[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Brilliant Minds Season 2 premiere “The Phantom Hook.”]
Brilliant Minds bookends its second season premiere with a flashforward to six months in the future, when Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto) is a patient himself. Plus, it delivers a heartbreaking blow to the doctor when he’s finally ready to talk to his father (Mandy Patinkin), whom he’d been avoiding despite letting him stay in his house.
Elsewhere in the Monday, September 22, episode, Wolf and Josh (Teddy Sears) are no longer together, Ericka (Ashleigh LaThrop) returns from a trip to Mexico seemingly better after her anxiety-inducing experience when her building collapsed last season, and the team gets a new member in resident Charlie (Brian Altemus), who seems to have a hidden agenda.
Read on for a breakdown of the Season 2 premiere (which picks up six weeks later from the finale) with insights on what happened and what’s next from Zachary Quinto, Teddy Sears, and showrunner Michael Grassi.
Why is Wolf a patient at Hudson Oaks?!
A flashforward reveals that Wolf is a patient at Hudson Oaks, a psychiatric facility run by Dr. Amelia Frederick (Bellamy Young), and he’s trying to escape. In the final moments, he’s caught and sedated as she checks, “He won’t be fighting back anymore. Isn’t that right, Oliver?”
We will catch up those six months, Grassi promises, though he won’t say when exactly (or when Young might show up in the present), and there won’t be flashforwards every episode, just “when it’s really pertinent to our storytelling and reflects our case and when we need to go, we go there.”
As the season progresses, the question will be, “What’s going to be the thing that breaks Wolf and sends him there? Is it going to be one thing? Is it going to be a combination of things?” asks Grassi. “There will be more surprises. Within this season, we will learn exactly what’s happening there at Hudson Oaks, and it’s going to be surprising.”
Quinto still doesn’t know fully what’s going on, he shares, since they’re writing and filming the season as it airs. “Michael and I talk about a lot of the catalysts for why Wolf ends up at Hudson Oaks and why he can’t escape, and all of that, but they haven’t been committed to a script yet. So it’s an ongoing collaboration, an ongoing conversation, and one that we’re having all the time so that I can be planting seeds that maybe pay off later,” he says. “That mystery is a real thrust of Season 2, not only for audiences, but also for the characters: What happens that leads Wolf to this place of needing to seek help and then getting trapped somehow in the place where he thought he was going to get some relief. There’s a lot simmering, and I’m excited to watch it boil over.”
Sears’ initial theory after reading the premiere’s script was it involved Noah and something Wolf had buried about his father. “That, to me, is overly simplistic, and I certainly don’t think it’s that,” he admits.
What’s in Noah’s letter? Will Mandy Patinkin return?
While Wolf is working on figuring out what’s medically wrong with his father — Noah shared that he hasn’t been able to get any answers, and that’s why he came to his son in the finale — he’s been sleeping in his office. But as his best friend Carol (Tamberla Perry) points out, if Noah was just another patient, Wolf would do everything in his power to get to know him, which means going home. But when Wolf does just that near the end of the episode, it’s to find that his father’s gone (and left a goodbye letter).
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“He was ready at the end of the first episode. I think that’s the tragedy of that turn of events is that he got advice from Josh, he got advice from Carol, and he finally felt like, ‘OK, if I’m going to move through the upheaval of this return of Noah, then I have to confront it,’” says Quinto. Unfortunately, instead of that conversation, “he was met with another disappointment and after all of the work that he did to forgive his father, to understand where his father may be coming from, I think it was a particularly impactful blow to be yet again abandoned, to be yet again left alone, to be yet again put in a position of longing for some kind of connection that he thought maybe was possible and then realized wasn’t so.”
So, what would Wolf want to say the next time he sees him? “Find somewhere else to stay? I don’t know,” Quinto admits.
“We spent so much of the first season dealing with Wolf’s issues around abandonment and around mistrust that was caused by this lie that his parents decided to tell him. And to have him welcome Noah back into his life only to have him once again pull a disappearing act, I think was really re-traumatizing for Wolf in a way that he had only two options: One was to confront that and face it and accept it and lean into it, and the other, which is the choice he makes, I think, is to kind of slam the door on it and say, ‘I’m done. I’ve tried. I have no more to give this person, and I’m going to channel my energy into the people who want and need me, my patients primarily, and my friends and the doctors that I work with,’” he adds.
“Is that the healthiest choice that someone could make for their own mental health? Maybe, maybe not, but considering where we find Wolf at the beginning of the second season, I think we know that the answer is maybe not. And how that’s all going to add up over the course of the season is something that I think audiences will hopefully be invested in,” Quinto teases.
Not only did it seem that “Noah got the message” his son sent by not being around, Grassi says, but we’re also going to see Wolf continuing to ask, as the season progresses and he deals with being left again, “‘Is Dad lying to me? Is he lying just to get back into my life?’ He’s done all these tests and he’s run all these things and he hasn’t found anything yet. So is he getting too close to the truth?”
Even without Noah around, he continues to weigh on Wolf. “So much of Season 1 and Wolf’s life has been processing this grief. What happens when somebody that you’ve grieved comes back and what happens when they leave again? Something tells me that the grief is just as painful, but we’re going to see how Oliver navigates that grief and follow, in 202 and onwards throughout the season, how do you move on and how do you deal with all of the feelings around that?” Grassi previews. “And it’s complicated.”
As for whether we’ll see Patinkin this season, “the story will definitely continue in very surprising ways and I can’t say whether or not we’ll see Mandy again this season yet,” according to the showrunner.
