The Pitt slows down its pace (and increases its focus)

There’s no doubt that the reason medical shows captivate audiences, no matter how much many of them traffic in melodramatic absurdity, is because they give us a glance into the ultimate existential drama of life and death. From the safety of our homes, we can glimpse into the cavern of death, vicariously experiencing the pathos and dread of it until the next commercial break clicks on, drawing us back into our workaday lives. The team behind The Pitt is very aware that the trauma bay is the stage upon which this very ancient drama plays out for modern audiences, delivering an episode that is very concerned with mortality. 

Tonight’s opening shot picks up with Whitaker (Gerran Howell) urgently doing chest compressions on his genial patient Mr. Milton, whose heart has given up, with the camera framing him in close-up and from the angle of what his patient might’ve seen (had he been able to wake up). The young doctor’s desperation clearly moves the team around him, who stand almost in vigil—for the patient and for Whitaker’s innocence as a doctor—until it becomes apparent that he truly has to stop. There’s no hope of a resurrection. 

Whitaker’s quiet devastation at losing this patient forms a thematic lynchpin for an episode that is clearly focused on how the patients and providers alike must come to terms with death. The episode takes on a slightly slower pace, focusing on a few select patients whose stories directly touch on themes of loss, that actually manages to magnify its intensity and emotional heft compared to the more frenetic pace of the prior two episodes. Indeed, having a more singular theme allows the series to deepen the character work introduced earlier. 

Right away, we see Mel (Taylor Dearden) try to console Whitaker only to anxiously flex her hands and bounce in place while humming—again, introducing the idea that she may be neurodivergent with descending into the brilliant-yet-weird tropes that can surround neurodivergent characters. (Here’s lookin’ at you, The Good Doctor.) If anything, Mel is distinguished from her peers by her compassion and empathy, putting her in contrast to Dr. Santos (Isa Briones), whose brashness and knife-blade sarcasm serve as a reminder that not every doctor is passionate about healing and is more focused on racking up achievements or treating patients as puzzle boxes, not people. 

When a construction worker is brought in with a nail lodged precariously in his heart, swearing and howling in terror and pain, Dr. Santos regards the anguished man as a super-cool opportunity to ace a procedure she’s wanted to get on her résumé to move up in the field. Briones is so good at playing the particular sharpness of someone who so ardently needs to be the smartest, most successful person in the room because she’s terrified she’ll be a nobody without her accomplishments, shading layers of nuance in a character who is also incredibly grating. She can’t help but betray her impatience when Robby (Noah Wyle) asks the team to observe a moment of silence around Mr. Milton.

When Dr. Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) rebukes her for dropping f-bombs while patching up the worker, or reminds her that humility is also a part of being a good doctor, one can’t help but think that she’s gotten humbled, even a little. But The Pitt is too smart a show to suggest that Dr. Santos’ hubristic brittleness comes out of nowhere. In her attempt to console Whitaker(“don’t kill anyone else” ), she does admit that one is not a real doctor until one has lost a patient—and at least this one isn’t his fault. 

Meanwhile, Javadi (Shabana Azeez) is still trying to play amateur detective, learning more about why her mentor Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) has an ankle monitor. This episode sees Javadi take more tentative steps out of the glass jar she’s been put in by her physician parents. Even after she performs a successful procedure to stabilize the construction worker, she’d rather go back to help patients in the waiting room than follow through on some potential attention-getting glory. 

One of those patients ends up being a college girl rushed in by her friend after ingesting some fentanyl-laced Xanax. In a small bit that seems insignificant until it is very significant indeed, that friend will wander through the ER, talking on the phone, proclaiming how her pal basically came back from the dead. It’s a spot of dark humor, given that Robby is across the hall, trying to slowly acclimate the parents of the college boy rushed in last episode with another accidental fentanyl OD that their son is brain dead. Who lives and who dies seems like a vicious roll of the dice, especially when one of the girl’s visitors recognizes the boy’s father. Apparently, they were friends and shared the same drugs. 

When the father explodes into the girl’s room, screaming that his son is dead because of her, everything he couldn’t allow himself to believe crystallizes into the cold rage of clarity. His son is gone, and this girl—who may or may not have given him the tools to destroy himself—was resurrected on a hospital gurney. Death can be held at bay by the hands of a skilled physician, but only sometimes. Even the most talented healer or elite technology can not change the fact that death is both capricious and inevitable. 

It’s a reality that is slowly dawning on the brother and sister who overrode their elderly father’s do-not-resuscitate order in a quixotic, unintentionally cruel effort at getting more time with him. As he becomes more agitated and is clearly in pain, they come to realize that they’re not getting more time. When the sister asks Robby what else there is to do, he tells her that anything else they would try would only compound the man’s pain without bringing him back. Gently, he tells them that the best option—and as the show proves, the rarest and most sacred—would be a peaceful transition. 

But The Pitt is not without its rays of hope, the cracks where light gets in. On the heels of another skirmish with Robby about how long she takes with patients, where he alludes to a patient death that may still be rumbling its aftershocks in her bones, Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) decides that she’s not going to let Whitaker succumb to his dread of losing another patient. She tells him that the next case they’re taking is going to be someone high-risk, someone they can try to save. 

The episode closes with a callback to the first hour of the series, in wich the sister of the veteran whose death set Robby’s colleague Dr. Abbott (Shawn Hatosy) on the ledge finally arrives to claim his body. It is the most silent, meditative confrontation of death in the show so far, as the sister touches her brother’s hand, sobbing that he’s so cold. She’s sorry she wasn’t there for him then, but she’s here now. 

There’s a letter from Dr. Abbott to the young woman about how, as a fellow veteran, while he didn’t know her brother, he knew him to be a good man, a strong one who still could not overcome his injuries. But strength alone, and the power of regret, is not enough to overcome death. 

Stray observations 

• • McKay is particularly concerned about the location of the teenage kid with a kill list of his female classmates, telling Robby that she’s been on the wrong end of an angry, entitled man before. Her backstory should hopefully be more fleshed out soon. 
• • Poor Whitaker. He not only lost his patient but also got a disgusting white liquid medicine all over his scrubs. And his quest to finally get a clean pair gave the show a dose of humor.