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You can read this without being spoiled for more than the first few episodes by not clicking on the cut tags. Cut tags are spoilery through S4 E7.
Dr. Bright is a therapist who treats atypicals (people with powers). They are not known to the general public, but a secret sinister organization, the AM, studies them.
At the start, she has four clients we follow. Caleb is a sweet teenage empath who's struggling to not get overwhelmed by other people's emotions and who has a sweet romance with another boy at his school, Adam, who is not atypical. Sam is a young woman who time-travels when she gets anxious. Chloe is a college-age woman who is an extremely strong receptive telepath.
Dr. Bright also has a fourth, unofficial client, Damien. He has a very strong power, which is to make people do what he wants. It's functionally mind control. He's a lonely, somewhat pathetic, but very dangerous sociopath who likes to drop in on Dr. Bright and be a dick to her, controlling and non-sexually harassing her and non-sexually creeping on her clients. She can't get rid of him because of his power.
We learn early on that Dr. Bright has a secret agenda and wants to use her clients' powers for her own purposes. This is actually not my beef with the show or its portrayal of therapy. Obviously, it's unethical but the show knows it is and this is discussed a lot. Her clients learn what she's doing and why fairly early, and because she does have sympathetic motives they stick with her.
She's trying to rescue her brother Mark, a powerful atypical, from the AM which has imprisoned and experimented on him for four years. A non-consensual experiment using him and another kidnapped atypical left the other atypical dead and him in a coma. They're still holding him and refuse to release him to her care.
Dr. Bright used to work for the AM, which also does non-evil stuff like provide medical treatment and training for atypicals; she didn't know about the evil division, but they learned about Mark through her so she feels extra guilty.
Chloe, the telepath, I think is incapable of tuning out other people's thoughts. (This isn't 100% clear but it seems like it.) If she attends a therapy session, she can/will read Dr. Bright's mind. That means that she knows everything Dr. Bright knows, including everything Dr. Bright's other clients tell her. She routinely blurts out stuff other clients told Dr. Bright to different clients of Dr. Bright. Effectively, no one can have any secrets or privacy around Chloe, not just because she knows things, but because she will tell everything she knows to everyone.
(Dr. Bright's clients all end up meeting each other, which sets up its own set of ethical issues which I'll get to shortly.)
If I was Dr. Bright dealing with this genuinely fascinating problem in a therapy ethics, there are multiple possible ways to deal with this. The best way would be to only see Chloe over the phone. Another might be, since my clients all know each other anyway and know this is happening, to ask them, privately and individually and after discussing it, whether they consent to Chloe knowing everything they tell me. If even one person says no, then all of Chloe's sessions happen over the phone, permanently.
If I was the writer of this podcast, I would make clear is whether Chloe is literally incapable of shutting up about other people's secrets, whether she can but it's difficult for her for whatever reason, or whether she just doesn't want to or get why this upsets people.
Why this is happening makes a huge difference! Especially since Dr. Bright is literally there to help people control their powers. If Chloe is incapable of shutting up and her other clients don't consent to having her blurt out everything they tell Dr. Bright, then all her sessions need to happen by phone so she can't read Dr. Bright's mind. If it's difficult for her not to blurt, then Dr. Bright should be helping her with this. If she just doesn't think it's a problem and so refuses to stop, she should be booted as a client.
In the show, the why is not made clear but it seems like it's difficult for her not to blurt and she doesn't want to stop. (At one point she complains how haaaaard and saaaaad it is for her to be expected to keep other people's secrets.) Whatever the reason, everyone keeps telling Chloe not to blurt out their secrets to third parties and Dr. Bright keeps complaining that the whole situation is unethical, but no one ever boots Chloe out of their life or asks Dr. Bright to only see her by phone or do anything about it. Chloe is portrayed as a sweet cinnamon roll too good for this world, but in real life, she would be murdered so fast.
Any time someone brings up Chloe blurting out everything other clients told Dr. Bright to third parties, Chloe or someone else points out that Dr. Bright was also unethical. ONE PERSON BEING UNETHICAL DOES NOT MEAN IT'S OKAY FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO BE UNETHICAL. ALSO, CHLOE, SHUT THE FUCK UP BEFORE SOMEONE SHOVES YOU OFF A CLIFF.
This brings me to my biggest single problem with the show: almost everyone in it is from the Crab Nebula. (On FFA, "from the Crab Nebula" is shorthand for "person operating off of an incredibly strange set of assumptions about life/human beings/everything.") The particular quadrant of the Crab Nebula is, I think, young people on Tumblr.
