Summary
Brilliant Minds Season 2 turns up the emotion in “Once Upon A Time In America”, a devastating and emotionally complex chapter that puts Nichols through the wringer.
It occurred to me during “Once Upon A Time In America” that Brilliant Minds has spent so much time building mystery in Season 2 that it has kind of skimped on the emotion a little. As of Episode 5, this is no longer true — not by a long shot. A devastating, heartbreaking chapter full of emotional complexity that completely avoids easy answers and tidy resolutions, it’s as much about Nichols as it is about Wolf, and punishes the former most harshly of all. Without any mention of Hudson Oaks and with no glimpse of Porter, this feels, at least to me, like the procedural recapturing some of its peak first-season form.
Don’t get me wrong, this is still very much Season 2, and most of the ongoing subplots — sans Porter, obviously — are developed in some way. There’s even a new character introduced who, if I’m not mistaken, may grow into another romantic option for Wolf, especially with things between him and Nichols being so complicated. It’s actually Nichols’s new role as Chief Medical Officer that facilitates both the introduction of Nurse Silva and the crisis he finds himself in personally, trying to perform two long and complicated surgeries while managing all of his other responsibilities and, ultimately, being unable to juggle everything at once.
The two surgeries are attempts to save the lives of window cleaning brothers, Jorge and Benny, who fall 39 stories to the ground below in a freak accident. Improbably, both survive. But Jorge is in dire straits from the off, and Benny, while a bit more stable initially, develops a new neurological issue that causes him to forget his first language of Spanish, making it especially difficult to repair his relationship with his mother, Ana, who has determinedly ostracised him after he, in her view, turned his back on the family’s faith. Ana is a persistent figure in this episode, a pious woman working through very complicated emotions in extremely stressful circumstances.
A couple of characters are deployed to translate for Ana, first Ericka, who does it very accurately and directly, and later Nurse Silva, who embellishes the translations with relevant cultural details and slight mistruths to ease the conversation along. It’s a very interesting method of characterisation through language, and tells us a lot about Silva, who’s in charge of the nurses in the neurology department and wants Wolf to memorise all of their names despite his face blindness. He considers the white lie — that Benny agreed to accept Jesus into his heart again, a sentiment he never expressed — as worth it to repair the relationship. The details can be handled later.
But the details aren’t handled later, since Brilliant Minds Season 2, Episode 5 goes off-script by introducing this compelling neurological mystery about Benny’s sudden inability to comprehend Spanish and then invalidating it completely when he suffers a massive stroke and is rushed off to surgery. He doesn’t make it. Despite the entire episode being framed around whether Jorge will survive, given the severity of his injuries, it’s in fact Benny who loses his life, while Jorge is ultimately stabilized. It’s a very cruel and unexpected twist on the usual formula.
And Nichols does not take it well, understandable. There’s a lovely moment in “Once Upon A Time In America” that remains wordless for a while, where Nichols is mopping up the bloodied operating room and Wolf silently assists. They eventually have a conversation about it in which Wolf helps to assuage some of Nichols’s guilt, but the quiet portion is more striking, especially in an episode that is, in a roundabout way, very much about language and its power.
Brilliant Minds also pulls the rug again after this, almost cruelly. It really does seem to be building to an obligatory “happy” ending, with a string of moving scenes that help Ana to rationalise her son’s death. Wolf and Ericka show her a brain scan of his final moments, his life flashing before his eyes even after his heart had stopped, and they promise to support her through Jorge’s recovery. The women from the cold open, who were planning a date with Jorge and Benny when the window cleaning platform collapsed, show up with flowers and well wishes, and Ana welcomes them in. Wolf even remembers all of the nurses’ names, prompting a bit of flirtatious banter from Silva.
But in the final scene of the episode, Ana slaps Nichols, curses him, and angrily snatches the religious pendant she had loaned him from his neck. It’s an awful moment of understandable selfishness to deny Nichols — and indeed the audience — a lighter payoff, and it leaves things on a cruelly sour note.
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