Last week’s MINORITY REPORT gave fans a lot of insight about Agatha, as well as her life after arriving on the island. Tonight’s episode is going to continue to give us backstory, but this time there will be more of a focus on Arthur and the precogs as a trio, as we learn about their lives after they were all released.
“It’s sort of an origins episode, which was fun. It follows the precogs day one of Precrime ending, so we get to see what they were like the day it ended. Also it’s sort of the episode where you understand Arthur,” Nick Zano explained during a recent visit to the MINORITY REPORT set in Vancouver. “You see a guy that’s released who’s very optimistic and positive and excited to meet the world, and there’s a very sweet moment in that particular episode where a girl smiles at him and no one’s ever smiled at him before and it’s like a heavy moment for Arthur. He’s so excited about it, and he leaves talking about it and you see in that episode the death of his innocence and what transpired from that moment to today. It was a fun episode to do. At the same time, Arthur’s making a major move in the Sprawl crime world. So, shooting those scenes and then bouncing back to him being completely flustered at a person smiling at him and then jumping back the next day to doing a monologue of out-thinking crime bosses and then coming back to being excited that he’s able to say, ‘This is my brother Dash’ to somebody. He’s wide-eyed – that innocence death and how he became him – it was a great fun episode to do. And I hope it came out well.”
Nick went on to explain more about the kind of character that Arthur is now and why he is the way he is: “Here’s the thing you’ve got to remember: if you were truly a person as a child held captive and put in something and in a drug-induced coma for years and painfully used by a government and then you’re released, you’re not going to be quick to be affectionate and kind to people. Especially after you realize he was excited to get out and he was very optimistic about life and how the world works and then that gets shattered before him. You’re not going to be okay. His whole place that he operates from is not one of being a dick or mean-spirited, it’s really ‘I don’t ever want to go back to that place where we tortured – literally tortured. ‘ We don’t live. At the cost of our lives, they save lives and it’s more of running for his life. So when he’s mean and hard on Dash it’s like, ‘[jackass, we’re going to go back to that place again’ and that’s where [his attitude] comes from. When it comes to Vega in particular, Vega revealed something very intimate to Arthur which is pain – her pain. And a thing Arthur understands is pain. So, as soon as she revealed this sort of thing, she became – she’s not a cop, she’s a person and she became a person to him. He understood her pain, he helped her based on that. Arthur has a huge heart. It’s just extremely callused.”
Executive producer Max Borenstein clarified that Arthur’s “not a bad guy. He’s kind of neutral, in a sense. He’s looking out for himself. He’s someone who has been taken advantage of and, if given the opportunity and the knowledge of their existence, any number people would just use them and abduct them again. He’s amassing money and leverage and power and living his fucking life which he deserves to live. He resents the idea, like initially that his brother’s getting involved with this detective that could put him at risk. That said, he’s not a bad guy and he’s not evil. He too has been traumatized and seen all these murders. He’s lived through that also. Softened is one word for it, but humanized. The subsequent episode after Agatha’s episode is going to take us into Arthur’s world a little bit more. We’ll see what made him who he is and what jaded him a little bit. He’s certainly jaded and has a cynical edge, but he’s not just the evil twin.”
Don’t miss an all new episode of MINORITY REPORT on November 2 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on Fox.
