Minority Report recap: Fredi

Minority Report suffered a blow this week, as Fox cut its first-season order down to 10 episodes from 13 (and prompted many a hilarious joke about whether the precogs saw this coming, ha, ha.)

But like its murderers-to-be, Minority Report might still have time to change its destiny. The show’s various plotlines cruised ahead with confidence in “Fredi” — and Stark Sands, in a plotline that found him with more to do than play Vega’s bumbling sidekick, showed us a different side of Dash: one that’s emotionally vulnerable and possessed of a certain socially awkward sex appeal.

Intrigued? Yeah you are.

That comes later, though. In the opening scene, it’s Arthur who’s getting down to some steamy business with his ladyfriend, only to be interrupted mid-makeout by Dash, who studiously ignores the lingerie-clad woman in the room (and, it must be said, shamefully ignores a golden opportunity to make a filthy precog pun.)

Dash is stopping by because he wants to tell Vega about Agatha’s vision, the one in which Vega appears to be complicit in re-enslaving the precogs. Arthur doesn’t like this idea and responds the way he always does — by threatening not to help Dash with future pre-murder investigations. And neither man seems to realize that they have some version of this conversation basically every time they meet, but hey, at least this time, they got it out of the way before the title credits.

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Back at police headquarters, it’s time for the civilian Hawk-Eye analysts to pair up with cops and head into the field. Blake pops up long enough to give Dash a hairy eyeball, presumably a reminder that he’s supposed to keep an eye on (read: spy) on Vega. Vega, meanwhile, is more concerned that she and Dash are spending too much time together, leading to a moment of awkwardness as they both realize that she’s his only friend and confidant.

But there’s no time to talk about their relationship: Dash’s thermometer watch — the one that alerts him a few seconds before he’s going to have a convulsive vision — goes off. And so does he, to Wally’s house, to download the new psychic teaser trailer for a murder in the making.

As always, it’s just bits and pieces: a gun, a blood-spattered statue, a bracelet, and a barking dog. Fortunately, now that Akeela is part of the team, they’re able to quickly track down the likely murderer, whose name is Cayman Bello. He’s a rich playboy with recently deceased parents, and he happens to be throwing a fundraising party, which is basically a great excuse for Dash and Vega to get fancied up and go undercover. (Sidenote: I could write 500 words about the evening gown Vega wears for this scene, and every one of them would be DAAAAAAMN.)

At the party, Dash locates a statue that looks a lot like the to-be-bloodied one — and then gets located himself by a flirtatious hottie who works for Cayman, Fredi Kincaid. Not only is she wearing the bracelet from his vision, pegging her as the likely murder victim, but she’s cute. So obviously, Dash can investigate her and date her at the same time, right?

Right! …Well, okay, sort of. Vega insists that he be chaperoned, wearing a wire and a pair of those contact lenses that let she and Akeela see and hear everything. And if you’ve ever wondered how those lenses work:

“Whatever you want the system to do, just think it with your tongue,” says Vega, which sounds more like a line from an erotic memoir about robot romance than a user’s manual, but whatever.

Despite the fact that Vega and Akeela are basically cockblocking him via earpiece, Dash successfully asks Fredi out (for “meals or beverages”) and ends up accompanying her as a guest to another party at Cayman Bello’s house. It doesn’t seem to be going well, but when Cayman asks a snobby question about where Dash’s family comes from, Dash gives a brutally truthful answer that not only puts the rich jerk in his place, but is also transformative for Dash. For the first time, he’s talked openly, albeit obliquely, about the pain of being orphaned and abused, and his face registers vulnerability and empowerment at once.

Fredi, of course, is smitten.

NEXT: Agatha gets busy

While Dash is forming a relationship based on something other than his precognitive gifts, Agatha is doing the opposite, using her own psychic abilities to blackmail her fugitive criminal neighbor, Charlie, into doing some dirty work for her — a role she takes rather naturally to and seems to relish, despite all her maternal moralizing in previous episodes. It’s also a family affair: Charlie meets with Arthur in D.C. and pays a great deal of his getaway money (with a nice cameo by President Obama on the $20) for an identity with a security clearance.

