The first season of Brilliant Minds ended with some promise, as Mandy Patinkin arrived as Dr. Noah Wolf, the father that Zachary Quinto’s Dr. Oliver Wolf thought was dead. How the neurologist, who has been fighting his own mental health issues, deals with this new intrusion into his life was supposed to be a very intriguing aspect of Season 2. It may still be, but the way that surprising turn of events is treated at the beginning of the new season gives us pause.
Opening Shot: As a nurse pushes a cart down a hall and brings medicine into a patient’s room, a man in a lab coat steals her key card.
The Gist: The man in the lab coat is Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto). Why would he need someone else’s key card? Because he’s not at Bronx General, where he works, and he’s trying to escape, as we see when he’s subdued in the stairway and given a sedative.
Six months earlier, we see an MMA fighter in training, and at the end of a sparring bout, he spontaneously punches himself out with his right hand.
At Bronx General, Dr. Wolf is still the head of neurology, though personal issues are affecting him. The shocking return of his father Noah (Mandy Patinkin), whom he thought was dead, has driven him to sleep in his office. He also keeps asking Dr. Muriel Landon (Donna Murphy), the hospital administrator (and his mother), for a special brain scan that might help him and Noah figure out what’s going on with Noah.
He also gets a new member of his team, Dr. Charlie Porter (Brian Altemus), a 2nd-year resident transferring from Cornell. Wolf thinks this is his mom’s way to keep tabs on his rogue way of treating patients. He’s replacing Dr. Jacob Nash (Spence Moore II), who is now working in the ED for Dr. Anthony Thorne (John Clarence Stewart). Drs. Erika Kinney (Ashleigh LaThrop), Van Markus (Alex MacNicoll) and Dana Dang (Aury Krebs) are still with him, with Erika coming back from being on leave after her apartment building collapsed.
Someone who isn’t there to support Dr. Wolf is his friend Dr. Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry), whom Muriel put on administrative leave, and is now working at a ritzy Manhattan psychiatric practice talking to wealthy clients.
The MMA fighter keeps losing control of his right arm, punching Wolf in the face as he’s being examined and punching a hole in the wall of Dr. Pierce’s office. Eventually, Wolf diagnoses it as something called “Alien Hand Syndrome,” but pushes to find the cause as he faces resistance from the fighter’s father, who is also his trainer.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like we said when reviewing its first season, Brilliant Minds is basically House but with neurology cases.
Our Take: As much as the continuing storylines on Brilliant Minds are intriguing, and as much as we enjoy Zachary Quinto’s performance as the drily funny, rule-skirting Dr. Wolf, the show that creator Michael Grassi has constructed still feels like too many medical shows that have come before it, with stock side characters embroiled in various relationships and cases of the week that rely on too many conveniences to be at all realistic.
One of the most disappointing aspects of the first episode of Season 2 is that we don’t get any more scenes between Quinto and Patinkin, as Wolf sleeps in his office in order to avoid his father, then finally is convinced to go back to his house, only to find Noah has already left. Will Patinkin come back later in the season? Perhaps. But it feels like things between them have been short-circuited in the first episode.
We’re not 100 percent sure how the psychiatric hospital scenes are going to play into the season’s narrative. Will we keep seeing Dr. Wolf as a patient, then keep flashing back to yet another case of the week while we see Wolf slowly inching his way to a breakdown?
Otherwise, the rest of the episode, including the case with the fighter, feels like pretty bog-standard medical show stuff. There’s a scene where neurosurgeon Josh Nichols (Teddy Sears) telling Wolf that he can’t wait around while Wolf sorts out his life drama, and we also have Dr. Dang’s relationship with Katie (Mishel Prada) as well as a flirtation between Drs. Kinney and Nash. None of this get more than a scene or a few sentences’ worth of treatment.
Having to service all of those stories make the fighter’s case-of-the-week story a little too quickly settled, especially given the fact that Wolf trains the fighter to trick his brain into getting control of his right hand again, and we have no idea if that training was a few days, weeks or months.
Sex and Skin: Just some kissing, but that’s about it.
Parting Shot: Back to the psychiatric hospital, Wolf sees the doctor treating him (Bellamy Young) as he loses consciousness, then we see the sign outside that confirms that we’re not at Bronx General anymore.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Porsha Williams, who shows up as one of Dr. Pierce’s overprivileged patients and is pretty funny.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Why does chronic pain have to be so chronic?” Katie says to Dang, uttering a line only a character on a medical show would say.
Our Call: SKIP IT. While we still enjoy Quinto as Dr. Wolf, the rest of Brilliant Minds is just too generic to get excited about.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.