Early in this week’s episode, Dr. Whittaker finally gets a moment free of blood, piss, and rats. He enters the peds morgue to retrieve a blanket and runs into Dr. Robby amid his breakdown over the death of Jake’s girlfriend, Leah. Whittaker tells a distraught Dr. Robby that if he doesn’t return to the floor, “We’re fucked,” which motivates him to get back to work. Toward the end of the episode, they share another exchange about faith—Whittaker, a theology major, recites a passage from Isaiah 40, and Dr. Robby admits he doesn’t know if he believes in God. Then Whittaker quotes Dr. Robby to Dr. Robby. Meanwhile, Langdon and Santos can’t hide their history from Dr. Ellis as they work on an apparent overdose case together, and Abbott supports Mohan’s experimental procedure.
With things slowing down in the ER, Dr. King is sent to triage. Dr. Robby certainly senses she, too, needs some air and a break from the ongoing carnage in the ER. Unfortunately, amid a mass shooting, other medical crises happen, too. An ambulance arrives with an unconscious 13-year-old boy and his little sister, Georgia, who called 911. Dr. King—undoubtedly thinking about her own sister and the little girl who died from drowning while saving her—brings Georgia into the ER after removing her “scary” blood-soaked smock. After her traumatized patient Trish Gregory—whose husband was the guy with multiple sclerosis who died in the Pitt Fest shooting—is reunited with her daughter, Dr. King steps out of the room to cry. Dr. Robby, fresh off his own breakdown, sees her, and she apologizes. “Never apologize for feeling something for your patients,” he says. “Today was chaos, you were awesome.”
Dr. Robby proves his age by recognizing the boy has measles, which the kids caught on a trip to Orlando, which he notes is a likely place for exposure due to the influx of international travelers. The parents arrive, and the anti-vax mother sets Dr. Robby off again with her attempts to fact-check him and general animosity toward treatment options. He reiterates that the measles vaccine is safe, and explodes when she suggests a spinal tap will paralyze her son. “They want medical treatment, but they don’t want medical advice,” he says to Dr. Shen. (It stands to reason that he’s a little salty; at this point, he’s on his second hour of overtime.)
The shocking twist in the penultimate episode of The Pitt is not “who is the shooter?” Rather, it is Dr. McKay’s fate. In the middle of the episode, someone from the Allegheny County courthouse calls the hospital. Dr. McKay, who broke her malfunctioning ankle monitor in the previous episode with an IO shouts, “Not now!” at Perlah while intubating a patient. Mere seconds after Dr. McKay is told to go home, she is arrested, and the credits roll. And The Pitt, once again, delivers a cliffhanger so manipulative that it is clever and therefore not annoying.
Fourteen episodes in, The Pitt feels like the beginning of a new era in television history. It’s post-peak, post-Golden Age TV that strikes a delicate balance between 1990s network drama and the graphic frankness of ‘00s prestige. But in its delicate handling of the shooter reveal—or lack thereof—The Pitt ultimately proves it will never prioritize entertainment or shock value over nuanced statements on the ongoing healthcare crisis in the United States and genuine character moments.