Remember Damien, the mind-controlling sociopath? He ends up "rescuing" Mark, Dr. Bright's imprisoned brother, but then kidnaps him himself. He keeps him in motel rooms for three months, not letting him leave or have any human contact with anyone else, until Mark escapes. (Mark & Damien is the relationship I'm invested in. It's really interesting.)
Damien threatens to mind-control Sam into committing suicide and severely injures Chloe. When everyone is gathered literally to hide from Damien, he finds them and attempts to kidnap Adam to use as a hostage, saying that he intends to harm him. No one can do a thing about it because Damien doesn't want them to. Everyone else's anger overwhelms Caleb, breaking the mind control and making him go berserk. He beats Damien half to death before the rest of them pull him off.
There's a range of normal human reactions one might expect about this. Caleb freaks out as he's already been afraid of losing control and he's a sweet, non-violent kid. Totally understandable, even though he was rescuing his boyfriend from a dangerous sociopath who was trying to kidnap him and outright said he'd hurt him.
But among the possible reactions, you would think that even if seeing the violence was upsetting, these are all people who Damien has either directly harmed, directly threatened, or is threatening or attempting to harm people they love. The only reason he didn't just walk off with Adam is that Caleb hurt him. This is something most people would be glad about, even if witnessing it is upsetting. THEY WERE LITERALLY HIDING FROM HIM!
What they actually do: express horror and sadness that Damien is badly hurt, and argue over what to do now that's in Damien's best interests.
WTAF!!!!!
What no one says: "Fuck this guy! He's a sociopath with zero remorse. He kidnapped Mark, he permanently injured Chloe, he threatened to murder Sam, and he was just now trying to kidnap Adam. It's good that Caleb stopped him, sorry you're traumatized Caleb, but thank God. Let's do whatever we need to do to protect ourselves from Damien, and if it means handing him over to the AM or letting him die, well, maybe he shouldn't have tried to kidnap Adam."
What they do not even consider doing until waaaaaaay after this, when Damien is AGAIN a huge threat to them: make a plan about what to do about him to protect themselves. But only after a loooooong argument over whether it's justifiable to deprive Damien of due process given that they can't turn him over to any normal legal system.
Almost everyone's values and ethics and reactions are skewed from how humans normally are, and they're all skewed in the same weird directions.
Mark was kidnapped, locked up, and experimented on for four years. In this time he befriended a guard who he believed would have released him if he'd asked. Mark never asked because he "didn't want to get him in trouble." That's not a euphemism for "killed." Mark was just too nice to want to get someone fired, even if it would get him out of the EVIL EXPERIMENT LAB.
This whole thing would make sense as a comforting lie to give himself a sense of control over the situation, but it's presented at face value or at least never called out, and this is a show where if the author wants you to know something, it will be called out one million times.
People keep defending the evil lab with "but they do some good work," which is true, but WHO THE FUCK CARES WHEN THEY'RE ALSO IMPRISONING AND TORTURING PEOPLE WHO SOMETIMES DIE AS A RESULT? The evil lab people say they don't kill anyone on purpose and their experiments aren't meant to kill anyone, which appears to be true, but WHO CARES! They literally grab atypicals off the street, lock them up, and do experiments on them and sometimes they die! Not killing them on purpose doesn't make that better!
As of season four, everyone knows they still have atypicals locked up and experimented on, but no one is doing anything to break them loose and they're still half-heartedly defending the AM as "they do some bad things and some good things, it's complicated." NO IT ISN"T!
And that's not all! There is SO MUCH Crab Nebula reasoning!
A telepath constantly blurting out your secrets to third parties? Worth resignedly bitching about but not worth doing anything about.
A time-traveler using her ability to spy on the evil organization kidnapping, experimenting on, and sometimes killing atypicals? BAD. INVASION OF PRIVACY.
A therapist telling one of their clients something another client told them in therapy? Unethical enough to literally say "So much for ethics!" in a "Oh well, can't be helped" manner.
A violent sociopath is seriously injured when attempting to kidnap your friend? TERRIBLE. THE WORST.
Guiltily not caring if that sociopath dies? TERRIBLE. THE WORST. (No one ever wishes him dead without feeling guilty about wishing harm on another human being. I wish people harm all the time because they're harming other people, and I feel no guilt about it, and those aren't even people who threatened to murder someone I loved!)
Using the word "rape" or "sexual assault?" Apparently so horrifying that it can't be done, even when people are explicitly talking about it, such as exchanges like this:
Character A: "Did he... do anything to you? You know, when he kidnapped you and you spent all that time together, I mean I don't know his sexual orientation but, well...?"
