Brilliant Minds Premiere Recap: Is Zachary Quinto’s Medical Drama Just What the Doctor Ordered? Grade It!
If you take anything away from the premiere of NBC’s Brilliant Minds, it’s that Dr. Oliver Wolf Is! Not! Like! Other! Doctors! And in case you miss that point when it’s made right in the series premiere’s cold open, don’t worry: The message will be revisited several times through the hour.
Zachary Quinto (Heroes, American Horror Story) plays Wolf, a neurologist inspired by Dr. Oliver Sacks of Awakenings fame. “I believe you can’t treat a patient without understanding who they really are,” he tells us, via voiceover, at the top of the episode. “Sometimes the only course of treatment is breaking the rules.” Then we watch him take an Alzheimer’s patient named Harold on an unauthorized excursion — via motorcycle — to Harold’s granddaughter’s wedding. Though Harold is near-catatonic under normal circumstances, Oliver seats him at a piano, and within moments the formerly unresponsive man is playing and singing The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” with deep feeling. After the performance, which draws the entire room’s attention, Harold recognizes his granddaughter and calls her by name, bringing her to tears. “Music makes him lucid,” Oliver explains to the awed family.
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Aw, everyone’s happy, right? Nope — the Powers That Be at the hospital where Oliver works are incensed over his actions. “We get it: You’re a hero. You want to change how your patients see the world,” one higher-up says. “I want to change how the world sees my patients,” Oliver responds. But it doesn’t matter: He’s fired for putting the facility at risk.
But his unemployment doesn’t last long. Oliver’s friend, Carol (Tamberla Perry, The Good Fight), a friend of his from medical school who works at Bronx General, swings by to offer him a job as as neuro attending. But she lures him in with a case that’s currently stumping the Bronx General staff: A woman named Hannah had brain surgery to stop her epileptic seizures — and it worked! — but whenever she looks at her two young sons now, she thinks they’re imposters.
Early in the episode, we learn that Oliver has face blindness, or an inability to recognize familiar faces. Through flashbacks, we learn that he’s had it as a child. His dad, who lived with mental illness and eventually had to move out of the family home, tried to teach Oliver how to adapt to his challenges. Oliver’s mother (Donna Murphy, The Gilded Age), herself a doctor, advised her young son to keep his face blindness a secret from others.
The face blindness becomes a big issue when Oliver takes the job and realizes he has to manage four interns, a task he sorely despises and which is made tougher because he can’t clearly see them. Another pain point: Dr. Nichols (Teddy Sears, The Flash), the surgeon who performed Hannah’s procedure, thinks Wolf is a meddling know-it-all. (Side note: Wolf kind of IS a meddling know-it-all, but Nichols is an arrogant jerk, so it’s a wash.)
When Hannah locks her sons out of the house during a rainstorm because she doesn’t think they’re her kids, Child Protective Services steps in, and Oliver has to race to figure out how to help her keep her children at home. Hannah checks herself out of the hospital and Oliver somehow knows how to get to her right before she tries to kill herself; he gives her a pep talk that convinces her to keep trying.
He brings her back to the hospital and blindfolds her, then brings the boys into the room: Presto! She instantly recognizes their voices and calls for them to come hug her. Oliver uses a chalkboard to give a long explanation of she can recognize the kids via sound but not sight, but I’ll shorthand it: different pathways in the brain. But of course Hannah can’t be bumbling around her house with her eyes covered all the time, so Oliver comes up with a plan to help retrain her brain re: her kids. And as we watch a montage, it seems like it works.
At the end of the hour, off Carol’s suggestion, Oliver tells his team about his face blindness. And then he visits his mom.
Now it’s your turn. Grade the premiere via the poll below, then hit the comments to let us know all of your thoughts about Brilliant Minds!
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