#brilliant minds

[lovingericdane]

[dogpoet]

August Prompts Day 16

Today's prompt is watermelon.

Watermelon

Josh hasn’t eaten watermelon this way since he was a kid. He and Wolf sit on the back steps, slices in hand, no plates or napkins. They’re making a mess. Wolf is barefoot, wearing a ratty T-shirt and shorts made from old sweatpants. Josh refuses to tell him how sexy he looks because then Wolf will put on the clothes every time he wants to win an argument. Instead, Josh says, “Hey,” and when Wolf turns, Josh leans in, kisses him. Wolf’s mouth is cold and sweet. He presses something into Josh’s mouth with his tongue. It’s a seed.

[lovingericdane]

[dogpoet]

August Prompts Day 15

A drabble for the bubbles prompt! It makes me very happy to imagine all the domestic disasters Josh has to put up with when he's living with Oliver. Exasperated Josh is hilarious.

Bubbles

“Oliver!” A kitchen floor covered in bubbles is not what Josh wants to find when he gets home after performing an emergency surgery. 

Oliver’s feet thump down the stairs and into the kitchen. “Oh!”

“What soap did you put in the dishwasher?”

“Dawn?” Oliver’s face scrunches. “We were out of the other stuff.”

Oliver resisted getting a dishwasher. Josh insisted. Now he’s paying. “Never use regular soap.”

“Why is it called dishsoap if you can’t use it for dishes?”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as a dishwasher Luddite.”

“You love my Luddite ways,” Oliver says.

Josh does.

[lovingericdane]

[dogpoet]

August Prompts Day 14

A drabble for today's prompt: airplane.

Airplane

Oliver’s patients always teach him new things or offer him new experiences. He has faith in Elle as she guides the plane upward. From above, everything is small, the buildings crammed together, so many people living their lives in the dense tangle of New York. At twenty thousand feet, Oliver feels light and free, like the weight of his life—his dad, Josh, Porter, his own heart and mind—has been lifted temporarily. He’s never been anyone’s copilot before, flying home with them to make peace with their past. He hopes he can make peace with his own past, too.

[wowbright]

Rewatch of Brilliant Minds episode 2.11 "The Boy Who Felt Too Much"

On rewatch, a lot of this episode feels just as unnecessary as it did the first time. What was the point of killing Michelle? There are a lot of other ways to move Van's actor off of being a regular from the show--for example, child care schedule, Michelle getting a job elsewhere and he wants to go with her, etc. In terms of connecting the case to the rest of the season, we could talk about Michelle's death symbolizing the death of the old Oliver, but I feel like that's a stretch. So much of this episode feels like a waste to me.

However! "Maybe more information isn't always better. Maybe there are things better left unseen." Oliver says this to Josh and Carol when discussing his hesitations about having Van present at Michelle's neuro exam to confirm brain death. On first watch, I took this as both a reference to the immediate topic and to Oliver's conflicted feelings about seeing his dad's New York apartment. On rewatch, I think this is an indication that he has already found the photos of his father's other family. And he wishes he hadn't, because the information is devastating to him and he doesn't know how to process it.

Josh and Carol make eye contact when Oliver says this, apparently trying to have a psychic conversation about, "Hey what's going on with Oliver and what is the deeper meaning behind his statement?"

They're so stupid. They could, like, you know, ASK him.

Yes, Wolf has a record of giving them the brush off or deflecting when they ask. But honestly I think with Carol it's because she has this tendency to treat Wolf like he's fragile or damaged and he doesn't like it. (To be clear, I don't think she's trying to be disrespectful, and I don't think it's totally uncalled for her to be cautious, but I don't think it's always appropriate, either.)

And as for Josh, Wolf deflects sometimes, but not always. Josh should have just put his big boy pants on and asked Wolf directly how he was doing, and kept asking until Wolf stopped deflecting. The problem with those two that they are both very prideful and stubborn.

This scene is also where Wolf says to Carol: "Begging people to stay isn't exactly my style. Just ask my dad. Or Josh." My interpretation: Wolf knows that he had a chance to keep Josh, back when Josh told him he couldn't wait around forever for something that might never happen. All he had to do was ask Josh to stay. But he didn't. I wonder if this is something that Wolf knew at the time or if it's something that has become clear to him in the months since.

*

A little later ...

Whoa, Charlie Porter is really tall!

*

Okay, so I misremembered about this one time character named Rachel, who is a rabbi and who Michelle's mom brings to the hospital for support. I had remembered Rachel as being Michelle's rabbi or the family's rabbi, but her mom introduces Rachel as "a family friend and a rabbi," so it's just as likely that Rachel is not a congregational rabbi, or at least not their congregational rabbi.

I also forgot the part where the rabbi asks if anyone wants a smoke. Lol!

*

"Charlie doesn't strike me as the therapy type," says Wolf. Which just goes to show that Wolf has pretty much zero understanding of how Charlie ticks. (We saw Charlie in a therapy session at the beginning of the previous episode, and the implication is that Charlie has been going for some time.)

Those two are at battle with their images of each other. They can't fight with the actual person because they can't even see who that other person is.

*

I wish I cared about Jake and Kinney's relationship or empathized with Van's reckless way of expressing his grief but I don't so I get to sit here bored for 10 straight minutes.

I remember being furious the first time I watched this "trying to smuggle Michelle into New Jersey" scene and she woke up. Then was relieved when I realized it was Van's fantasy. Not because I wanted Michelle to be dead but because her coming to life after brain death would be like ... a very bad thing to do in a medical show.

All the same, should we assume that Rabbi Rachel officiating an (I'm guessing) interfaith ceremony in his fantasy means that she would actually do that in real life, and thus she is Reform or possibly Reconstructionist, but definitely not a Conservative rabbi?

(It goes without saying that she is not Modern Orthodox.)

*

Uh oh. Charlie's conversation with Van about Liam is additional evidence that he's probably not a sociopath and may in fact care about other human beings.

*

It's fun to see Josh working on the masking tape mural. Is that a purple squid? A jelly fish?

Someone give me deep meta about whatever it is he's making.

*

Finally! In the last scene of this episode, something genuinely interesting happens. Sophia shows up!

So the question is, has Oliver only now seen the photos of his sister, and he immediately hallucinates a friend based on her? Or did he see them before (as I posited earlier), pushing it down or aside as something he didn't want to deal with? And maybe he thought he would come back to deal with it later? But the sudden loss of two of his interns is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and he's got no bandwidth left to process this information? So instead, he hallucinates a friend to fill the emotional gap left by Noah, Jake, Van, Josh, and Carol distancing themselves from him physically and/or psychologically?