This Season, ‘The Pitt’ Is About What Doesn’t Happen in One Day

The structure of the Emmy-winning HBO Max drama The Pitt, where every episode covers a single hour in the life of a busy Pittsburgh emergency department, might suggest it’s about how much can happen in 12 or 15 hours. In Season 1, that meant deaths, a mass casualty event, a doctor caught stealing pills, a charge nurse being assaulted by a patient, and a fourth-year medical student who spends the whole day being splattered over and over with things that force him to change his scrubs.

But more than anything, that season was the story of Dr. Robby, played by Noah Wyle, whose trauma from COVID and the death of his mentor, alongside a thousand other stressors, built and built over the day (and the season) until he collapsed, sobbing, in the room where the dead bodies were being kept. And in the second season, with Robby and everyone else, it’s clear that the show is really about feelings and tensions that take more than a single day to play out.

That breakdown of Robby’s could have been a climactic moment of catharsis that changed his direction for the better, and on a lot of shows, it would have been. He would see how bad it is, see what shape he’s in, go to therapy and lean on his friends for support, and get better. But when we first see Robby in the second season, set ten months after the first, he is riding a motorcycle to work, and he’s not wearing a helmet. This, for an emergency room doctor who knows it is reckless, and who knows it signals recklessness to his colleagues and students, is a bad sign.

It’s Robby’s last shift before a planned three-month sabbatical, and all is not well. The mentor who was once warm and encouraging is now chilly and impatient with just about everyone except Whitaker, who became Robby’s new protégé after Langdon fell from grace. Langdon himself has returned to work after a long stint in rehab, but Robby won’t speak to him and will barely let him treat patients, even when the workload is crushing.

Langdon seems genuinely sorry for what he did, and he wants to make amends as part of his 12-step program. But who gets to choose the timing? Should he have tried to make amends with Louie while Louie was in the hospital? Should he expect Robby to have a big air-clearing talk during a busy shift? Is there middle ground between Robby freezing him out and Langdon expecting to get it all out of the way on the first day?

If the first season was about acute problems, the second is about more chronic ones. Trauma has a long tail; it does not resolve from one good cry. Addiction is a daily threat. A breach of trust like Langdon’s drags on, messy and awkward. Santos had a bad first day with her colleagues, and even as she’s gotten more professional and she’s made a friend or two, she’s thrown by Langdon’s return and suspects that everyone blames her for turning him in over the pills.

A new attending physician who will be there while Robby’s gone, Dr. Al-Hashimi, gets under his skin quickly for what he perceives as overstepping, and his opinion of her seems to harden instantly. But Mohan knows her from the VA and likes her a lot — and it’s smart that the show uses other characters’ reactions to her to suggest that Robby seeing Dr. Al-Hashimi as the problem doesn’t necessarily mean she’s the problem. Robby’s voice doesn’t feel as authoritative, as reliable, as it once did.

It’s a season of great complexity not only because these problems are seen through a longer lens but also because everyone is sometimes right. While Al-Hashimi originally presents as a thorn in Robby’s side, and while her interest in using generative AI for doctor’s notes is a red flag for him and meant to be one for the audience too, she turns out to be a compassionate, thorough teacher and an advocate for patients, not to mention a pretty quick study of Robby’s severe case of senioritis and how to navigate it.

Even the AI question is not as simple as it initially appears: As Santos struggles to get her charting finished, and as Dana repeatedly tells her she will just have to stay after her (long!) shift to do it, Al-Hashimi argues that AI could help here: even though AI-generated charts may have errors that would have to be caught in proofreading (which she points out is also true of dictation), AI could help doctors live better lives. And as you watch these doctors and nurses so close to breaking, it’s hard not to wonder whether that could be true. Maybe there are no good outcomes, only less bad outcomes.

The collapse of what seemed in the first season like Robby’s heroism has played out in ways the show hasn’t started to address, but hopefully will. The most obvious is that he plays favorites — more now than ever — and he shouldn’t. But also, when his original protégé, who was a white guy, went astray, he picked another white guy to make his new pet project. It’s a small sample size and Whitaker is a promising young doctor, but Robby should notice, or someone should help him notice, that he has never shown the kind of personal interest in Mohan, Javadi, McKay, Mel, or Santos that he took in Langdon, and now Whitaker. It needs, at a minimum, to be something he’s aware of.

It’s not that Robby was good and is now bad. It’s that what was a one-day window into his life is now a nearly year-long window. There were times in the first season when his compassion and patience felt bottomless; they were not. His reflexive kindness seemed unchangeable; it was not. And while it’s bad and sad when trauma drives someone into an explosive meltdown, it’s worse and sadder when pain digs in untreated, and the natural defensive strategy is numbness and detachment. That’s the danger to Robby now. It’s less dramatic than seeing him collapse and sob, but it’s more insidious and perhaps more difficult to reverse.

After an explosion of feeling, if nothing changes, that feeling takes over. This is who you are now: a teacher too impatient to teach, a colleague who doesn’t offer support, a person who has seen probably hundreds of unhelmeted motorcycle accidents and how they can end, and has decided that perhaps that is the direction in which he wants to ride.

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