Summary
Brilliant Minds benefits from a narrower second episode after a chaotic start to Season 2, but there’s still plenty going on to keep things mysterious.
Brilliant Minds got off to a chaotic start in Season 2, so it benefits from a narrower episode like “The Contestant”. But there’s still plenty going on here, including a meta flourish, more on the mystery of Wolf’s eventual admission to Hudson Oaks, and a new wrinkle in Carol’s personal arc that suggests there’s someone in the hospital who means her ill, at least career-wise. We also say farewell – I think? – to Muriel, but I wouldn’t bank on that being permanent.
I often despise it when shows attempt to do the whole nudge-nudge-wink-wink fourth wall breaks, but I can tolerate this case of the week, which finds a young woman, Lauren Brooks, trying to escape what she believes is a reality TV set but turns out to be a taxi. Lauren’s psychosis obviously has a complicated root that it’s up to Wolf and the gang to get to the bottom of, but in the meantime in excuses Lauren calling out the obvious artificiality of the hospital and telling Zachary Quinto to his face that he’s not a real doctor, he simply plays one on TV.
As ever, the case isn’t especially important in and of itself, but is vital in how it intersects with everything else going on. This is especially true of Wolf, since it turns out he’s taking the recent departure of his father rather badly. Not that he’d admit it if anyone asked, of course, but that’s entirely the problem. He’s throwing himself into work and pretending everything is hunky dory so that he doesn’t have to really grapple with the complicated feelings that come with being abandoned a second time.
This manifests in different ways depending on who Wolf’s interacting with. Muriel, Carol, and Nichols all know he’s struggling, but also know better than to try and force the issue, so they attempt to crack on as normal until he’s ready to deal with his feelings. The most interesting manifestation of this obviously comes with Nichols, since Wolf tries to restart their romantic relationship as though nothing happened in between, and Nichols has to tactfully rebuff him. Any claims that he might suddenly have his house in order – the expression he used in the previous episode – are, of course, entirely exaggerated.
It’s impossible not to wonder whether this spiralling sense of mental decline is what ultimately ends up getting Wolf committed, but as predicted, Brilliant Minds is happy to let this develop across Season 2, and Episode 2 has no new revelations pertaining to it, unless you count Wolf’s future psychiatrist there, Amelia Fredrick, showing up in Bronx General trying to poach his patients. Her sudden appearance is a bit too convenient for my liking and suggests a conspiracy may indeed be afoot, especially since Wolf shows obvious disdain for her and her approach. I don’t believe in coincidences as far as network TV is concerned.
Ashleigh LaThrop in Brilliant Minds Season 2 | Image via NBC
More to the point, what we do see of Hudson Oak in this episode comes right at the end, and shows Wolf being encouraged to sign himself over to the facility by Carol, of all people. Though did anyone else think her more severe look, including a slightly different hairdo, is suggestive of something amiss? Especially since it’s coming in an episode about someone’s delusions becoming indistinguishable from reality? Maybe I’m paranoid, but I’m very intrigued to see how all this plays out, since it’s not quite ringing true for me just yet.
This paranoid line of thinking also leads me to suspect Porter more, although to be fair, his focus seems to be less on Wolf and more on ruining Ericka, for reasons that remain a little unclear. It could be that she was the first of the interns to really stand up to him and call him out in the premiere, but that doesn’t seem like enough of a slight for him to be sabotaging her the way he is here. Perhaps his attempts at causing discord among the interns are simply designed to create more problems for Wolf. It remains to be seen, but he’s up to something unsavoury, that’s for certain.
The only remaining matter to address is Carol, and by extension Muriel, since their personal plots intersect in a surprising way in “The Contestant”. After deciding in the premiere that she wanted her job back, Carol has to face down the board, which means grappling with whether or not to tell them the whole truth about what happened with Allison. The safer option is to simply obscure the details and let her word as a trusted long-time medical practitioner stand against Allison’s as a patient with mental health issues, but Carol is nobler than that. She gives an impassioned speech to the board that includes the full truth about continuing to treat Allison for two sessions after she learned she was her husband’s mistress, and the admission leaves the board split down the middle.
Muriel comes to the rescue by claiming to have pushed Carol to keep treating Allison. She volunteers to step down as Chief Medical Officer as long as Carol becomes Head of Psych. This seems like an uncharacteristically noble gesture for Muriel. She rationalises it as being ready for retirement anyway, and also as a way to ensure that when Wolf needs the support he inevitably will when the pain of his father’s departure hits him, Carol will be best positioned to provide it. But it still feels a bit clunky, especially when Nichols tells Carol almost immediately afterwards that the board’s vote was swayed by a ringing endorsement from Allison herself. She claims that Carol saved her life, which is a weird thing for the person who reported her in the first place to do. But it turns out Allison didn’t report her – someone else did.
So, I guess Muriel didn’t need to step down? Whatever.
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