Once again, Dr. Wolf will lose his job, because he did the right thing. In pilot episode prologue, that means taking a dementia patient to his granddaughter’s wedding, hoping if he seats his patient behind a piano, his memory will briefly reawaken. It sort of works, but he gets fired anyway.
Wolf wants to revel in his depression, but his old college friend, psych department chair Dr. Carol Pierce guilt trips him into joining her on-staff at Bronx General. His first case there tantalizingly offers similarities with Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, but, disappointingly, Dr. Wolfs identifies an earthly neurological explanation regarding Hannah Peters’ strange belief her children are not really her children.
Somehow, Wolf and Pierce get along, but he immediately clashes with Dr. Josh Nichols, a veteran during the “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” era, who is not privy to Wolf’s “face-blindness,” another similarity he shares with the real-life Sacks. Since he is reluctant to discuss his condition, Dr. Wolf’s new skulls-full-of-mush neurology interns, Drs. Kinney, Nash, Dang, and Markus just assume he is aloof and anti-social. Coincidentally, Dr. Markus has his own rare neurological challenge, which will be revealed in a few episodes.
The series credits Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars as sources of “inspiration,” but only the second episode, “The Disembodied Woman,” about a woman losing her proprioception, or sense of body control and positioning, is faithfully drawn from one of Hat’s case-study essays. Although the third episode, “The Lost Biker,” shares some thematic similarities with Sacks’ “The Lost Mariner,” the circumstances of each patient’s new memory-forming issues are considerably different.
“The Blackout Bride” presents some of Dr. Wolf’s most extreme methods, when he takes MDMA to understand his patient’s perception of events, but rather awkwardly, it turns out to be laced with PCP. Notably, this episode also introduces an apparently unresponsive patient, impressively portrayed by Alex Ozerov-Meyer, whom Wolf struggles to reach over an as yet unresolved multiple-episode story-arc.
Arguably, “The Haunted Marine” might be the best of the first six episodes, thanks its compassionate handling of military themes and Joshua Echebiri’s sensitive but refreshingly restrained performance as neurologically-troubled veteran, Steve Hill. However, the teen characters and immature melodrama of “The Girl who Cried Pregnant” make it the comparatively weakest.
The kind of medical detective work and deductive diagnoses depicted in the series remain tried and true grist for medical drama. To a great degree, viewers can think of Brilliant Minds as a House M.D., but without the pill-popping, excellent musical taste, and withering sarcasm.
Throughout the early episodes, Tony-winner Donna Murphy is a standout as hospital director Muriel Landon, who maybe isn’t as bad as Wolf remembers. Indeed, the mind’s fallibility is one of the show’s major themes. Unfortunately, the interns function more as stock devices rather than interesting characters, except maybe Alex MacNicoll, who gets to faint and act out other serious medical reactions as the mysteriously afflicted Dr. Markus.
Each episode maintains a healthy pace, but the series lacks the humor of House and the suspense of Medical Investigations (which deserved a better fate). As currently calibrated, it is just far too earnest. Still, each episode serves up enough medical legwork and rational hypothesis-testing to satisfy fans of the genre, at least for a while. Watchable but not essential, Brilliant Minds premieres Monday (9/23) on NBC.
