The second season of NBC’s medical drama “Brilliant Minds” kicked off Monday with what series star Zachary Quinto describes as a “mystery bomb,” with his character, Dr. Oliver Wolf, under close supervision in a mental institution.
“It’s a pretty revolutionary perspective that we come in with: we don’t know how he got there or why he’s there, and we don’t know why he can’t leave,” Quinto told HuffPost in an interview. As it turns out, Dr. Wolf’s appearance in the facility is a flash-forward, with each of the new episodes rewinding the action six months to offer “breadcrumbs that lead to what I hope will be a satisfying [end],” he added.
“Brilliant Minds,” which premiered last year, is based on the life of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist and author known to a generation as the “poet laureate of contemporary medicine,” in the words of The New York Times.
Sacks died in 2015 at age 82, having spent most of his life both closeted and celibate. Quinto, however, portrays Dr. Wolf as a gay man who makes no secret of his sexuality among his cohorts at New York’s Bronx General Hospital, but grapples with a deep-rooted fear of intimacy that may be connected to his experiences with prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and from having grown up with an absent father.