Where Charlie goes next is no surprise, and neither is what he finds there: At a terminal in the police headquarters, we see him accessing a file that contains a highly recognizable blueprint featuring three human forms, connected at the heads, floating in a circular bathtub. If Agatha was looking for evidence that PreCrime is set to be back in business, this is one hell of a smoking gun.

Meanwhile, it’s turned into a very lovely first date for Dash and Fredi: the kind where you walk around a flea market and bond over your mutual history of emotional trauma. Fredi reveals that she had a sister, Alison, who died for reasons she’s convinced were Cayman Bello’s doing. She took her job with Cayman in the hopes of catching her sister’s killers — which means that she and Dash even have the same hobby of hunting killers. What are the chances!

Moved by Fredi’s quest for justice, Dash asks Arthur for help breaking into Cayman’s security system, which leads Dash and Fredi to a little back-alley, black-market “tissue printing” business — where a little DNA goes into a machine and out comes an actual human eyeball suitable for retinal scanning. Further proof that Fredi and Dash are soulmates: She’s so thrilled by the eyeball that she makes out with him right there in the street…

…and when we return from commercial, she’s in his bed wearing nothing but a shirt. Implied: They did it. (Yay!) Also implied: Vega and Akeela watched the whole thing on Dash’s contact lenses. (Ew!) There’s also some post-coital sharing going on, as Dash opens up some more about his childhood “in the system,” and Fredi explains why she blames Cayman for letting her sister die of a drug overdose during a party at his beach house.

Only there’s a twist: Fredi isn’t being entirely honest about her motivations. While she and Dash were making the beast with two backs, Akeela and Vega were discovering that one of Cayman’s friends, who was at the party where Fredi’s sister died, “committed suicide” last year — only it looks like Fredi was the one responsible. But when Vega shows up to tell Dash he just slept with a murderer, he refuses to believe it. Instead, he heads off with Fredi to confront Cayman with “evidence” of his crime and turns off his contact lenses for good measure so Vega can’t track him

And now, the denouement: Once inside Cayman’s house, things start to fall apart. Fredi reveals that her actual plan is not to confront Cayman with evidence but to make him confess. Dash balks, and Fredi leaves him locked out in the hallway while she goes farther into the house. She finds Cayman in his (exquisite, by the way) bathroom, reveals her identity, and holds him at gunpoint.

Cayman, who may or may not be a murderer but who is definitely a total jerk, responds by saying a series of nasty things about Fredi’s dead sister.

And then she shoots him in the leg, and he tackles her, and Dash worms through a doggy door just in time to talk Fredi — who is actually the murderer from his vision — into not committing the crime he’s foreseen, which is actually killing Cayman. And thank God for all that post-coital bonding, because it works! He convinces her to run, seconds before Vega shows up and arrests Cayman, having discovered evidence that he was guilty of negligence in Fredi’s sister’s death. (She also pretends not to know that Fredi had been there, which is nice, but also raises the question of how she intends to explain away the bullet in his leg.)

Well, anyway: It’s another win for the crackpot cop’n’precog murderstoppers, as well as for justice and decency.

Only back on the island, it’s rather the opposite, as Charlie shows Agatha the ill-gotten diagram of what looks like a new PreCrime blueprint. Oh, and he’s figured out who she is — but that doesn’t matter, says Agatha, because the U.S. Marshals are coming for him. He’ll have to run, she says. They won’t take him alive, she says. And he should go out the back door, she says, which he does…right into a volley of gunfire.

So, while Dash is running around saving lives, Agatha just straight-up used her psychic powers to directly, purposefully cause someone’s death. Which is new! And bad, because based on the look on her face, she wouldn’t mind doing it again.