Noah Wyle gives his most powerful performance on The Pitt to date
The show’s thirteenth hour finally breaks Dr. Robby.
Photo: Warrick Page/Max
“Don’t worry, sir, there will be no more pain!” This promise, awkwardly yet chipperly delivered by Dr. King in the beginning of episode 13, is a much-needed yet fleeting moment of levity in an hour marked by devastation. It’s fitting, then, that she says it to a man in a clown costume after poor Whitaker takes Dr. Robby’s directive to give every patient an IO a bit too literally and drills into the man’s arm. The man is smeared in makeup and blood, and he regards King with an expression of brittle weariness that gives the episode its last real moment of humor—barring Dr. McKay’s drilling into her ankle monitor after it goes off—before The Pitt delves into some of its most deeply tragic scenes to date.
Just a few beats after this moment, social worker Kiara and her colleague, the ward clerk, do the quiet and brutal work of photographing the dead. The tension of knowing that soon they’ll have to show these photographs to agonized family members hangs over every other moment on the floor as the medical team works to keep the wounded out of the makeshift morgue—even as it highlights how the living will be forever altered.
McKay, Javadi, and Perlah attend to a young woman who can’t feel her legs and tearfully asks if she’ll be paralyzed, which McKay can only answer with the notion that recovery is possible. Mr. Grayson, the “old hippie” with the head wound, tells Whitaker that he’ll never get the images of the day out of his mind. After attending to Mr. Grayson, Whitaker helps Carmen, a young woman whose leg injury won’t stop bleeding, as she trembles and sobs, at first barely choking out answers to the questions he asks to distract her—as best he can—from her agony.
For a show that, by virtue of its setting alone, is suffused with maximalist drama, The Pitt manages to show its characters’ evolutions, or de-evolutions, with effortless subtlety. Whitaker, the death-haunted aspiring doctor who came to be almost frightened of his patients, chats with Carmen about how he likes coconuts. (Has the farm boy ever even had one? Likely not.) Mohan, the queen of patient-centered care, whose dedication earned her the nickname “Slow Mo,” finds the reserves to act with a life-saving swiftness on her feet. Dana is back in boss mode, ushering the police who’ve hovered over their fallen colleague into a waiting area. Meanwhile, Robby and Langdon are ready for battle on the floor, but currents of anger, betrayal, anxiety, and reverence flow between the two men. Because even when the immediate blitz of terror is done, what has gone on between them is far from over.
The episode builds on smaller beats of dread, like Kiara and the ward clerk saying “I’m sorry” in unison to a woman in teddy-bear-covered scrubs who’s just learned that her husband is dead and her brother is unaccounted for. Or Langdon finding an ankle holster on a jewelry-shop owner hauled in with a massive gut wound, compounding the amorphous, free-floating anxiety that the shooter will bring his carnage directly to the hospital. Or the image of a shell-shocked woman with her arm in a cast wandering out of her wheelchair, gazing out at the rows of broken bodies with a glazed, dead-eye slur of a stare.