A doctor’s painful past and uncertain future bookend one of the freshman hit’s most emotional outings, which offers a deeper dive into Brilliant Minds’ beating heart: the bond between Zachary Quinto’s neurologist, Oliver Wolf, and Tamberla Perry‘s psychiatrist, Carol Pierce. “It’s based on the real-life relationship between Oliver Sacks and a woman named Carol E. Burnett,” says Quinto, whose character is inspired by the famed Sacks. “They were medical students together and colleagues, and they were very, very dear friends. I think both of them—he as a gay man and she as a Black woman [in the 1950s]—really understood what it was to be ‘othered’.”
Unlike Oliver, however, Carol is more about figuring out a different kind of cerebral operation. Back in July before the show launched, Perry noted, “Dr. Carol is the chief of psychiatry, so I’m not dealing with brains. I’m not pulling out any scalpels, I’m not doing any of those things.” So as Wolf and his interns attempt to diagnose their patients of the week, she added with a laugh, “I get to watch them figure out what to do with their hands.”
Picking up from last week’s cliffhanger involving Alison (Julia Chan), a patient revealed to also be sleeping with Carol’s husband, “The Other Woman” offers insightful flashbacks to the good doctor’s struggles with being a young wife and mother just starting in her career. As the memories play out, however, it becomes clear Carol was in need of not just a friend like Wolf, but also professional help, inspiring her older self to make two very bold decisions regarding Alison’s treatment and her own domestic situation.
The storyline also may have inspired Perry herself to go a little deeper. Ahead of filming the episode in Toronto this fall, the actress admitted that on-screen Carol could teach her a few things. “As I’ve gone through this journey of developing this character, I’ve realized that we are not as alike as I thought we were, in terms of the way we think. [In] matters of the heart, matters of the mind, I am a very logical person. Carol handles things a lot with her heart, and that’s often the way she treats her patients. She is unwavering. She is fiercely loyal.”
She added, “I’m going to be very transparent, I have never done actual therapy in my life. And in watching this through, because mental health is at the forefront of most conversations right now, it’s really making me take a step back and decide that [therapy] might be my first step as soon as we wrap.”
Before then, however, Carol, Oliver, and the Bronx General Hospital staff will have their hands full with a mind-blowing turn of events. Without spoiling anything, you do not want to miss the hour’s final moments because the writers have found a, well, brilliant way to keep us hanging on until the show returns in January!
Brilliant Minds, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC
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