Summary
Brilliant Minds Season 2 continues to skillfully build various concurrent subplots in “Lady Liberty”, all without abandoning its empathetic sense of self.
Brilliant Minds has always been good, and sometimes it has been very good, but in Season 2, it really might be at its peak. Sure, there hasn’t been a truly stand-out episode yet — and Episode 4, “Lady Liberty”, isn’t that either — but its baseline level of quality is really high consistently, and it’s juggling an impressive number of character-driven subplots while also furthering the season-wide arc of Wolf’s incarceration, clearly against his will, in Hudson Oaks.
That’s where things begin here, and also where they end. Wolf, gambling pretzels in a card game, antagonises one of his fellow residents into an outburst, which causes a riot, which gives him an opportunity to use the phone. It isn’t until the end of the episode that we see who he’s calling — Nichols, unsurprisingly. But we also see who’s with him — Porter, smugly gloating that the neurology department is in good hands. With this context, his surprising characterisation throughout “Lady Liberty” makes more sense. It seems pretty clear that he’s a truly demented villain of a kind this show doesn’t typically employ.
Porter gets the chance to put his foot down with the interns since Wolf is busy — more on this in a moment — and he grasps the opportunity with both hands, being especially harsh to Dana, only to then turn the whole thing into a teachable moment. He somehow compels Dana to reveal that she was the one who reported Carol, and he’s quick to claim he’d have made the same decision and poke at her worsening relationship with Ericka. In the moment, it seems like he’s an okay dude. But given the revelation at the end, it seems like that’s the point. He’s up to something.
Anyway, I mentioned Wolf being busy. He’s especially put-upon in “Lady Liberty” since Bronx General is strapped for cash and his unconventional treatment methods are responsible for a sizeable chunk of the hospital’s outgoings. Nichols entrusts him with treating Arianna Burnett, who has thrown herself down the stairs. An eccentric entrepreneur whose husband, David, is one of the hospital’s biggest donors, she has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia and is under a guardianship, meaning every aspect of her life, including her finances, is tightly controlled. She claims it’s against her will, and that her family is poisoning her to keep her under control. It’s just the kind of case that Wolf specialises in solving through characteristically extreme measures. It’s a wonder Nichols entrusted him with the matter in the first place.
Naturally, this goes off the rails in true Wolf style. She escapes into the hospital vents, he takes her to a casino, she flees and steals his motorcycle, then she goes on CNBC and announces that her family is essentially holding her hostage. It’s a PR nightmare, but Wolf is right in his assessment that she doesn’t have dementia. Instead, she has the same thing that the free climber Alex Honnold has — an improperly functioning amygdala. She’s fearless and requires extreme risk-taking to stimulate her brain and stave away symptoms of depression (which include memory loss). To be treated, she has to be allowed to take chances. Obviously, that’s best done in a controlled, managed way, which means it’s a good opportunity for family bonding. It turns out her husband and daughter weren’t poisoning her after all, which is nice. And David is so pleased with the treatment that he’s willing to keep enthusiastically donating to the hospital, which is nicer, at least as far as Nichols is concerned.
Brilliant Minds Season 2, Episode 4 also spares a bit of time for Ericka, who’s still popping pills and giving Dana the cold shoulder but finds a new object for her attention in “Lady Liberty” — Sam, the homeless schizophrenic she had encountered briefly in the hospital. Ericka oversteps a little but lightly pushing Sam into a full workup, including an MRI scan, since she believes he might not be schizophrenic and whatever condition he does have might be treatable. But that means asking Porter to sign off on the scan and then going behind his back and doing it anyway when he refuses. This backfires, since Sam flips his lid, forcing Thorne to intervene. Ericka gets chewed out by him and later by Wolf, and that night, when she can’t find Sam during her run, she has to rush back to her apartment and take some pills to balance herself out. She’s spiralling, and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this subplot.
Despite all this, there’s no Van in this episode, and no Katie either. At this point, Brilliant Minds has so many compelling characters that it has to pretend they don’t exist for an episode just to make time for everyone. I’d say that’s the sign of a procedural really firing on all cylinders. Long may it continue.
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