Summary
Brilliant Minds has a mixed pilot, but despite some concerns there’s plenty of potential here all the same.
The pilot of NBC’s Brilliant Minds is a mixed bag, but I’ll say this for it – it has a superb opening sequence. And in a TV landscape saturated with medical dramas about unconventional doctors who don’t play by the rules, it’s important to grab a potential viewer early. Whether the show will be able to hold them for a full run is another matter, but Episode 1, at least, has the goods. Mostly.
The unconventional doctor in this drama is Oliver Wolf, who is gay (this only comes up in the context of one joke, but might matter more later), clearly nursing some childhood trauma related to his father that only seems to resurface whenever he swims in the stinky Hudson River, and has face blindness.
Unfair Dismissal
He’s also just kind of off the rails in general. In the opening sequence – which, I should remind you, is excellent – he kidnaps an Alzheimer’s patient named Howard and takes him to his granddaughter’s wedding, where he sits him down at a piano to sing “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys. This is to test a theory, which proves to be accurate – performing music helps the otherwise catatonic Howard to become lucid, giving him a brief, beautiful moment with his granddaughter.
Of course, he won’t remember it after, but that isn’t the point. Wolf is all about creating these moments for his patients rather than leaving them to rot, because he, ahem, “wants to change how the world sees his patients.” Very noble, but his bosses don’t think so and fire him.
I mean… I get it. The outcome was a briefly happy one, but you can’t be strapping Alzheimer’s patients to the back of motorcycles.
Alternative Employment
Wolf is quickly rehired by his long-time friend Carol to serve as Bronx General’s neurology attending, which comes with its share of complications out of the gate. One is that the position puts Wolf in charge of four interns, who he can’t recognize because of his face blindness – which he keeps secret – and has to identify based on their distinct traits (don’t worry, they’ve got plenty.)
The second thing is that Wolf’s initial case is a triggering one, as implied by the flashbacks to his past with a clearly mentally ill father and a somewhat dismissive doctor mother. A woman named Hannah has had brain surgery to cure her epilepsy, but the procedure has left her with a frightening inability to recognize her own sons.
The surgery, for what it’s worth, was carried out by Dr. Nichols, and despite being ostensibly successful is the cause of her present condition, causing an immediate rift between Nicols and Wolf. To be fair, though, I can’t imagine they’d have gotten on very well anyway.
Brilliant Minds | Image via NBC
Brilliant Minds Episode 1 Has Some Issues
Some of my early issues with this show are best illustrated in how Hannah’s case proceeds. Constantly believing her kids to be imposters, she eventually locks them outside in the rain and refuses to let them back in, prompting Child Protective Services to get involved. This heightens the stakes but leads to a bit of ridiculousness. At one point, Hannah drives to her favorite spot to commit suicide, and Wolf, despite having only discovered she was missing a while after she left, manages to arrive just as she’s driving toward the edge of a cliff. That prioritization of drama over plausibility worries me.
Likewise, the culmination of the case isn’t all that satisfying either. Wolf has a breakthrough when he realizes that Hannah recognizes her sons when she hears them but is unable to see them, so he has her put on a blindfold to prove to the social worker that she’s a loving mother. But this scene lacks oomph since we already saw Wolf figure out the audiovisual thing earlier, and changing how she sees her children, literally, was the most obvious solution from the beginning.
I don’t want to suggest that Brilliant Minds doubts the audience’s ability to interpret very clear information, but it takes two examples and a thorough explanation for the pilot to feel satisfied that we’ve got the idea, so that’s a bit worrying.
Mommy Issues
The happy ending with Hannah and Wolf finally confessing his face blindness to the interns does feel like a nice moment of understanding that’s going to allow them to work together well, though, and I think the subject of neurological cases has a lot of potential. If nothing else, Hannah’s condition was novel, and I’m excited to see what comes next – I just hope the outcomes are as intriguing as the premises.
Brilliant Minds Episode 1 ends with Wolf being summoned to the medical director’s office, and it turns out the hospital’s boss is his mother, which explains why he told Carol earlier that he was unable to work at Bronx General. That should bring back some trauma that’ll help us get to the bottom of Wolf’s eccentric demeanor.
