The Pitt
8:00 PM
Season 2
Episode 14
Editor’s Rating
5 stars
*****
Everyone is concerned for Robby’s mental state, given the truly shocking admissions he makes during this hour of the shift.
Photo: Warrick Page/HBO Max
Over the course of the 8 P.M. hour, several shocking sentences come out of Dr. Robby’s mouth. Some thrilling, some chilling, some that will break your heart — all of them made me gasp. And this is really saying something since we’re coming off an episode that ends with Robby uttering a shocking sentence when he asks Dana what happens if he doesn’t come back in a way that we all know that he isn’t talking about finding a new place of employment. When we see Dana in “8 P.M.,” she is visibly shaken by the encounter. Abbot tries to pay her a compliment about how she’s the mama bear here, she’s the glue, and then notices the woman is trying and failing to hold back tears. She is scared and worried about Robby, she tells him. She wants Abbot to talk to him, and she needs him to force Robby to actually listen. Nothing that Robby does over the course of this episode calms Dana’s fears, nor ours.
For a second, The Pitt really had me going. It had me believe that we’d finally get a quick mending of fences between Robby and Mohan before this shift was out. He’s been riding her so hard and so condescendingly, it’s been tough to watch. After Mohan tortures herself a little more by sitting in the trauma room while Orlando’s wife sobs over her husband until they’re able to move him into the ICU, Robby asks Mohan how she’s doing. It seems genuine. When she asks if this is a trick question, he says no. When she beats herself up a little bit, he assures her she did everything she could; this was the patient’s mistake. It sounds comforting, almost. That is, until she asks what his mistake was, and he quickly responds, “not picking a higher spot to jump from.” The noise that left my body upon hearing that. The way my eyes bugged out of my skull. If you needed any more evidence that the Robby we knew from season one has disappeared — or, perhaps, rather, has been beaten fully out of this man by trauma and stress — you got it right here. What a feat for a series, in just two seasons, to present a protagonist and then tear him apart both so convincingly and with such care that we can still recognize the guy we know.
The only positive out of this moment is that Dr. Jefferson is close enough to hear it and to call Robby out on it. I mean, mostly he just makes Robby promise to keep his number handy on his trip, but what is he going to do? Tie the guy down? At least he is making Robby face some of the things that are flying out of his mouth.
Jefferson isn’t the only one to confront Robby. When McKay sees him rip into Javadi for filming a TikTok while on the clock, she doesn’t hesitate to tell him he has it wrong — that Javadi is posting in the hopes of finding someone who knows where Jesse is. If Robby is refusing to confront who he is at the moment and, more importantly, why he is acting this way, other people have to force the issue.
Perhaps this is another level of why Robby has been such an asshole to Langdon all day. As Dr. Ellis astutely points out to a mopey Langdon, she’s been working with Robby for the past ten months, and she can tell that he isn’t mad at Langdon; he’s mad at himself for failing Langdon. They are both walking around trying to be martyrs. And if that isn’t the perfect read on Robby, I don’t know what is. Between that and Ellis breaking up the bar fight boys by informing them that they “are on different health journeys now,” I’m so excited we’ll be seeing more of her in season three.
Ellis is right about both Langdon and Robby. Since Langdon can’t seem to leave the hospital even though his shift is long over, we find him repeatedly roaming the halls, inserting himself in conversations, and joining in on cases. If he is waiting around to prove to himself or to Robby that he’s ready to be back, he gets his chance when a 53-year-old Lyman Paine is brought in after crashing into a telephone pole in his car. Langdon and Crus work on him until Robby rolls in — Lyman is quickly losing feeling in his arms and legs and begins to have trouble breathing. He has a partial dislocation of two vertebrae in his neck, and that is putting pressure on his spinal cord. They need neurosurgery to come in and perform a very complicated traction-type procedure, but they’re delayed, and Lyman’s condition is progressing fast.
Langdon has an idea: He thinks he could do a closed reduction right there in the trauma room without any type of visual guide. It’s risky. If they wait, Lyman could be paralyzed. If Langdon messes this up, Lyman could be paralyzed. It’s a lot of pressure, and at first, you can see the frazzled, insecure Langdon that we witnessed a few hours ago, the last time he and Robby worked on a patient together. But this time around, when Robby barks at him, it’s less cruel and more encouraging: “Doctor the fuck up,” he tells his former protege. And instead of buckling, Langdon doctors the fuck up. There is no blood or gore or people chaotically running around the trauma room here and this procedure is one of the most intense few seconds of the entire season. And Langdon pulls it off. (The procedure, not Lyman’s head.) On top of saving a patient from quadriplegia, Langdon gets a “good job” from Robby on the Attending’s way out. I had to rewind it to make sure I heard it correctly. Is Robby hoping to fix things with Langdon before he takes his motorcycle ride? Later, when Langdon’s big save is brought up again, Robby looks around for where he’s gone, and Dana tells him his wish has come true: Langdon had to run upstairs for a mandated drug test, so Robby probably won’t see him again. Dare I say, does Robby look a little let down by that idea? Even if that’s all Langdon gets on this shift, this guy earns that sweaty sigh of relief and tiny smile.
