Minority Report Makes Sure You Know Misogyny Has At Least Fifty More Years To Live

When Game Of Thrones hit HBO back in 2011, I could pretty much tell it was Not For Me after the first two episodes, and after checking back in periodically for premieres and finales, I have yet to find a reason to revise that opinion. Partly it's that I'm not into fantasy; I'm just never going to be able to get that invested in a show in which dragons are a major component of the plot. But it was also partly that, dragons aside, the imaginary world of Westeros just reproduced the female subjugation endemic in real human history: why invent a geographical setting out of whole cloth only to populate it with characters no more forward-thinking than real people from the Medieval era? (And that's a view I held before I knew how much more rapey Game Of Thrones was going to get.) Two episodes in, Minority Report has a similar problem: fifty years from now, the status of women is apparently still going to suck. How...interesting?

To be a tiny bit fair to Minority Report, it hasn't exactly presented itself as a utopian vision of the future. In fact, to hear Detective Vega tell it, things were better for society twenty years ago, when precogs could foresee crimes and police officers could stop them before they'd been committed -- which I don't think was really the conclusion audiences were supposed to reach from watching the film version of Minority Report, but sure, why not. The problem with "Mr. Nice Guy," this week's episode, is that other than the tech gadgets and the psychic predictions, everything about it is depressingly familiar on a procedural. A police consultant has reason to believe a woman is going to be kidnapped and assaulted by a man she meets in a club; his female handler, a detective, tries to entrap the apparent target by making herself bait for his "scientific" pick-up artist rap; the real perp is a "nice guy" who's sick of being ignored in favour of smooth-talking jerks. It could be an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit set last week.

I can imagine, hypothetically, that if Minority Report over-corrected -- if putting women in sexual/mortal peril wasn't the topic of the show's second episode ever -- it would be criticized for painting an unrealistically optimistic view of what women will have to fear as possible outcomes should they be so reckless as to try to dance and have a drink in a nightclub fifty years from now. But boy, wouldn't it be fun to read a thinkpiece about a TV show being TOO feminist FOR ONCE? It wouldn't actually be that hard to introduce story elements in this week's plotline that project safety precautions for women that might have been developed at some point between our time and the show's; maybe the wristbands issued by the club upon entry could alert wearers not to the sexual compatibility of their fellow patrons but of which ones seemed to have a higher-than-normal level of hostility, for example. Yes, in that case, Blanca would not spend the episode's third act in fear that a bartender who'd cornered her was going to murder her because he thought she'd friendzoned him. But maybe then the show's producers would have to come up with a way to end the story that wasn't something we'd already seen on literally every other cop show, and also in a dispiriting number of news stories about women who are just trying to get through college in our present day. Maybe it would be intriguing to watch a show set in a future in which women aren't the default victims, since that's certainly not the experience, for a lot of us, of living in 2015?

But it's not just Blanca who's poorly treated by "Mr. Nice Guy." Vega still has to put up with Blake, the mansplainer we're supposed to think got promoted ahead of her and whose cockiness she wearily tolerates. She's also made to defer to Dash, who saves the day in the episode's final shoot-out by using his precog powers to tell her when and where to aim her weapon. This is a guy who, after a decade predicting crimes while floating in a milk bath, is only marginally functional on his own, and yet he's out-copping the cop?

Minority Report: The Movie was based on source material from which I assume it couldn't deviate much. Minority Report: The Show barely shares any characters with the story it was based on and takes place decades later. If the people who made it were ambitious, there's no reason they couldn't portray a future in which accommodations have been made to render life in the U.S. a little less unfriendly toward women. But they're not, which is why we've ended up with a Criminal Minds knockoff that has slightly cooler phones. The second episode of Fox's Almost Human also handled sexual politics in a lazy, predictable way; maybe after Minority Report gets cancelled, Fox can try to hire Eve Ensler to fix their next sci-fi drama before it gets too embarrassing.