At Intolerant TV, we watch every new show on network television for the fall season—so you don’t have to. We don’t watch them for long, though. Instead of giving thumbs up/down or a certain number of stars, we let you know how long we were able to stand the pilot episode before turning it off.
Hey, it’s Zachary Quinto! We open with him looking at his reflection in elevator doors, which distorts his face and turns it into a metaphor.
Not that we need any metaphors, because Quinto tells us in the second sentence of the entire show, “I believe you can’t treat a patient without understanding who they really are.”
If you’re still not sure exactly what this show is about, the third sentence is, “Sometimes, the only course of treatment is breaking the rules.”
See, other medical shows might waste time showing you this, but Brilliant Minds just gets that all out of the way by telling. His fourth sentence should be, “There was a patient who we had trouble diagnosing and was about to die,” followed by “But I figured out what it was and saved them.” Then we could be done with the pilot episode before the elevator doors open.
The elevator of exposition reaches its floor, and Quinto exits, looking as crazy as he did on Heroes. He sneaks into a patient’s room, disguises them and tries to sneak them out of the hospital in a wheelchair. We’re a minute in and we’ve already had an elevator scene and a kidnapping the patient in disguise scene. All he needs to do is hook up with someone in an on-call room, and we’ll have Medical Show Bingo before the opening credits.
The nurses catch him, but Zachary jumps on the elevator and speeds off with the patient on a motorcycle … because he breaks the rules.
Zachary is bringing the patient, who was on the Alzheimer’s floor, to his granddaughter’s wedding. Because he feels a connection to the guy. Because he also has some type of cognitive issue—he can’t recognize faces. How do I know this? Because one of the nurses tells us outright. You aren’t going to struggle to interpret this show, is what I’m saying. It’s House with Cliff’s Notes.
I really should have pulled the plug on this before the cold open ended, but I loved Zachary Quinto as Sylar and tolerated him as Spock. I also loved House.
Hospital higher ups call Zachary into a meeting to yell at him. He gives another speech explaining the premise of the show, but they decide
to fire him anyway. Twist! Opening credits!
Zachary is at home—he likes ferns. They’re everywhere, hoarder-style, including clippings in the refrigerator. Tamberla Perry shows up to try to get him to take a job. The exposition continues to flow hot and heavy, including Tamberla telling us that Zachary likes ferns.
Then Zachary says he can’t take a job at Tamberla’s hospital. “You know why.” And the subject changes.
This, you’re not telling us? After serving everything else up to us in an unappetizing dialogue gruel? We have a flashback to Zachary’s childhood. His father had a similar problem, and swimming was important. Back to present, Zachary is thinking about this as he swims … in the Hudson River. Okay. I tried. We’re done here.
Time of death: An extremely generous 12 minutes.
