Summary
Brilliant Minds Season 2 returns after a long hiatus in “The Missing Person, which sidelines Wolf for the entire runtime to lend more focus to the supporting cast.
After an unreasonably lengthy hiatus, Brilliant Minds is back on our screens to conclude Season 2. The final few episodes should hopefully dig deeper into Wolf’s time in Hudson Oaks, where he’s attempting to rescue his imaginary friend, and if Episode 15 is anything to go by, the process is going to be pretty traumatic. As if to prove a point, “The Missing Person” sidelines Wolf for almost the entirety, letting the supporting cast pick up the slack. It’s clear that getting him back to his best is going to be a team effort, and that it’s going to be challenging for Carol most of all.
With Carol promoted to the role of protagonist here, the episode has a slightly different vibe. Her long familiarity with Wolf comes through nicely, since she’s the first to pick up on the red flags suggesting that he’s spiralling, not least of which being the insistence that he put a woman who didn’t exist through sleep therapy. After confiding in Nichols, Carol goes on the hunt for Wolf, doing a whistlestop tour of his usual haunts.
He’s not at home. More worryingly, he left a one-night stand there to essentially stay as long as he wants. That guy hasn’t seen Wolf for three days. His phone is in his desk drawer. And it transpires that he has told the Hudson Riders, the motorcycle gang he has an ongoing relationship with, to sell his bike, since he apparently has no further use for it. This is all bad enough news that Carol thinks it’s necessary to tell the entire hospital staff about her concerns. Porter gives her the next lead, since he’s familiar with Wolf’s dad’s apartment, though Carol isn’t exactly thrilled to hear how he found out about it (Porter’s intentions remain vague, mostly because he always looks like he’s smirking, even when he isn’t).
Carol finds the apartment smashed up with the tell-tale baseball bat left behind, but luckily Wolf turns up at the hospital anyway, looking for Sofia’s file. Nichols ushers him into his office, where he tells Carol that Hudson Oaks stole Sofia’s file to keep her being trapped there hush-hush. He wants to break her out, which Carol tearfully agrees to help him with, since it’s a way to get Wolf to check himself into the facility, where he will hopefully get the help he needs, even though he still believes he’s on a secret mission.
The only upside for Carol in “The Missing Person” is that it looks like things are heating up between her and Thorne. The fling she met earlier in the season has apparently been done away with, and the flirting isn’t going to stop any time soon. For now, Carol seizes the opportunity to stick it to Morris by having Thorne attend their kid’s recital as a plus-one, the implication being that they’re together. Small victories.
Even though the search for Wolf occupies a big chunk of the runtime, there is a case of the week in Brilliant Minds Season 2, Episode 15. It involves a woman named Denise who is having pretty serious manic episodes that she believes are panic attacks, but are actually caused by a tumour in her spine flooding her system with epinephrine. It’s like being on cocaine all the time, biologically speaking, which doesn’t sound half bad until it transpires that Denise is a full-time carer for her father, who has advanced dementia, and has absconded — she’s the missing person of the title — for a bit of a break.
The tumour can be removed with surgery, but this isn’t so much a medical mystery as an emotional predicament. Denise isn’t capable of giving her father the care he needs, which means having a difficult conversation with him and her brothers about an assisted living facility. It’s quietly and effectively emotional in a way that Brilliant Minds often is, but it’s also pretty lightweight in the grand scheme of things. There’s an argument to be made that this show is at its peak when Wolf is solving more complex cases in eccentric ways.
On the intern side of things, we’re still running a little short, so Dana and Ericka dominate this area. Katie asks Dana to move in with her, which would mean chucking Ericka out on her ear, but Dana is reluctant to have that conversation. Katie takes it upon herself to let Ericka know, which upsets Dana, who isn’t ready to play house with Katie yet. It sounds like it’s building to a break-up, but the two of them actually end up on a surer footing after a bit of openness. Like with Wolf’s absence, though, I think there’s a case to be made that everything worked better with all the interns in situ, juggling their own subplots while working on the big case. I’ll be interested to see how the remainder of the season shakes out with the status quo having been shaken up to this extent.
