One of the great assets of The Pitt’s episodic structure is the way that time continues to compound, with the effects of every moment felt acutely even after the immediate crisis has subsided. There is no quick shift to Dr. Robby. He is still in that pediatric room and broken over all the death he experienced that day—and all the days that came before it. He is always in the room. He may never get out of it.
It’s especially poignant that the person who temporarily gets Robby back on his feet, albeit reluctantly, is Whitaker, the unluckiest first year of the day, whose streak continues when he loses a game of rock paper scissors with Santos and must go to the makeshift morgue for patient blankets. In the few little beats before Whitaker finds Robby on the floor, the show reminds us of how much the other doctors depend on him for his guidance—even Abbott, who calls for him before sending a patient to the OR (and after delivering a wry quip about the human anatomy, that “nipples to navel are no man’s land”). Beyond the human level of Robby’s understandable crash, the show reminds us how vital he is to the functioning of his team.
After the frenetic pacing of the last two episodes, hour 14 wisely slows down to continually linger on the human impact of the shooting. Mel sits quietly at the bedside of the woman who went into shock and wandered the hallways. Taylor Dearden plays such a wonderful listener, allowing the strain of what her character is hearing—the woman tried to shield her wheelchair-using husband from the fray, only to have him die in her arms after he was shot in the head—to cross her face along with deep fatigue. When the woman asks her how she deals with all this death and carnage—asking, in her own muted way, how she’s supposed to go on now—Mel says, simply, “I don’t know.”
The question echoes into the scene where Whitaker stumbles upon Robby, mumbling and sobbing and praying. He sits beside Robby, not knowing what to say, but allowing himself to be there, until Robby tells him he has to go, that he’s needed out there. “No, we need you,” Whitaker says (Gerran Howell wisely resist an impulse to go too heavy into the line reading). Without you, he reminds Robby, offering his hand, the team is fucked.
It’s enough to get Robby standing, even if he pushes Whitaker away. During the last hour, Robby’s trauma manifested in terror and grief. Now, Wyle allows the character to become a boiling kettle, ready to hiss and spit steam and burning water. Administrator Gloria (Michael Hyatt) comes back to the floor bearing the “good news” that supplies will be delivered only to discover the “informal” blood donation practices going on. Before she can launch into a lecture about the legal ramifications of donating unscreened blood, Robby finally erupts, thundering at her to shut up and “go back to [her] micromanaging ivory tower.”
Needing a breath, he goes outside, where Senior Resident Ellis (Ayesha Harris) chides her colleague, the iced-coffee-sipping Dr. Shen (John Kirby) for casually remarking that things have calmed down. A car careens into the ambulance bay, and the driver, a Navy medic who patched up his own formidable leg wound to help others, stumbles out. This man is the brother of the woman in the adorable animal scrubs whose world was upended with the brutal loss of her husband. She tells him to fight like the stubborn bastard he’s always been, and a few simple lines, impeccably delivered, convey a whole history between the brother and sister.The Pitt has continually turned these small moments between patients—minor, fleeting characters—into worlds of meaning.
In the backseat of the hero’s car, a young man is turning blue, likely from some kind of drug overdose. Ironically, this patient will reunite Drs. Langdon and Santos. Patrick Ball and Isa Briones each seethe with barely contained resentment as their characters dart and strike at each other like battling snakes. One of the subtle, yet potent, currents rippling through this episode is Langdon’s palpable desire to remain a doctor and his terrible, jittering fear that it’s been taken from him.
He’s not the only person feeling like he’s potentially lost everything before he even really had it. As young David (Jackson Kelly) paces inside an observation room, now committed by his worried mother, Gloria shares the news that the shooter has been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I said it before: The Pitt is too smart a show for David to have been the shooter, or for it to be Doug Driscoll or anyone else who lent themselves to convenient internet theories. The shooter’s identity was never the point. The point was that life, and people, can be chaotic and cruel—and only those determined to fight against that chaos and cruelty can counteract it. But that doesn’t change the fact that David, already a lost and broken child, knows that people can look at him and see the very worst.
Of course, some damage is caused not by willful cruelty but by human stupidity. Once the hospital reopens to the public, Dr. Shen again tempts fate by remarking upon the calm, and fate responds by bringing in an unresponsive boy who is covered in strange markings that he and King can’t clearly identify. Oh, but Robby can. They’re a sign of measles, which a conversation with the boy’s younger sister, who was sick in the same way only far luckier, confirms. Shen and King wouldn’t know it was measles because measles, by all accounts, is blessedly rare thanks to vaccines.
Naturally, the boy’s parents don’t vaccinate their children. Mom has read things online about vaccines. She’s not so sure they’re safe. She’s also read things about the spinal tap that the doctors say will give them the results they need to save her son’s life, or, at the very least, prevent him from suffering blindness or brain damage. It says right there, on her phone, that spinal taps can cause paralysis. She fights the doctors at every turn, telling them instead to try steroids. While she doesn’t have a medical degree, she sure does know how to Google.
Given the reality of life outside the TV screen—where an unvaccinated child died of measles in Texas and, in an interview with anti-vax group Children’s Health Defense (once chaired by RFK, Jr., now U.S. Secretary Of Health And Human Services)—Robby’s explosion at the mom’s claim that “God does no wrong” seems wholly justified. Still, his friends and colleagues are worried. As the final hour of the shift—and the first season—approaches, Robby needs to find a way out of that sad, small room of his pain.
Still, he’s not in as much immediate trouble as Dr. McKay. At the end of the episode, two police officers who absolutely cannot read the room arrest her for tampering with her malfunctioning ankle monitor.
Stray observations
- • After reuniting her patient with her daughter, Mel breaks down crying. She apologizes to Robby, insisting that it won’t happen again. He tells her to never apologize for caring about her patients.
- • Speaking of Langdon, his moment with Jake, where he assures the boy that Robby did everything he could, was just lovely. Goddamn it, I like Langdon and I want him to get it together.
- • Santos’ brusquely awkward yet genuine attempts to check in with Whitaker were unexpectedly sweet. If the show is asking me to like Santos more now, I can go with it.
- • Dr. Shen offers some fantastic comic relief. Give us The Pitt: Night Shift now, Max. It’s what the people want.
- • Matteo knows Javadi’s first name!
- • McKay’s father is played by Fiona Dourif’s real-life dad, beloved actor Brad Dourif. And he gets to call Chad a douchebag!
