‘Brain Dead’ Recap ‘The Insanity Principle: How Extremism In Politics Is Threatening Democracy In The 21st Century’

Imagine a world where politicians aren’t only corrupt, some of them actually have alien bugs controlling their brains!

Welcome to the new CBS show Brain Dead

Laurel Healy played by  Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a documentary filmmaker in LA. She is at an event with her brother, Luke, played by Danny Pino,who is a Democratic senator. Her father is begging her to come back to D.C. to help the family out and if she complies, he’ll help fund one of her documentaries.

It’s her first day on the job  and she is to handle people’s complaints and make sure they are happy and will vote for Luke next election. This is no one’s dream job.

Her last case of the day is an interesting case, Randell Burke’s wife, Breanna… She has a video of her husband at work investigating a disturbance and then the screen goes black.  Then Aaron Tveit interrupts. What happened to that man? What was in that crate???

Gareth Ritter, AKA  Aaron Tveit, wants  her to get her brother to take a deal and she has 90 minutes to get him to do it. Kind of freaked out, she races to get to her brother.

She gets to him in time, but he doesn’t take the deal. Plus he is cheating on his pregnant wife…

“God I hate politics”- Laurel.

Getting back to the crate- whatever is in it looks like bugs… and a lot of them.

Day two on the job and a lot of people are out of a job. Actually pretty much everyone except Laurel and she got some dirty looks for it.

Laurel goes to the ship who carried the crate only to find the whole thing very strange. The crew is acting weird and Gareth got there before she did.

So she goes to his office to confront him and finds a passed out Tony Shalhoub, Red Wheatus, and a Gareth who is only interested in getting Luke to take the deal.

Later she calls Randell’s wife and it’s clear that something is wrong. They hang up and the Burke’s get tucked in for the night. A swarm of bugs, seemingly controlled by Randell, flock over to them.

Laurel calls her dad as a last resort to try to get her brother to take deal. After she hangs up, The Burkes arrive pledging their support to Luke and Laurel is super suspicious. Briana is acting just like Randell now.

Luke and Red go off to discuss “something” over drinks, leaving Laurel and Gareth to make small talk about her documentaries when that song comes on again. All of a sudden one of the waiters looks a bit zombie-fied.

Later that night, a drunk Red passes out as those pesky bugs crawl into his ear and take over his brain. Actually, they kick his brain out of his head. Gross.

Red wakes up the next morning, playing that song and cleaning up the brain mess on his sheets. He goes into the office and is basically a different man. Gareth immediately takes notice.

Laurel, finally using her brother’s power, makes her way into the lab where the crate came from and she finds Dr.Daudier, injured, saying their is something in his ear. Gee, I wonder what it could b- OHMYGOD DID HIS HEAD JUST EXPLODE?!?!?!

The senate just got handed over to the Republicans and Luke is surprisingly ok with that. He has a plan.

 

Well this show was weird, in a delightful kind of way? I don’t know, it is hard to describe. CBS called it a political thriller with a twist but I’m not sure if that covers it all. This is one of those shows that is going to take a couple of episodes to really understand everything that is going on in it.

Good luck getting “You Might Think” by The Cars out of your head.

What did you think of the Brain Dead pilot?