REVIEW: ‘Brilliant Minds’ Season 2 Is Good, But Makes One Too Many Changes

Brilliant Minds Season 2 is a strange beast. Without the context of Season 1, this second season largely succeeds. An ensemble cast of likable yet flawed characters, an overarching mystery with twists and turns, and interesting and moving episodic stories and medical cases to keep things moving. All in all, a standard and decent medical procedural show. And that’s ultimately the problem.

Because Brilliant Minds Season 1 had those things, yet it felt unique and new. The stories took their time, allowing each patient case the space to visually explore their ailments, instead of the mad rush of other medical shows set in busier parts of the hospital.

Most of all, the show led with empathy and a sustainability-solution lens, which is not often found in medical dramas. It wasn’t always about a cure but about how to help their patients adjust to their new reality. Brilliant Minds Season 2 loses that as it switches its focus to a broader world of Bronx General.

Brilliant Minds Season 2 breaks down Wolf’s bias about long-term care facilities.

When Brilliant Minds Season 2 starts, we’re thrown into an overarching mystery surrounding how Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto) ends up in a psychiatric facility. This mystery gets more complicated, with inconsistent flash-forward scenes offering pieces to a puzzle that becomes hard to care about the more it drags on. And when the show finally fills in those gaps, it barely covers two episodes.

The story arc does a decent job of taking Wolf on a journey of healing and acceptance when it comes to his father’s and his own mental health struggles. Early on in this season, Wolf makes it known how he feels about Dr. Amelia Fredricks, director of Hudson Oaks, and how she persuades patients into long-term care. Wolf sees it as giving up on their patients and a way to claw money out of their pockets.

But more importantly, he views long-term care facilities as the place that took his father away from him. Breaking down his bias during his own stay at Hudson Oaks did a marvelous job of emphasizing that long-term care can be helpful if the right doctors are in place to care for those patients. Wolf was right about Amelia, though.

Brilliant Minds Season 2 expands the world of Bronx General beyond just neuro.

It’s clear there was a pivot, however. Season 1 ended with Wolf’s father, Noah, returning after being presumed dead for 30 years to ask for his help in saving his life. The presumption here was that Noah had some complicated neurological case that Brilliant Minds Season 2 would explore. However, when the new season premiered, Noah was nowhere to be seen, and Wolf was holed up in his office 24/7 researching what was wrong. But by the end of Brilliant Minds Season 2 Episode 2, Noah had left again, only to be killed off-screen in the series finale.

So while the pivot worked for the most part to connect Wolf and his father via his experience with his own mental health, the path to get there is convoluted, with an obvious Mandy Patinkin-shaped elephant in the room. Brilliant Minds Season 2 also just has a whole new vibe compared to Season 1’s gentler pacing style of storytelling.

The world of Bronx General expands outside the neuro ward to the emergency room, a place responsible for a 50 percent increase in energy that doesn’t always make for a smooth integration. With the success and popularity of HBO’s The Pitt, which takes place exclusively in the ER, it’s hard not to assume the emergency room’s inclusion in this season is an attempt to join the mainstream.

There’s nothing ultimately wrong with this move. It does introduce a new character, Dr. Anthony Thorne (John Clarence Stewart), the ER attending who often collaborates with neuro and is Carol’s (Tamberla Perry) new love interest. Thorne works well bouncing off Wolf, ribbing him and his ways good-naturedly.

And his love story with Carol adds a wonderful will-they-won’t-they vibe to the season, even if it ends poorly due to the cancellation. But this much time spent in the ER means we’re not in neuro as much. The unique neuro cases and their visual representations were a huge part of why Brilliant Minds Season 1 was so good.

But Thorne isn’t the only new face at Bronx General in Brilliant Minds Season 2. Dr. Charlie Porter arrives at Bronx General with an agenda to get revenge on Wolf. He immediately comes off too cartoonish for this type of show, and his motivations are weak compared to the larger mysteries of the season.

Brilliant Minds Season 2 goes big on overarching mysteries.

Once he sets his big plan into motion in the midseason finale, sending Wolf on a spiral that lasts for a few episodes, Charlie’s presence feels unnecessary. The show tries to integrate him into the intern group, and while he tries to make amends, there just isn’t enough time spent on him to really care.

Part of the problem is just that there are too many overarching mysteries happening. The flashforwards take up a lot of time, and Charlie’s appearance in some of them only muddies the waters. Brilliant Minds Season 2 goes big with these overarching mysteries to try and garner some intrigue, but it misses by miles.

