Early in the eleventh hour of The Pitt, Dana Evans—her face still bruised from taking a sucker punch and her pride just as injured (though she’s loath to show it, even a little)—asks Dr. Robby if he ever gets the sense that God is trying to tell him something. Robby wryly replies that they stopped talking a long time ago.
Her sarcastic quip about the spectacular shittiness of the day is met with an equally sarcastic quip about the spectacular shittiness of life. Coming on the heels of discovering that one of their top doctors has been stealing medicine from vulnerable patients, and the acknowledgement that life—or, more appropriately, life-and-death situations—will continue, this cold and broken Hallelujah gives this episode its narrative and emotional center.
One of the first major cases of the day surely feels like God, or some cosmic being with a cruel sense of humor, communicating with Dr. Collins. Shortly after she confides in Robby that she had a miscarriage earlier in the day, a young woman in labor arrives in distress, her best friend and his partner arriving behind her. Ever the professional, Dr. Collins snaps into action, assisting in the difficult delivery and helping to resuscitate the infant after he’s born unresponsive.
If The Pitt has earned high praise from the medical community for its honesty in portraying the ins and outs and ups and downs of an ER, it also merits acclaim for the way it depicts infertility. Those of us who know we’ll never be able to carry a baby of our own can see ourselves in the wicked set of coincidences that have befallen Dr. Collins, who persuaded the mother of a teenager to let her have an abortion and now sticks her hands inside a woman whose body did what hers could not to usher a child into the world.
What the show seems to understand with a powerful, cellular instinct, is that when you can’t have a baby, the universe seems to push you into circumstances where you’re made to feel even more alien and alone about it: The friends and relatives who send you photos of their new babies or the co-workers who have baby showers in the breakroom seem like they’re acting on some divine mandate to torment you. Hell, even the screaming kids running around Panera remind you of the family you’ll never get to have. Everything feels so outsized and specific to your pain—and in Collins’ case, it literally is. She’s literally holding what she wants badly enough to subject her body to the rigors of IVF in her hands, and she has to give it back.
Tracy Ifeachor continues to dazzle as she layers in the many shades of Collins’ grief and how hard the character must fight against such a primal emotion to remain professional. When she finally does break, there is a seismic shift in the quivering of her lip. The scene where Robby will console her—or at least attempt to—is one of the loveliest moments in the show to date, a casual catharsis that can only occur between two people who once loved each other but still really like each other.
There are times when the show’s dialogue comes across as a little too on-the-nose—Robby’s mini-lecture about the origins of violence in today’s young men to the mom looking to commit her son after he’s made threats comes to mind—but this exchange, where Collins admits to having some ambivalence about an abortion (which is essentially alluded to have been when she was with Robby) and he grants her an informal absolution, gains its power from how unforced and natural it is.
Most of the cases this week deal with parenthood in ways that stick sharp fingers into the characters’ deepest wounds. McKay and Javadi are caring for a woman brought in with her terrified daughter in tow. It turns out mom is a reformed party girl whose body is still bearing the brunt of her wild years, though they’re decades behind her. The daughter explains that her mother got sober when she discovered that she was pregnant. For all the tension in their bond—she’s her mother’s whole world, and that’s a lot to carry on such young shoulders—she knows her mother loved her. That she was a good mom.
The parallels between this patient and McKay are quite obvious, of course. Yet Fiona Dourif’s remarkable receptivity, her ability to convey silent revelation, makes the connection land so much harder. In this daughter, she seemingly glances at a future vision of her own son—who is still in the breakroom with his dad’s girlfriend—telling some compassionate stranger about his own mom, who was imperfect but who loved him. This exchange gives her the fortitude she needs to confront little miss “Bonus Mom” (or so her T-shirt reads), who swears she can take care of Harrison and Chad (ugh, Chad) at the same time, that there’s no need for Harrison to stay with his mom.
The girlfriend is so deeply insufferable, one of those not quite a girl, not yet a woman types whose unawareness of the complexities of life make her feel singularly equipped to dish out judgements. When she tells McKay that she is more than able to provide a stable home (clearly insinuating that McKay can’t) since she’s almost 25, McKay compliments her on having a nearly fully formed prefrontal cortex. And Douriff’s line delivery does more than draw blood; it cuts down to the marrow.
Meanwhile, Dr. Mohan and Whitaker are tending to a man who claims to be in agonizing pain days before his daughter’s wedding. Well, he is in pain, just not for the reasons he gives. Mohan can spot someone who’s cruising for pain meds. In a callback to an earlier plotline, where she called out Whitaker for immediately assuming that the woman with sickle cell was faking her illness, Mohan reminds him that eventually, he’d come to spot the real fakers. And this man’s symptoms align too closely with withdrawal—so close to withdrawal that when she gives him a medicine specifically designed to treat withdrawal (though he doesn’t know that and thinks he’s getting what he came shopping for), he’s suddenly cured.
Mohan tells Whitaker that the trick to treating these kinds of patients is to outsmart them, getting them to eventually admit their addiction. And she does, indeed, outsmart the patient. Yet it’s not enough to crack his shell of denial, as he rages about suing the hospital. He’s an upstanding citizen, pays his bills and his taxes. Seething in fury, he asks Robby if that sounds like someone who could be a drug addict. And Robby, still wounded over losing Langdon and wishing that the divine would toss him a lifeline, can only say yes, it does.
At this moment, Dr. Mohan, the woman known for the tenderest touch with all her patients, finally snaps. Her own long-suppressed grief erupts. She tells the man that her own father died when she was a child; he’ll never get to walk her down the aisle at her wedding or be there for any of the other big occasions of her life. But this man still can be there for his own daughter, if he wants to be.
Naturally, the spectre of Langdon hangs over this exchange. He keeps calling Robby, Dana, even the main hospital line, in sheer desperation. But everyone has their own shit, their own conversations they’d like to have with God. While security keeps a protective eye on her, Dana returns to the ambulance bay for a smoke. She tells Robby she’s done. She was born in this hospital, volunteered there as a teenager; she’s been covered in every bodily fluid, cursed at, swung at. But this just feels different. People are meaner now. He reminds her that she still helps people. Still, he understands. He can’t blame her.
The conversation stops there, as Dana gets a phone call. There’s been a mass shooting at PittFest, and the victims will be coming in. There will be so many more desperate conversations with a higher power to come.
Stray observations
- • Katherine LaNasa is so damn good, even adding a nasally inflection to Dana’s voice to really drive home the idea that her sinuses are damaged.
- • I really hate that Santos was right about Langdon. I also hate that she didn’t want to hear about Mel’s experience helping the patient deliver her baby. Dr. Langon definitely would have wanted to hear about it.
- • Also, seriously, what is up with Dr. Garcia and Dr. Santos? The ace surgeon telling the newbie doc that she can make up dropping a scalpel in her foot by taking her out for drinks seems, um, highly inappropriate.