Kidnapped Character: "No! Absolutely not! Nothing of the kind happened."
YOU CAN SAY SEXUAL ASSAULT, THESE ARE ADULT CHARACTERS ON AN ADULT SHOW DEALING WITH TRAUMA.
Remember Mark, who was kidnapped and experimented on for years, and witnessed experiments in which other kidnapped psychics died? I had just assumed that he'd been tortured. In fact it's kind of a technicality to even say "he was tortured" given that everything going on was inherently torture.
Mark: [Looooong monologue of trauma.]
Dr. Bright, an adult psychologist who knows what happened to him already as she spent years trying to rescue him: [shocked] "You mean... you don't mean... My God, Mark, are you saying you were TORTURED?"
At that point I actually said aloud, "No shit, Sherlock!"
What did she THINK they were doing to him???
There's this weird prudishness and naivete going on, which is especially weird given that the show deals very openly and explicitly about topics like trauma, mental illness, and sexual orientation. This juxtaposition feels very Tumblr teenager to me.
AND ALSO, when you have a situation where your clients end up all knowing each other and hanging out together, one's telepathic and two are empathic, and they don't have any real therapy options other than you, stop wringing your hands about the unethical lack of privacy and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
It's actually a very interesting problem in therapeutic ethics. The most relevant ethical frameworks I can think of come from group therapy and situations in which dual relationships and clients knowing each other is unavoidable, such as being a therapist in a hospital or in a very small town where you're the only one.
The solution that comes to my mind is to get everyone's input, first individually and then (if they all want) in a group setting. You could decide that within the group, you don't have secrets, but you cannot reveal anything from within the group to anyone outside of the group.
And this is just touching the surface! There's so much more, like why the fuck Dr. Bright wouldn't tell a client that the organization she's involved with KIDNAPS AND EXPERIMENTS ON PEOPLE LIKE HER when there is literally no reason not to tell her other than that-- HER STATED REASON FOR NOT DISCLOSING THIS - is that the organization doesn't always do this and is sometimes helpful WHEN IT DOESN'T DECIDE TO KIDNAP AND EXPERIMENT ON YOU WHAT THE ACTUAL CRAB NEBULA FUCK.
Dr. Bright is a therapist who treats atypicals (people with powers). They are not known to the general public, but a secret sinister organization, the AM, studies them.
At the start, she has four clients we follow. Caleb is a sweet teenage empath who's struggling to not get overwhelmed by other people's emotions and who has a sweet romance with another boy at his school, Adam, who is not atypical. Sam is a young woman who time-travels when she gets anxious. Chloe is a college-age woman who is an extremely strong receptive telepath.
Dr. Bright also has a fourth, unofficial client, Damien. He has a very strong power, which is to make people do what he wants. It's functionally mind control. He's a lonely, somewhat pathetic, but very dangerous sociopath who likes to drop in on Dr. Bright and be a dick to her, controlling and non-sexually harassing her and non-sexually creeping on her clients. She can't get rid of him because of his power.
We learn early on that Dr. Bright has a secret agenda and wants to use her clients' powers for her own purposes. This is actually not my beef with the show or its portrayal of therapy. Obviously, it's unethical but the show knows it is and this is discussed a lot. Her clients learn what she's doing and why fairly early, and because she does have sympathetic motives they stick with her.
She's trying to rescue her brother Mark, a powerful atypical, from the AM which has imprisoned and experimented on him for four years. A non-consensual experiment using him and another kidnapped atypical left the other atypical dead and him in a coma. They're still holding him and refuse to release him to her care.
Dr. Bright used to work for the AM, which also does non-evil stuff like provide medical treatment and training for atypicals; she didn't know about the evil division, but they learned about Mark through her so she feels extra guilty.
Chloe, the telepath, I think is incapable of tuning out other people's thoughts. (This isn't 100% clear but it seems like it.) If she attends a therapy session, she can/will read Dr. Bright's mind. That means that she knows everything Dr. Bright knows, including everything Dr. Bright's other clients tell her. She routinely blurts out stuff other clients told Dr. Bright to different clients of Dr. Bright. Effectively, no one can have any secrets or privacy around Chloe, not just because she knows things, but because she will tell everything she knows to everyone.
(Dr. Bright's clients all end up meeting each other, which sets up its own set of ethical issues which I'll get to shortly.)
