to work on what it would be like to have a superpower like this. “He grew up floating in the milk bath and he was sent away to witness protection. He doesn’t get sarcasm. He doesn’t get jokes. It’s fun to grow from being that baby chick. He becomes more fully realized.”
  • They talked about the choreography that they had to use to teach the language of working on new tech. They had to be trained in specific hand gestures that are connected to tech.
  • Valderrama said that they won’t let him do his own stunts, but he really wanted to do the one with the jet pack in the footage we saw. He was talking about how technology jumps six years every two years, and how exciting it was to see what everyone had come up with for the show.
  • Regan said she was honored to take over Samantha Morton’s character, but that she hadn’t consulted with her at all. She hinted that, though Agatha wants to be away from society now, she was likely to come back into it at some point.
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    Image via Fox
    Valderrama and Good joked about the past between their characters and said that they would really be a great team if they could manage to work together. They came up together in the ranks and there is an undeniable chemistry between them
  • Good said that Dash was really going to soften Lara because of his innocence. Falls said that there were no plans to have them hook up romantically in the near future. He said they didn’t want to do something typical. He didn’t rule it out long term, though.
  • They joked about having Steven Spielberg direct an episode and that that was the only way Tom Cruise would be in the show.
  • In terms of tech, Good said the piece she’d like the most is the drone selfie, and that he sister was a selfie master.
  • Falls said there were a lot of Easter eggs in the pilot, including an indication that The Simpsons is still on the air in the future.

Footage

We saw the first 30 minutes of the pilot which introduces us to detective Lara Vega, a woman who’s family was murdered when she was young. She enrolls in the Pre-crime program, only to have it canceled right before she was ready to graduate. We’re shown that she’s talented and clearly wants to help, but her boss Will Blake keeps getting in the way. She’s dealing with a murderer who pushed someone out a window. Something that Dash, the precog, sees right before it happens.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

We then see Agatha, the precog from the film, who has been sheltered in the witness protection program with her younger twin brothers. She’s trying to convince her brother Dash to come home. After an argument, he presses a button and she disappears. Clearly she’s a hologram, just some of the tech we saw in the pilot.

We see kids in a hall using a drone selfie stick, and cut to Lara running into Dash, who has a notebook full of future crimes. He drops it, stabs her in the leg with something and runs off. She realizes he’s a precog. Back at the station, Lara works with Nick, her boss. There is clearly a history between them. He’s giving her crap about the murder investigation and keeps trying to take over from her. We see a body on the table, and find out that it’s also a hologram.

In a giant factory, Will and some other officers find the murderer, who they’ve cornered after flying in on jet packs. He’s crushed by a falling piece of metal. They realize it’s a suicide. Back at the station, they’re told that the man who stabbed Lara in the leg used something to make her muscles collapse. They think he’s the murderer’s partner. Along with a woman working on the department data base, she searches through a group of videos to see if she recognizes the guy who stabbed her. She clearly does, but doesn’t tell Nick. Along with her friend, they find out where he is.

Lara catches up to him in a burger joint, where he’s starring at people. She gives him the good cop routine and then accuses him of murder. When he has a seizure, she realizes he’s a precog.

 

Audience Q&A

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    Image via Fox
    The panel was asked if they did a lot of research on the original film and everyone said they did. Valderrama said that they were excited to imagine what the world would look like 10 years after the incredible tech from the film. They also loved the original story from author Phillip K. Dick that the film was based on.
  • They were asked what time period they wanted to live in. Regan said she loved the idea of the 30s and 40s in Los Angeles, a la film noir. Valderrama said the same and that his character has a retro feel to him. He said he’d done the 70s and didn’t want to revisit that. Good said she loved the 80s and wishes she could be 20 then and now. Sands said he’d originally loved the idea of Medieval times, but that the reality was a bit daunting.
  • Borestein said that they worked to find a balance between getting cool tech on the show and having that be the meat of the story. He talked about how you have to think about everything. If you have a scene with two people in the car, you think about what the car looks like, if it has a driver as an example.
  • Sands said he spent a lot of time in isolation in the Catskills to get away from New York City and get into his character.