Will Wolf & Josh get back together? Is Josh dating?
Wolf and Josh’s journey to getting and being together was a memorable one in the first season. In the finale, Josh told Wolf he was falling for him, but then Wolf missed a gala where the other doctor was being honored after his father showed up. When Season 2 begins, the two aren’t together. Wolf says if he could, he would, but his house isn’t in order, and Josh gets it but says he can’t wait for something that might not ever happen.
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Both men “are really complicated” and “have a lot to navigate,” says Grassi. “It’s a bit of a ride with them this season and there are some twists coming. They’re going to go through stuff, but there is a really deep respect there and a love there. And I think you see that in all of their scenes together, even as they’re navigating all of the complexity that they’re going through. I love Zach and Teddy and their chemistry and this relationship is such an important part of the show, and we’ll continue to explore it, but in some surprising ways. The dynamic is going to shift in a way that we don’t see coming.”
Early on in the premiere, Josh comments on Wolf’s black eye (from a patient), and the other doc replies with the expected “you should see the other guy.” But then, when Wolf comments on Josh’s tan, the surgeon says he spent the weekend in the Hamptons … and “you should see the other guy.” Grassi’s not ruling out other love interests, but Sears tells TV Insider that specific remark was just “a swipe, an attempt to make him jealous,” and Josh isn’t out there dating.
“I think he’s trying to bury his pain by having a great time, but I don’t think he’s moved on per se, even for a casual night. I don’t think that Josh would say, ‘I’m falling for you,’ at the end of Season 1, only to resort to something that I think we would probably expect someone far more juvenile or less emotionally informed to do,” Sears explains.
“I think he doesn’t quite know where things stand, and it’s bugging the s**t out of him,” he adds, pointing out that some days, they might only have a quick glance or exchange in the hallway. The key scene was the one in Wolf’s office where they have the aforementioned conversation.
“It’s been six weeks, and he’s still not ready. And six weeks is, I feel like, not an unreasonable amount of time to allow someone time to process the arrival of something so devastating and world-shaking. ‘I’m an adult, you’re an adult, and we do need to talk about this, and if you still need some time, OK, but I have my own life to live, if you will,’” Sears says.
While Wolf made what Quinto says “probably wasn’t the best choice” in the Season 1 finale, what’s great about the two doctors is “they’re adults and they’re able to hold space for themselves and for each other, and they have to work together. Things definitely change in the nature of their working relationship at Bronx General over the course of the first few episodes of the season, so, that’s something they’re going to have to navigate. And I think that question about what they mean to each other and what they want to be to each other is something that will continue to unfold. And I don’t think there are any easy answers or it’s not black and white. It’s like a lot of human relationships, which means that it’s complicated, it’s uncertain, and I think they’re both trying to figure it out, and we’ll definitely watch that unfold as the season progresses.”
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What is Charlie’s motive?
Wolf assumes that his mother, the hospital’s CMO (chief medical officer) Muriel (Donna Murphy), has brought on Charlie to spy on him. Charlie denies it. He visits Wolf in his office to tell him that he asked for the job because of him; he wants to learn from the best. We have a feeling that he is telling the truth about asking for the job because of Wolf but having a hidden agenda as to why.
“You tapped into something,” says Grassi. “Charlie is such a fun character. I love our interns from last season, and we really established an interesting dynamic between our interns where they really opened up to each other, and they would group hug, and they became this surrogate family. Charlie comes in, and he’s kind of like, ‘This isn’t normal. Whatever Wolf created with you guys here, it’s like this is weird.’ He’s going to try to subvert the status quo a little bit and poke at our interns and that dynamic. And at the same time, he pursued this job with Wolf. He applied for it. He wanted this job; he wanted to work with Dr. Oliver Wolf. And I think the big question we’ll be asking ourselves is, ‘Why?’”
Quinto’s take is that Charlie seems to be “really enthusiastic” and “a little bit of an agent of chaos. For Wolf, the jury’s out,” he says. “Their relationship is actually going to be an interesting and unexpected evolution. At least that’s what I’m picking up on so far. We’re only on Episode 8 now, so we still have a long way to go, but my sense is that Charlie represents something to Wolf that he’s going to have to reckon [with] and confront.”
How’s Ericka doing after her building collapsed?
As we learn near the end of the episode, Ericka came back from her trip to Mexico with a suitcase compartment full of meds she’s hiding from roommate Dana (Aury Krebs).
“Ericka is dealing with a lot this year,” the showrunner says of the type A doctor who thinks she can medicate herself. “She really thinks that she can control everything that she went through last season and all of the feelings that she’s carrying with her this season. And as the season goes on, we’ll see it build on her and how her PTSD from what she went through starts to manifest in how she’s a doctor in a weird way and the patients she tries to treat.”
Season 2 will also reveal more about Ericka as well as continue to explore her and Dana’s friendship.
Has Season 2’s recurring patient been introduced?
The first part of Season 1 featured a recurring patient in Roman, who had locked-in syndrome. It appears we’ve met the Season 2 version. Jacob (Spence Moore II) tells Ericka of a 30-year-old man with schizoaffective disorder who complains of daily chest pains and is in all the time.
“We may see more of Sam this season, and we may be learning more about him soon enough,” Grassi confirms.
What did you think of the Brilliant Minds Season 2 premiere? What’s your theory about that flashforward? Let us know in the comments section below.
Brilliant Minds, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC
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