The third shocking bit of dialogue from Robby in this episode is the most heartbreaking one. Duke may be annoyed that he’s spent hours at the hospital, but we should all be glad he’s been around, keeping an eye on his friend. Even after Robby explains the options Duke has for taking care of his aortic aneurysm — surgery with a long recovery or a fifty percent chance of death within the year — he stays around to process the whole thing as Robby is in and out of his room. When an ambulance accidentally rams into Robby’s motorcycle — have there been enough signs telling you not to go yet, Michael?! — Duke is there to take a look at it.
Outside in the ambulance bay with the bike, Duke isn’t afraid to engage in some real talk with his friend. He opens up about regrets and second chances and reminds Robby that one thing that can never be changed is death. You can almost see a physical impact of that statement hitting Robby. He’s holding back tears and pauses before he says the thing he has been carrying around for a long time, the thing that has been slowly creeping up to the surface throughout this shift: “I don’t know that I want to be here anymore.” And he doesn’t mean the hospital. The hospital, in fact, is the one place he can stand to be. He has purpose there, he tells Duke. He can distract himself there. He says it again: “I don’t know that I want to be anywhere anymore.” I desperately need someone to hug this guy as he falls to pieces, but Duke doesn’t exactly scream hugger. Still, he looks at his friend with no judgment in his face, just concern and support (Jeff Kober has been so good all season) and asks his friend what he plans to do next, now that he’s said that out loud. Robby’s answer is to ride, but Duke is able to be both honest and gentle with Robby, wisely telling him that what he’s doing isn’t riding, it’s running, and that’s a pretty terrible final lesson for all “these kids” he’s been trying to teach and guide. If anything is going to get through to Robby, a reminder of what kind of effect his suicide might have on the people he cares about could do the trick.
We’ll have to wait and see, of course, because before Robby and Duke can get any further, Robby’s pulled into an emergency.
If Robby gets to shock us all repeatedly throughout this episode, it seems only fair that he should be on the other end of that feeling, doesn’t it? At the end of the episode, Dr. Al-Hashimi asks Robby for a second opinion on a patient. She pulls up a chart for him, and he starts reading about a 40-year-old woman with a history of seizure disorder that began when the patient suffered a prolonged bout of viral meningitis when she was five. It’s not long before Robby stops reading to look at his fellow Attending: “Baran, is this you?” When they’re using first names, you know it’s serious.
• Robby’s slow meltdown means his lack of filter gets more and more potent, and we see that in one incident that is much more enjoyable than watching him berate his residents. When a 46-year-old woman’s heart attack is initially misdiagnosed because the EMTs placed the leads way too low on her chest, Robby is not having it. He rips into them in front of everyone. The patient has large breasts, and they were so worried about offending her, they didn’t do their job — she could have died. He asks the women standing around if they’d prefer “death with modesty or life with brief nudity.” They all raise their hands. “Turns out women want to live.” It’s not, uh, the most conventional way to teach someone a lesson, but it does seem effective, and Santos is a fan!
• Noah Wyle wrote this episode. Is he going to add an Emmy for Writing to his treasure trove of awards this year?
• Wyle’s really revealing bits of himself with the pop culture references we get in this episode. A Rumble Fish reference and Gilligan’s Island? It makes me happy then that he also wrote in that bit with Javadi basically telling him to get with the times, old man.
• Okay, but Whitaker is right: Robby’s the Professor and Dana’s definitely the Skipper.
• Whitaker standing up to Langdon is a great scene. How much of that is because he’s actually annoyed with Langdon treating him like a naive little sidekick and how much is it because he was recently reminded how much Langdon hurt his very good friend Trinity Santos?
• After realizing that her sister is building her own life, it seems like Mel is looking for a new hobby and/or group of friends…and that new hobby might just be Revolutionary War reenactment? Mel is too good for this world.
• I was expecting way more fireworks-related emergencies this season, but I have appreciated how creative The Pitt has been with its holiday-related injuries. In this hour alone, we get a return of the Hansens thanks to a tug-of-war competition that ends with a rope slicing through a hand and a man stabbed with a handheld American flag. God Bless America, indeed.
• Abbot casually telling the belligerent flag guy that he’ll get him more pain meds, but he needs to shut his fucking mouth is all the medicine I need, actually.
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