Summary
Inside, Agatha tells John, "Dr. Hineman once said, 'The dead don't die. They look on and help.'" She then tells him about the fact that Sean's presence is still with them in the house, even though he has passed away. Lara cries as Agatha dictates predictive facts about Sean, that he loved animals and wanted to be a vet. "You kept a rabbit for him, a bird and a fox," she says. She then describes Sean in high school, talking about how he loves to run, then narrating his life when he's 23, proposing to his girlfriend, Claire. "There's so much love in this house," she says.
Agatha reveals that Anne Lively was her mother, and that she was killed trying to reconnect with Agatha. When John asks her to tell him who killed Anne Lively, she gets an abrupt vision and screams for John to "Run!" just as a group of PreCrime spacecraft are arriving at the house. The men arrest John and render him unconscious.
Agatha is returned to the Precog Temple, where Wally holds her and lowers her back into the water. Gideon greets John as he is loaded into a small prisoner pod at PreCrime.
Unaware that Lamar is the mastermind behind the whole operation, Lara goes to visit him in his office. He comforts her for her loss, saying there was nothing anyone could do, before telling her that he's decided not to retire for a little while. He then tells her that she might find some comfort in the fact that "John finally found the man who kidnapped your son."
Abruptly, Lara asks Lamar who Anne Lively is, telling him, "John was talking about her right before they took him." He tells her he doesn't know who she is, and Lara recounts that John had mentioned being set up because he found out about Anne Lively, and that Crow was a fake. Lamar offers some words of comfort, then asks Lara to help him tie his tie. As she does, he tells her he will look into the murder of Danny Witwer, and investigate the drowning of Anne Lively.
Lara stops tying his tie, realizing that she never mentioned that Anne Lively drowned. Lamar stands and looks at Lara, as an assistant comes in to tell him that a press conference is starting. "We'll talk about this later; perhaps tomorrow I'll come by the cottage," Lamar says, smiling, then leaves the room.
Realizing that Lamar is the villain, Lara takes her husband's gun and goes to Gideon, demanding to speak to John. When Gideon asks how she got into the chamber, she puts her husband's old eyes on the organ Gideon is playing.
Meanwhile, Lamar speaks at a board dinner where he is presented with a revolver like the ones given to Civil War generals, complete with golden bullets "to symbolize the end of destruction and death that had ripped the country apart for five years." He suggests that, with PreCrime "going national," perhaps there will be no more gun violence. The audience erupts in applause.
After his speech is over, Lamar receives an emergency call from John, who sarcastically congratulates him for creating "a world without murder," before adding, "and all you had to do was kill someone to do it." As John tells Agatha and Anne Lively's story, Lara calls Jad asking for a favor.
Agatha begins to have a vision, but it is of the past. The PreCrime workers gather around to see. When Jad puts a file into a computer, the vision of Anne Lively death is projected all along the walls of the dinner honoring Lamar. The guests watch the footage of Anne's death, as Lamar goes to the next room. The footage shows Lamar coming just after Anne Lively's first "John Doe" killer is apprehended, and drowning her himself. Lamar looks down the hallway and sees John escaping.
Going into the kitchen, Lamar takes out the golden gun he has just been honored with. In the Precog Temple, Agatha predicts the murder of John by Lamar. When, over the phone, Lamar mentions that Agatha could have prevented John's son's death, John becomes angry and the two men confront each other on a rooftop patio overlooking the Washington Monument.
"No doubt the Precogs have already seen this," John says to Lamar, alluding to the fact that Lamar is trapped in a scenario in which, if he kills John, he will be arrested, and if he doesn't, then PreCrime "is over," because it will be revealed not to work. Thus, Lamar must choose between his own freedom and the continuation of his life's work. As Lamar draws his revolver, John implores him to take control of his own destiny, telling him that he still has a choice.
Just as it seems that Lamar is going to kill John, he kills himself instead.
It is the year 2054 and PreCrime is disbanded. We see shots of the empty facilities, as John narrates that all prisoners were released. John and Lara get back together and have another child. The twins and Agatha are "transferred to an undisclosed location," and we see them reading in a small secluded cabin near the water.
Analysis
As it turns out, Agatha's talents as a Precog are not only applicable to helping John solve the mystery of the nightmare he's found himself in, but also in helping him and Lara grieve for the loss of their son, Sean. When they run to the house to learn more about Anne Lively's murder, they find Agatha in Sean's old room, visited by visions of who he could have become as he got older. She insists that death is not final, that people's spirits outlive them, and that the love that Sean brought to their lives is still present in their house. In this way, Agatha is not only a predictive technology, but a kind of spiritual guide, an angelic and holy presence in a bleak draconian society.
Agatha also has a biography, and it is in this section that she reveals that her own life has more in common with John's than he might have thought. Like Sean, she was torn away from her mother, Anne Lively, forced to become a Precog and pulled away from a life as a normal human being. Her own relationship to death, particularly as it is predicted and stored as data by the PreCrime department, has a traumatically personal bent, and the wound still stings. Thus, she acts as an empathetic ally to John and Lara, who mourn the premature loss of their son.
Lamar Burgess is a terrifying villain because he seems so unlikely to cause harm. His paternal qualities, gentle demeanor, and comforting affect obscure a ruthlessness underneath. Thus, the betrayal contained in his evil is not just the evilness itself, but the fact that he is so good at obscuring it. When Lara goes to him for comfort after John is arrested, he speaks to her with a soft tone of voice, telling her what a good man her husband was, and asking her to tie his tie, as if he is a gentle patriarch. He is, it turns out, anything but. Rather, he is a coldhearted and extreme tyrant.
Part of what makes this twist so shocking is the fact that it serves to show that, while violence and murder have been curbed by the Precrime unit, a far more insidious violence has been upholding it this entire time. This irony becomes all the more potent when we see Lamar presented with the golden revolver at the PreCrime event in his honor. The revolver as a symbol of "the end of death and destruction" is in fact being placed in the hands of a man who wields a more dangerous corruption, and (as we saw in his brutal murder of Danny Witwer) a great capacity for violence. Thus, the film is making a statement about structural violence and the powers that protect it, is just as evil as traditional murder, if more difficult to see.
After two and a half hours of nonstop futuristic aesthetics and high-tech science fiction scenarios, the film ends as a celebration of the natural world. When Lamar Burgess' experiment is proven to be deeply flawed, the entire PreCrime department is disbanded, its halls and chambers and computers abandoned. We see Lara and John reunited, Lara now pregnant. They escape from the world of the technological by conducting the most natural science experiment they can think of: having a baby. Additionally, the Precogs are cloistered away in an "undisclosed location," a beautiful wooden waterside cottage that has none of the trappings of the futuristic world in which they've been imprisoned. After so much destruction and pain brought on by corporate interest and technological advancement working together, Minority Report suggests that solace only comes when human beings connect with what is human and natural.