If I was Dr. Bright dealing with this genuinely fascinating problem in a therapy ethics, there are multiple possible ways to deal with this. The best way would be to only see Chloe over the phone. Another might be, since my clients all know each other anyway and know this is happening, to ask them, privately and individually and after discussing it, whether they consent to Chloe knowing everything they tell me. If even one person says no, then all of Chloe's sessions happen over the phone, permanently.
If I was the writer of this podcast, I would make clear is whether Chloe is literally incapable of shutting up about other people's secrets, whether she can but it's difficult for her for whatever reason, or whether she just doesn't want to or get why this upsets people.
Why this is happening makes a huge difference! Especially since Dr. Bright is literally there to help people control their powers. If Chloe is incapable of shutting up and her other clients don't consent to having her blurt out everything they tell Dr. Bright, then all her sessions need to happen by phone so she can't read Dr. Bright's mind. If it's difficult for her not to blurt, then Dr. Bright should be helping her with this. If she just doesn't think it's a problem and so refuses to stop, she should be booted as a client.
In the show, the why is not made clear but it seems like it's difficult for her not to blurt and she doesn't want to stop. (At one point she complains how haaaaard and saaaaad it is for her to be expected to keep other people's secrets.) Whatever the reason, everyone keeps telling Chloe not to blurt out their secrets to third parties and Dr. Bright keeps complaining that the whole situation is unethical, but no one ever boots Chloe out of their life or asks Dr. Bright to only see her by phone or do anything about it. Chloe is portrayed as a sweet cinnamon roll too good for this world, but in real life, she would be murdered so fast.
Any time someone brings up Chloe blurting out everything other clients told Dr. Bright to third parties, Chloe or someone else points out that Dr. Bright was also unethical. ONE PERSON BEING UNETHICAL DOES NOT MEAN IT'S OKAY FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO BE UNETHICAL. ALSO, CHLOE, SHUT THE FUCK UP BEFORE SOMEONE SHOVES YOU OFF A CLIFF.
This brings me to my biggest single problem with the show: almost everyone in it is from the Crab Nebula. (On FFA, "from the Crab Nebula" is shorthand for "person operating off of an incredibly strange set of assumptions about life/human beings/everything.") The particular quadrant of the Crab Nebula is, I think, young people on Tumblr.
Remember Damien, the mind-controlling sociopath? He ends up "rescuing" Mark, Dr. Bright's imprisoned brother, but then kidnaps him himself. He keeps him in motel rooms for three months, not letting him leave or have any human contact with anyone else, until Mark escapes. (Mark & Damien is the relationship I'm invested in. It's really interesting.)
Damien threatens to mind-control Sam into committing suicide and severely injures Chloe. When everyone is gathered literally to hide from Damien, he finds them and attempts to kidnap Adam to use as a hostage, saying that he intends to harm him. No one can do a thing about it because Damien doesn't want them to. Everyone else's anger overwhelms Caleb, breaking the mind control and making him go berserk. He beats Damien half to death before the rest of them pull him off.
There's a range of normal human reactions one might expect about this. Caleb freaks out as he's already been afraid of losing control and he's a sweet, non-violent kid. Totally understandable, even though he was rescuing his boyfriend from a dangerous sociopath who was trying to kidnap him and outright said he'd hurt him.
But among the possible reactions, you would think that even if seeing the violence was upsetting, these are all people who Damien has either directly harmed, directly threatened, or is threatening or attempting to harm people they love. The only reason he didn't just walk off with Adam is that Caleb hurt him. This is something most people would be glad about, even if witnessing it is upsetting. THEY WERE LITERALLY HIDING FROM HIM!
What they actually do: express horror and sadness that Damien is badly hurt, and argue over what to do now that's in Damien's best interests.
WTAF!!!!!
What no one says: "Fuck this guy! He's a sociopath with zero remorse. He kidnapped Mark, he permanently injured Chloe, he threatened to murder Sam, and he was just now trying to kidnap Adam. It's good that Caleb stopped him, sorry you're traumatized Caleb, but thank God. Let's do whatever we need to do to protect ourselves from Damien, and if it means handing him over to the AM or letting him die, well, maybe he shouldn't have tried to kidnap Adam."
What they do not even consider doing until waaaaaaay after this, when Damien is AGAIN a huge threat to them: make a plan about what to do about him to protect themselves. But only after a loooooong argument over whether it's justifiable to deprive Damien of due process given that they can't turn him over to any normal legal system.
Almost everyone's values and ethics and reactions are skewed from how humans normally are, and they're all skewed in the same weird directions.
Mark was kidnapped, locked up, and experimented on for four years. In this time he befriended a guard who he believed would have released him if he'd asked. Mark never asked because he "didn't want to get him in trouble." That's not a euphemism for "killed." Mark was just too nice to want to get someone fired, even if it would get him out of the EVIL EXPERIMENT LAB.
This whole thing would make sense as a comforting lie to give himself a sense of control over the situation, but it's presented at face value or at least never called out, and this is a show where if the author wants you to know something, it will be called out one million times.
People keep defending the evil lab with "but they do some good work," which is true, but WHO THE FUCK CARES WHEN THEY'RE ALSO IMPRISONING AND TORTURING PEOPLE WHO SOMETIMES DIE AS A RESULT? The evil lab people say they don't kill anyone on purpose and their experiments aren't meant to kill anyone, which appears to be true, but WHO CARES! They literally grab atypicals off the street, lock them up, and do experiments on them and sometimes they die! Not killing them on purpose doesn't make that better!
As of season four, everyone knows they still have atypicals locked up and experimented on, but no one is doing anything to break them loose and they're still half-heartedly defending the AM as "they do some bad things and some good things, it's complicated." NO IT ISN"T!
And that's not all! There is SO MUCH Crab Nebula reasoning!
A telepath constantly blurting out your secrets to third parties? Worth resignedly bitching about but not worth doing anything about.
A time-traveler using her ability to spy on the evil organization kidnapping, experimenting on, and sometimes killing atypicals? BAD. INVASION OF PRIVACY.
A therapist telling one of their clients something another client told them in therapy? Unethical enough to literally say "So much for ethics!" in a "Oh well, can't be helped" manner.
A violent sociopath is seriously injured when attempting to kidnap your friend? TERRIBLE. THE WORST.
Guiltily not caring if that sociopath dies? TERRIBLE. THE WORST. (No one ever wishes him dead without feeling guilty about wishing harm on another human being. I wish people harm all the time because they're harming other people, and I feel no guilt about it, and those aren't even people who threatened to murder someone I loved!)
Using the word "rape" or "sexual assault?" Apparently so horrifying that it can't be done, even when people are explicitly talking about it, such as exchanges like this:
Character A: "Did he... do anything to you? You know, when he kidnapped you and you spent all that time together, I mean I don't know his sexual orientation but, well...?"
Kidnapped Character: "No! Absolutely not! Nothing of the kind happened."
YOU CAN SAY SEXUAL ASSAULT, THESE ARE ADULT CHARACTERS ON AN ADULT SHOW DEALING WITH TRAUMA.
Remember Mark, who was kidnapped and experimented on for years, and witnessed experiments in which other kidnapped psychics died? I had just assumed that he'd been tortured. In fact it's kind of a technicality to even say "he was tortured" given that everything going on was inherently torture.
Mark: [Looooong monologue of trauma.]
Dr. Bright, an adult psychologist who knows what happened to him already as she spent years trying to rescue him: [shocked] "You mean... you don't mean... My God, Mark, are you saying you were TORTURED?"
At that point I actually said aloud, "No shit, Sherlock!"
What did she THINK they were doing to him???
There's this weird prudishness and naivete going on, which is especially weird given that the show deals very openly and explicitly about topics like trauma, mental illness, and sexual orientation. This juxtaposition feels very Tumblr teenager to me.
AND ALSO, when you have a situation where your clients end up all knowing each other and hanging out together, one's telepathic and two are empathic, and they don't have any real therapy options other than you, stop wringing your hands about the unethical lack of privacy and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
It's actually a very interesting problem in therapeutic ethics. The most relevant ethical frameworks I can think of come from group therapy and situations in which dual relationships and clients knowing each other is unavoidable, such as being a therapist in a hospital or in a very small town where you're the only one.
The solution that comes to my mind is to get everyone's input, first individually and then (if they all want) in a group setting. You could decide that within the group, you don't have secrets, but you cannot reveal anything from within the group to anyone outside of the group.
And this is just touching the surface! There's so much more, like why the fuck Dr. Bright wouldn't tell a client that the organization she's involved with KIDNAPS AND EXPERIMENTS ON PEOPLE LIKE HER when there is literally no reason not to tell her other than that-- HER STATED REASON FOR NOT DISCLOSING THIS - is that the organization doesn't always do this and is sometimes helpful WHEN IT DOESN'T DECIDE TO KIDNAP AND EXPERIMENT ON YOU WHAT THE ACTUAL CRAB NEBULA FUCK.