The difference between Season 1’s mysteries and Season 2’s mysteries is that the questions in the first season were always focused on character. What happened to Wolf’s dad haunted a lot of Season 1 episodes, but it worked to paint a better picture of our main character rather than just being a plot point for the season.

The season loses too many good characters.

Nurse Silva also arrives about a quarter of the way into Brilliant Minds Season 2. Though there isn’t much singular focus on his character, he provides great comedic relief and serves as a liaison to the other nurses. There are some more heavy emotional moments for him, but they’re usually in service to another character.

While these new characters helped build out the roster and open the world of Bronx General wider, it also pushes out two characters that made Brilliant Minds Season 1 so good. Van (Alex MacNicoll) and Jacob (Spence Moore II) spend a lot of the first half of this season on the sides. Van reconnects with his ex-wife, and there are some episodes he’s just not in. Jacob, even less so as he works his ER rotation. The two depart the show officially in Brilliant Minds Season 2 Episode 11, although Van makes a small appearance in the series finale.

The loss of those two characters in Brilliant Minds Season 2 is hard to stomach considering how integral they were to building the heart of Season 1. The intern group consisting of Ericka (Ashleigh LaThrop), Dana (Aury Krebs), Van, and Jacob was a special one.

The show makes too many changes at once.

As we got to know Wolf, so too did the interns, and the bond they all formed as they learned from Wolf and grew in their abilities as doctors was one of the better found family dynamics on television in recent years. So to pull that dynamic apart so early on is disappointing and contributes to this season’s too many changes at once, which were ultimately the show’s downfall.

Ericka and Dana have a great rapport in Brilliant Minds Season 2. After surviving the building collapse in the Season 1 finale, Ericka goes on a journey of healing and finding her passion in helping others. Her biggest case is Sam, a schizophrenic patient who keeps arriving in the ER and then disappearing before they can do a full workup and develop a treatment plan. Her focus on Sam in the first half of Brilliant Minds Season 2 leads to her desire to learn more about her birth mother, who was also schizophrenic.

Dana also goes on a personal journey of confronting her reasons for turning Carol in to the medical board, and using those motivations to hold accountable psychiatrists who take advantage of patients, just like what happened with her sister. This ties nicely into the Amelia Fredricks drama, even if the conclusion is a bit rushed.

Dana and Ericka’s friendship also gets a lot of focus throughout Brilliant Minds Season 2, and it’s a beautiful journey of love and fights and disagreements as the two learn how to forgive each other for things but also how to hold on to the love they have for each other.

With Thorne’s addition to Brilliant Minds Season 2, Carol kind of breaks away from the Carol-Wolf dynamic, which helps give her more to do than just be a shoulder for Wolf to cry on. The season also dissects that dynamic during the Hudson Oaks episodes when she realizes she can’t be everything to Wolf when Wolf needs to get help elsewhere.

Her relationship with Thorne is full of ups and downs that are fun to watch unfold all season, but unfortunately, it doesn’t end on a good note. A breakup over ethical disagreements occurs in the series finale, which clearly had more story to tell if a Season 3 were happening, but alas, this wonderful love story ends on a sour note.

Brilliant Minds Season 2 has many great things about it, but too many things were lost.

As for Josh (Teddy Sears), he spends a lot of Brilliant Minds Season 2 lying to himself about his feelings for Wolf. To be fair, Wolf did need to go on his own healing journey, which we’ve talked about extensively already. But throw in a love triangle when Josh gets back together with an ex and wants to make a go of starting a family, and things get a little more complicated.

The love triangle drags on a bit too long, and Josh keeps too tight a hold on what he thinks, which often leaves him feeling a little static and hard to read. But the Wolf and Josh love story that started back in the beginning of Season 1 eventually finds a happy place to end.

Brilliant Minds Season 2 has many great things about it. The additions to the season were a lot, but they weren’t horrible. They stepped into the formula of any other medical show, and it’s hard to blame them for doing that as a way to gain viewership. But doing so also made the show lose a little bit of its identity.

The unique cases and the visually interesting way the show explored those cases were few and far between this season. A convoluted overarching mystery took up a lot of time and only barely paid off with an emotionally satisfying conclusion to Wolf’s story. But too many things were lost, like time in the neuro ward and the intern dynamic, which changed too much of the show’s DNA too quickly, leading to a second and final season that flew too close to the sun.

Brilliant Minds Season 2 is streaming now on Peacock.