Season 1 Episode 9: "Derailed"

           In this episode, Teddy Bryar, a delusional psychotic, hijacks a train in Texas and takes the passengers hostage. He sees a hallucination named “Leo”, who is always next to him and pressures him to shoot the passengers and police officers. This episode reminds me a lot of A Beautiful Mind, since Teddy shares a lot of the same characteristics as John Nash.  They are both schizophrenics, they both have delusional people that tell them to harm others (positive symptoms), and they both believe that they have a microchip in their arm that they try to get out. Police officers in the episode actually refer to John Nash, and say “Yeah, I saw the movie,” referring to A Beautiful Mind.

            Many other psychological terms are used during this episode, such as word salad and tardive dyskinesia. Word salad refers to a mix of random words and phrases, and tardive dyskinesia refers to involuntary, repetitive body movements. Teddy was experiencing both of these symptoms while he was holding the victims hostage. The police officers in the episode concluded that Teddy was suffering from schizophrenia, which is why they think that he pulled such an outrageous stunt. The hallucination that he was seeing because of his schizophrenia (the man named Leo), kept urging him to take the officer’s gun and take the passengers hostage. Teddy told the officers that they had one hour to take a microchip out of his arm, or he would kill everyone on board. This was an issue, however, because the “microchip” that Teddy was referring to was not real – making this a tough case for the officer team. This is very similar to John Nash’s case, since Nash believed that he had a secret chip implanted in his arm by the secret service. While Nash was in a mental institution, he tried digging it out, leaving his arm torn and bloody. In the end, they were able to get all of the passengers out of the train safely, and Teddy was brought to a mental hospital to treat his schizophrenia. This shows that many serial killers suffer from a mental disorder – such as schizophrenia, antisocial behavior disorder, or bipolar depression, which may be the cause of their psychotic behavior.