Zachary Quinto’s Dr. Oliver Wolf and His Face Blindness

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Brilliant Minds series premiere.]

“When a doctor looks at a patient, what do they see? The disease or the person? I believe you can’t treat a patient without understanding who they really are, and sometimes the only course of treatment is breaking the rules.” Brilliant Minds, which in some ways feels like House meets New Amsterdam, begins with that voiceover from neurologist Dr. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto).

We meet him taking an Alzheimer’s patient (André De Shields) on “a little field trip”—completely disregarding the nurses who try to stop him (“People say he can’t recognize faces, I just think he’s a dick,” one says of him)—to his granddaughter’s wedding. While his patient may not seem to remember his granddaughter, he does play “God Only Knows” and recognizes her; as Oliver explains, music unlocks his memories. But with the family threatening to sue, Oliver—despite an impassioned plea (“I want to change how the world sees my patients”)—is fired.

The head of psych and his old friend, Dr. Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry), recruits him to be the neuro attending at Bronx General. He tries to refuse (and says she knows why he can’t work there), but she points out that his workouts, Bach, and plants are a “coping mechanism” and she knows he’s lost without his patients. She dangles a case in front of him: a single mother who has had a shift in her behavior following a procedure for her epilepsy. After a swim in the Hudson—and remembering his time as a kid in a pool with his father, who offered some tips to remember people and was sick (which Oliver’s mother told him to keep to himself)—he goes to Bronx General. He’s not too happy to hear that he has interns when he thought he’d be a one-man show; she recommends he open up to them about his face blindness, but he doesn’t as they treat their patient, who doesn’t recognize her children.

During the course of this medical case, Oliver clashes with the chair of neurosurgery, Dr. Josh Nichols (Teddy Sears), who operated on the patient and argues that his job was to cure her epilepsy, which he did successfully. But thanks to Oliver’s unconventional approach to treating the patient’s Capgras syndrome—she recognizes her kids’ voices, so Oliver has her make auditory contact first and wear glasses that slightly alter her vision to retrain her brain to prioritize what she hears instead of sees—means the family can stay together.

Oliver does finally open up about his face blindness to the interns after helping the patient. “I try to focus on distinct traits to remember people, but it’s not a perfect science, especially in big crowds or with new people,” he explains. “The only way this is going to work is if we open up to each other, even when it’s uncomfortable.” As Carol sees it, his face blindness is a gift because “it makes you look so much deeper. You see the stuff the rest of us miss.”

Then, as the final moments reveal, the chief medical officer of the hospital, whom Oliver avoids earlier in the episode, is his mother.

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Brilliant Minds, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC