‘Brilliant Minds’ Season 2, Episode 6 Recap – There’s A Lot Going On Here

Let’s just get this out of the way — there’s far too much going on in “The Doctor’s Graveyard”. It’s the Halloween special, for one thing, so everything has a spooky contour which sometimes raises more questions than answers. Almost every character gets a personal subplot, some of which loop back to previous episodes, including one from the first season. And amid all this, Brilliant Minds embeds a handful of important clues about what might be going on in Season 2’s overarching plot. For that reason, Episode 6 is both hard to keep track of but important to pay attention to, so mileage may vary in terms of how strictly “enjoyable” it is on its own terms.

It does add a lot of important texture, though, and I really liked a lot of what it was doing, even though I’d have trimmed some chunks of it out entirely. There’s good character work on offer, if you’re looking for it, one or two half-decent scares, surprisingly, and I was pleased to finally land on that all-important “aha!” moment about Porter. But we’ll get to that later. In the meantime, let’s break everything else down.

The case of the week in “The Doctor’s Graveyard” revolves around a man named Cyrus being found dead — technically — in an ice bath. Jacob saves his life by insisting that he’s allowed to be returned to room temperature before he’s written off, but if he wants to stay in the land of the living, it’s imperative that Wolf and the interns figure out what caused him to pass out in the first place.

This should be easy, since Cyrus has every aspect of his health closely monitored. He’s a very obvious pastiche of Bryan Johnson and other middle-aged biohackers who are chasing immortality through science. He even transfuses the blood of his younger assistant, Thomas, who is bound by an NDA but seems surprisingly willing to do whatever Cyrus asks of him. With a bit of probing, Wolf learns that Cyrus’s obsession with his own health stems from a statistically improbable battle with breast cancer that, upon his victory, left him without a sense of purpose. It’s one of those cases that doesn’t have a particularly interesting medical explanation — it turns out Cyrus has a parasitic tapeworm in his brain, picked up from some kind of wacky health protocol — but leads to some interesting conversations about life and death, including how far we’re willing to go to avoid the latter at the expense of the former.

This is rooted in fear, and fear is threaded all throughout Brilliant Minds Season 2, Episode 6. Sometimes the way it’s expressed is very obvious, such as Carol attempting to treat a patient who’s dressed as a clown. But other times it’s more subtle. After losing Benny in the previous episode, Nichols has become superstitious, refusing to perform surgeries because he believes himself to be cursed. Little is made of this, since he’s keeping the extent of how much it’s affecting him private, but he’s stressed enough that his teeth are literally falling out while he talks.

Nichols’ stress is compounded by a lawsuit. The family of the patient in the first season’s Halloween episode is suing Bronx General over the cost of Wolf’s expansive scans and treatments, which feels like a bit of an unnecessary callback unless it’s brought up again in subsequent episodes. But it does reiterate how Nichols is feeling. It’s that fear again, which Wolf can understand since he’s far from being immune to it either, even though it takes a different form.

Wolf is haunted in “The Doctor’s Graveyard”, and I think this is our major clue for why Porter got him admitted to Hudson Oaks. When he was younger, Wolf had a patient who was dying from a malignant brain tumour. She was determined to fight it, to undergo any treatment she could, and Wolf didn’t have the heart to tell her that it wasn’t worth it. She sacrificed her quality of life only to die anyway, and it’s clear that Wolf hasn’t gotten over it, since he keeps seeing the woman lurking in empty rooms. Tellingly, at the end of the episode, Porter sees the same woman reflected in the mirror of his locker. This suggests to me that he’s connected to the woman — his mother, perhaps? — and is seeking to punish Wolf for what happened to her. This episode even ends with a four-months-later coda showing Porter visiting Wolf in Hudson Oaks.

The final thing to address is Ericka and Sam. She once again runs into him in the emergency room and tries to convince him to spend 48 hours in the hospital, under her care and that of a psychiatrist — which turns out to be Carol, obviously — as part of a kind of crisis intervention program. Sam agrees, but getting him there proves to be a nightmare for both, since it involves a tense elevator ride wherein both of them lose it, their conditions worsened by each other’s terror.

This prompts Ericka to open up to Jacob about her pill-popping. Now that she has gotten that burden off her chest, hopefully she can get the help he advises her to look for, and maybe the same will be true of Sam. It’s telling that they both admit they need help at around the same time; it’s a big step for both, and Ericka obviously sees something of herself in him.

Oh, and bonus points to Brilliant Minds Season 2, Episode 6 ending with Wolf and Carol going out for Halloween dressed as Spock and Ahura from Star Trek. Zachary Quinto played Spock in three of the movies, so it’s a cool callback.