[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Brilliant Minds Season 1 Episode 7 “The Man From Grozny.”]
We were already shipping Drs. Oliver Wolf (Zachary Quinto) and Josh Nichols (Teddy Sears) before that grand romantic moment at the end of the latest Brilliant Minds!
All the doctors are affected when their locked-in John Doe patient, Roman, upon getting a voice thanks to a new device, makes the heartbreaking decision to have himself taken off the machines keeping him alive. But thanks to a conversation that Oliver has with him in which his patients talks about wishing he could have kissed his boyfriend in the middle of the street where no one would care (unlike back home), the doctor does just that with Josh in the episode’s final moments.
It’s a moment that we thought wouldn’t happen until the end of the first season, and Sears agrees. “I thought if we were going to get there, we were going to get there later. My first pass of the script was, ‘Oh boy, is this too soon? Does this feel sudden?’ And then as we were acting it, as we were going through it, it made the perfect sense for it to be now because everyone’s kind of cracked open by the decision that Roman’s made and his ability to see each doctor and see their stuff,” he tells TV Insider. “It all culminates under the starry sky at Wolf’s house when Roman makes this transition, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house for us when we were doing it.”
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According to executive producer Michael Grassi, it wasn’t just about where Oliver is now but also the complications that will lead to for him and Josh in Episode 8. “When we first met Oliver Wolf this season, he had a lot of walls up, and I think in sort of spending time with Josh and having so much conflict with him and them working through all the John Doe stuff and then being inspired by this patient who was sort of unable to live this life and Wolf seizing that moment, those final moments that you saw in 107 felt like the perfect time for him to take this leap that he’s been avoiding taking for a very long time,” he explains.
Like everyone else, Josh is moved by their patient, especially after watching Oliver’s speech for Roman. “That just cracks Josh wide open. For a guy who is used to getting his dopamine hit outside of office hours with hookups and party friends or what have you, to find his equal, if not his superior, in a guy like Wolf, who is so empathic and so compassionate and so deep in a way, that was the perfect moment because boy, if something like that doesn’t cause you to ask yourself, if not now, then when, I don’t know what would,” Sears adds.
But Josh isn’t the one to make the movie—Wolf is—and Sears isn’t sure if his character would have, given how “guarded” he is. He points to a scene that was deleted from the pilot, of Josh suggesting they grab drinks after their first day to bury the hatchet.
“Josh knows all about Wolf. Wolf’s known in the gay doctor community. He has a reputation. There’s something exciting and mysterious about this guy, but also something that’s so grating to Josh that he just sort of can’t figure out, why is this guy so getting under my skin?” says Sears.
That scene was deleted due to everything else in the pilot, though the writers did talk about having Josh ask Wolf for a drink later in the season. Sears speculates that maybe his character would have done that now, after Roman. “He probably would’ve done it in a much more business-like kind of way, ‘Let’s go have a drink,’” he admits. “I’m just so happy that Wolf broke the seal, if you will, skipped ahead of all of the way to do it socially and just went right to the physical, right to the carnal. I think it needed to have someone like Wolf impulsively make that decision. Otherwise, Josh, cerebral as he is, probably would’ve danced around it for a long time and talked himself in or out of the situation. We’re dealing with an empathic, emotional beating heart of a man in Wolf next to a cerebral, ordered, structured guy in Josh who leads a lot more from his head. And so yeah, I think Josh probably would’ve blown it. He probably would’ve missed his window. So thank God for Wolf’s impulsiveness.”
Looking ahead to the next episode, “that cinematic sort of on the street moment in New York carries [over] as these two try to figure out, what is this and what are we doing?” Sears previews. “But boy, is this a rush, boy, is this fun, boy, is this releasing a lot of tension that these two have built up for the first half of the season.”
Adds Grassi, “Wolf has taken a big romantic leap, but that’s complicated. They work together. They are dealing with this grief that they’re going through with the patient, and I think they need to really figure out what this means and how they’re going to move forward.”
That grief from John Doe is not just a turning point for Oliver but also something that will affect all the doctors. It “sends them in different trajectories moving forward, but it has huge impacts and huge consequences for everyone,” says the EP.
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Roman’s death on record within the 30 days of implantation doesn’t look good, and so Simon (Brendan Hines) tells Carol (Tamberla Perry) he was wrong when he thought this would be the start of a prolific partnership with the hospital. But is that it, or is there something more coming up there?
“For now, it’s the end of the possible partnership for the hospital, but he’s a big key player in our world and we will continue to mine conflict with him in success,” shares Grassi. “We thought that Tamberla had such great chemistry with him and we really want to keep digging into that relationship.”
What did you think of Oliver and Josh’s kiss? Let us know in the comments section below.
Brilliant Minds, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC