What To Know
- Season 2 of Brilliant Minds has introduced Dr. Charlie Porter (Brian Altemus), a new resident in Dr. Oliver Wolf’s neurology department, whose true motives remain unclear.
- Brian Altemus teases something “explosive” to come.
- Altemus discusses if his character’s perspective has changed the more he works with Wolf, with the two frequently clashing over patient care and methods.
When Brilliant Minds returned for its second season, it introduced a few new characters, including a new resident for Dr. Oliver Wolf’s (Zachary Quinto) neurology department, Dr. Charlie Porter (Brian Altemus). He claims to be there to learn from the best (Wolf) but clearly has an ulterior motive, given the side of the character we’ve seen in flash forwards, the timeline in which Wolf is a patient at Hudson Oaks, run by Dr. Amelia Frederick (Bellamy Young).
“Things are definitely going to come to a head in a pretty explosive way,” Altemus tells TV Insider ahead of the Monday, December 1, episode. “It’s stuff that I still, thinking back on the days that we filmed, get excited and butterflies about, so it’s very fun to watch.”
Wolf and Charlie have been butting heads for most of the season, with the head of neurology, from the beginning, thinking the new resident was there to spy on him for his mother, Dr. Muriel Landon (Donna Murphy), formerly the CMO (chief medical officer); Dr. Josh Nichols (Teddy Sears) now holds that position since she retired. Then, they disagreed about patient care, particularly that of Jorge Torres, who survived what should have been a fatal fall. But is working alongside Wolf changing how Charlie feels about him at all?
“I think there’s moments where he starts to say, OK, maybe his practices do have a positive end result, but at this point, I’m still just looking to clash with Wolf at every step of the way,” says Altemus. “I think he spends too much time with patients. I don’t understand his methods, and I think they’re wrong. I think there’s moments of levity where you get to see, OK, he’s kind of seeing that Wolf might have some decent ideas, but it’s just pretty [much butting heads] the whole time.”
At the beginning of the season, Quinto told us that for Wolf, Charlie seems to be “a little bit of an agent of chaos,” and he suspected, having only filmed up to Episode 8 (which aired on November 17), “Charlie represents something to Wolf that he’s going to have to reckon [with] and confront.” We’ll have to see if that’s the case.
What’s your theory about Charlie? Let us know in the comments section below.
Brilliant Minds, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC