Summary
“The Disembodied Woman” is a great episode and puts some concerns about the show to rest. This is a slick medical drama with a lot more to offer.
I wasn’t sure about Brilliant Minds after a mixed-bag premiere, but I’m pleased to report that Episode 2, “The Disembodied Woman”, is a really good episode of television that improves as it goes along and lays some crucial character and narrative groundwork for the rest of the season. I still have some quibbles with it, but generally speaking, this is a very good show that is quickly managing to carve out a niche for itself even in the overcrowded medical drama genre.
“The Disembodied Woman” adopts a typical A-B procedural plot structure, but it moves between them pretty deftly, and it sneaks in some backstory and future mystery for good measure. The interns still lack a bit of individual identity but we’re definitely getting there in that regard, and I suspect future episodes will focus on them individually the way this one leans a little more towards Ericka than the others.
Pete’s Dragon
Brilliant Minds Episode 2 actually starts with the B-plot, so we might as well too. In the midst of his narration about how we’re all genetically identical, more or less, Dr. Wolf runs into a young man named Pete who is having very vivid and sustained hallucinations about a dragon.
Pete almost immediately gets passed off to the interns, and Ericka is especially dismissive of him since she assumes he’s just a party-hard bro who OD’d on shrooms or some such. It’s a common thing. Throughout the episode, we learn where this assumption comes from; Ericka had to work two jobs to pay for her education and worked so hard to get into medical school that she had never had time for drinking and partying. At some point along the way, she clearly developed a bit of resentment for the lifestyle.
But while Pete is a party-hard bro, and he does turn out to have LSD in his system, that isn’t the cause of his symptoms. Ericka begins to suspect that his drug use might have triggered a complete psychotic break and tries to hand him off to Carol, but since he can still distinguish between reality and his imagination, the matter remains a neurological one.
When the interns visit Pete at home they notice a neon dragon on a sign outside of his window. The memory is ingrained somewhere, and it turns out to be a lesion on the brain that is causing the symptoms. Nichols preps the operating room, and Pete is saved. Ericka shotguns her first beer in celebration, at Dana’s urging.
The Disembodied Woman
The main plot of the episode, and the one it takes its title from, revolves around Jessica Williams, a WNBA all-star known as “Jessie from the Block” who now coaches a local girls’ varsity team and has mysteriously canceled scheduled surgery because of what seems like a bad dream.
Muriel is keen to get Jessie into surgery for admin purposes, which causes her to clash with Wolf, who is adamant about not following hospital procedures and putting his patients first. So, he gets to work on Jessie, who has been dreaming about her consciousness separating from her body, as though she’s observing herself at a distance. And the condition is worsening — she signs a basketball for Carol, who is a big fan, and then signs the consent form for the surgery 30 minutes later, and the signatures are completely different.
Wolf gets Van to perform a lumbar puncture to extract some spinal fluid, but he bottles it at the last moment (more on this later). Jacob completes the procedure, but it reveals nothing, and Jessie gets worse still. She eventually starts to believe that there is no solid ground beneath her, and a nice edit communicates the feeling to the audience.
Jessie has a proprioceptive deficit, but at a severity and rate of escalation that Wolf has never seen before. Proprioception, for what it’s worth, is the ability to sense one’s body movement and position without a visual input. But the deficit can be caused by anything, which doesn’t help the doctors much. Jacob thinks it might be the overconsumption of supplements, which Jessie has in shakes, but when her system is flushed she goes into cardiac arrest. She has lost the ability to breathe on her own.
Past and Present
Brilliant Minds Episode 2 weaves in a few flashbacks — the first one begins with a very neat transition that’s worth pointing out — that eventually leads to Wolf having a breakthrough in Jessie’s case.
We see that as a child, Wolf was soft, for lack of a better word. He would rather run away with the lab class’s live frogs than euthanize them, and when Muriel took him to the hospital’s anatomy lab to practice on an actual cadaver — people volunteer their bodies for medical research if you didn’t know — he can’t even bring himself to make the first incision.
Wolf’s father tried to help him get over this hump by instructing him to imagine each tiny part of the body at a time, starting with his own hands holding the scalpel. This is the breakthrough. Wolf takes a risk by removing Jessie’s breathing tube and coaching her through breathing on her own, using a combination of visualization and earnest support. He even echoes her own father’s line to him: “I believe in you. Enough for the both of us.”
And Jessie breathes. Over time, Wolf teaches her to use her body again by relying on her other senses instead of proprioception. After a while, she can write. Then she can walk. We might never know what caused the nerve damage, and she might not ever be able to play basketball like she used to, but the team around her remains stronger and more supportive than ever.
Progress
“The Disembodied Woman” definitely results in a lot of progress for Wolf, both professionally and personally. He starts to recognize Nichols — is there a bit of flirting going on here? — and takes Van to the anatomy lab to help him get over his fear of pressure, just as Muriel did for him.
Speaking of Muriel, she pulls Carol to tell her to keep an eye on Wolf. Apparently, there are things in his past that even Carol doesn’t know, which one suspects will become clear in later episodes.
Likewise, Wolf also demands to take on “John Doe” as his patient. This is a guy who is completely catatonic and bounces around different hospitals, apparently beyond saving. Wolf sees him in the ICU and takes an immediate interest in his case. This will likely be a season-long subplot as Wolf tries to diagnose John Doe, though it’s the kind of thing that might provoke his tendency to “get attached”. I guess we’ll see.
