Also, I'm wondering in what sense they're investigating murders that haven't happened yet.
A machine gives them the social security number of someone who's going to be involved in a violent crime, but they don't know whether they're going to be a victim or a perpetrator.
It's just occurred to me that this means each case of the week has a clear 'main character', which may be part of what makes them engaging. In most case-of-the-week crime dramas, the main characters of each case are the victim, who's dead, and the perpetrator, who's unknown, neither of which lend themselves to interesting interactions. 'The protagonists struggle to win the trust of an angry, scared, traumatised teenage girl being pursued by a contract killer' is an interesting plot thread, but you can't have it if she's already been contract killed before the story begins!
I'd love it if a pre-crime scenario was about the least damaging intervention that would prevent a murder. (One of the interesting flaws in Minority Report was about the fixation on jailing people for crimes that hadn't happened yet, and I'd like to see more "try to interrupt them before they get into a murder headspace" stories.)
Come to think of it, most of the would-be perpetrators so far have been involved in organised crime, perhaps because that provides 'get them arrested' as a convenient option for removing the threat. There's been one case where the would-be perpetrator abducted and planned to murder the serial rapist who assaulted her sister, though; Reese talks her out of killing him and lets her evade consequences for the abduction. (In an interestingly dark touch, it's left ambiguous whether Reese ends up killing the man in her place.)
no subject
A machine gives them the social security number of someone who's going to be involved in a violent crime, but they don't know whether they're going to be a victim or a perpetrator.
It's just occurred to me that this means each case of the week has a clear 'main character', which may be part of what makes them engaging. In most case-of-the-week crime dramas, the main characters of each case are the victim, who's dead, and the perpetrator, who's unknown, neither of which lend themselves to interesting interactions. 'The protagonists struggle to win the trust of an angry, scared, traumatised teenage girl being pursued by a contract killer' is an interesting plot thread, but you can't have it if she's already been contract killed before the story begins!
I'd love it if a pre-crime scenario was about the least damaging intervention that would prevent a murder. (One of the interesting flaws in Minority Report was about the fixation on jailing people for crimes that hadn't happened yet, and I'd like to see more "try to interrupt them before they get into a murder headspace" stories.)
Come to think of it, most of the would-be perpetrators so far have been involved in organised crime, perhaps because that provides 'get them arrested' as a convenient option for removing the threat. There's been one case where the would-be perpetrator abducted and planned to murder the serial rapist who assaulted her sister, though; Reese talks her out of killing him and lets her evade consequences for the abduction. (In an interestingly dark touch, it's left ambiguous whether Reese ends up killing the man in her place.)