You know The Pitt is a true monoculture show when the cast and crew have to give public statements about storylines that haven’t even aired yet. Back in late February, producer John Wells clarified that while HBO Max didn’t ask them to tone down an upcoming storyline about ICE, they “wanted to make sure it was balanced” and to “make certain that we’re actually presenting both points of view.” The cast then echoed his sentiments on various red carpets. But now that the storyline is finally here, it’s unclear what Wells was even hedging about. “5:00 P.M.” rightly depicts ICE as thugs who are tearing apart families and communities, terrorizing American cities, and making hospitals less safe with their presence.
In a season full of social issues, it’s a welcome, full-throated condemnation of one of the existential threats of our time. No one is safer when ICE is around. Their restaurant employee detainee is denied even a phone call to her family. Patients and hospital workers leave out of fear. And Jesse winds up getting slapped in cuffs just for trying to stop an ICE agent from manhandling an injured woman who needs a sling. What’s gained from all that cruelty?
It’s a fitting through-line for an episode that sees our protagonists grappling with questions of their legal, ethical, and emotional duties. What falls under their “jurisdiction” both as doctors and as people? Where is it important to push boundaries and bend the rules to do what’s right, like McKay does with an unhoused patient she treats outside the system? Where do they need to draw the line and accept that there are forces beyond their control, as Robby ultimately does with ICE? And where do they need to acknowledge that they might be the ones holding onto something too tight, as Mel eventually does with her sister?
Indeed, part of what makes The Pitt such a buzzy series is that it’s built around a plethora of conflicting perspectives in a way that makes each episode really fascinating to debate and discuss afterwards. While other shows often physically divide their casts into separate storylines, The Pitt’s one-location, real-time premise is more akin to throwing a whole bunch of personalities into a fishbowl and seeing how they bounce off one another.
For instance, when it comes to their hospice patient, Robby and McKay feel it’s legally, ethically, and emotionally right to let Roxie choose her own end-of-life care. Javadi, however, understands the ethical argument but still doesn’t feel emotionally right about the whole thing. As viewers, we can decide where we fall on that spectrum of opinions, but the important thing is that the perspectives track with who we know these characters to be. Javadi is sensitive in one way while Robby and McKay are empathetic in another. All of that feels true, as does the devastating way Roxie’s death happens suddenly, anticlimactically, and offscreen—a far cry from the sort of big, emotional deathbed scenes we’re accustomed to in our medical melodramas. (The silent sequence where Robby signs her death note is a lovely bit of filmmaking from director Uta Briesewitz.)
One of my bugbears as a critic, however, is when a perspective doesn’t track from a particular character’s point of view—which was my main problem with last week’s episode, an installment I know others liked more than I did. Take the fallout from the reveal that Becca is having sex with her boyfriend. From Mel’s perspective, I absolutely love everything about this storyline. Without exactly meaning to, Mel has adopted the mentality that it’s her legal, ethical, and emotional right to be a part of all of Becca’s life choices. So it’s fascinating to see her finally confronted with that bias. In the abstract, she supports Becca’s right to make her own decisions, but when it comes to the idea of not being the central person Becca is making those decisions around, the reality is a lot harder to accept—especially when Mel fears she’s getting left behind by her best friend.
That’s all great stuff, but what doesn’t entirely track for me is Becca’s perspective. Not telling your sister all the details of your sex life makes sense for someone wanting more autonomy and privacy in her life. But not even mentioning your new boyfriend and/or six-month relationship to someone you talk to and hang out with all the time feels like a step beyond just wanting more independence. And if Becca did actively want to keep her relationship secret, why did she so casually and easily open up to Mel about it here? It all feels a touch artificial (Becca has to open up today because this is the day we’re following), although the fact that the episode has Mel herself voice all those questions at least suggests The Pitt is aware there’s a big perspective gap between the two King sisters. I just hope Becca eventually gets a chance to share her own POV in a storyline that’s ostensibly about her agency.
Indeed, it’s remarkable how much a little clarity can go a long way on this show. Much of the heated fan debate about Langdon and Santos this season has stemmed from the fact that—up until this week—we actually didn’t have a full picture of what happened to Langdon between seasons. Here, however, we finally learn the truth: The official story is that Langdon is an addict who went to rehab. Only three people know he was stealing drugs from the hospital and actively tampering with medicine to hide what he was doing, a pattern of behavior that likely wouldn’t have stopped if Santos hadn’t reported him to Robby.
That helps explain the very different ways Langdon and Santos have been processing his return. From his perspective, he suffered for his actions, put in the work to get sober, and is now trying to make amends with those he hurt. From her perspective, he got off with a slap on the wrist and is now requesting forgiveness without fully owning up to what he did. He thinks he had it tough because he almost lost his family; she thinks he got it easy for avoiding jail time; and the great thing about The Pitt is that both perspectives feel absolutely true to those characters. Langdon is a kind, empathetic doctor who doesn’t want to acknowledge (or maybe can’t even see) the privilege he received as Robby’s golden boy. (The way Patrick Ball delivers the line “You don’t know what I’ve been through!” like a petulant teenager is brilliant.) Meanwhile, Santos is a prickly, ambitious upstart who nevertheless has a moral backbone that Langdon lacks.
There’s something very gendered about the way both those archetypes are received—both as people within this fictional universe and as characters on the show. We’ve been trained to sympathize with tortured yet sensitive white men in a way we haven’t with bullish yet protective Filipino women. Though Robby and Langdon have basically forced Santos to live with their lie, she’s the one being treated like she did something wrong for feeling uncomfortable. Notably, Langdon’s apology feels like something he’s checking off a list for himself, not something he’s doing for her benefit. If it were, he would be thanking her for saving his career, not opening with a passive aggressive “I know you don’t like me.” (So far his apology to Louie in the premiere has been by far his most genuinely sincere and contrite.)
There is a lot of blurring of work-life boundaries for the male characters on this show—whether it’s Robby saving Langdon’s career or letting Duke cut the waiting-room line or offering Whitaker a place to stay. Yet, as he did last week, Robby decides to project his insecurity about himself onto a woman. He snaps at Samira for letting her personal life get in the way of double checking the ultrasound on Ogilvie’s English-teacher patient, even though there’s nothing to suggest that wasn’t solely a professional mistake on her end. It’s also hard to imagine he would ever let Whitaker end a conversation with an unrefuted “Maybe I just don’t belong here” in the way he does with Samira.
It’s easy for boundaries to get blurry in such an intense, close-knit environment like an ER. Yet, intriguingly, “5:00 P.M.” doesn’t solely depict that boundary blurring as a bad thing either. As she has all season, Al-Hashimi has wonderfully empathetic yet professional instincts when it comes to communicating with the mom of a young boy who’s brought in with debilitating heatstroke. But if Al-Hashimi didn’t push her own boundaries just a little bit, she wouldn’t have followed the troubled mom outside to stop her from walking into traffic over her guilt about what happened to her son.
This is a moment that brings The Pitt’s ongoing thematic interest in suicidal ideation directly to the forefront of the season. Al-Hashimi and Robby decide the mom might need a 302 involuntary psych hold for being a danger to herself—something a lot of fans have been wondering if Robby might need by the end of this season. Still, it almost seems like seeing the mom at her lowest shifts something in Robby. At the very least, he promises Duke he won’t leave for his trip until his tests are complete. That’s a rare ray of hope in an episode otherwise full of darker perspectives.
Stray observations
- • So was Emma finding the waterslide dad’s kid on Instagram supposed to be the resolution to that storyline last week? I thought there was still some ambiguity as to whether the kid was found dead or alive (at best he’d be badly injured, right?), but we don’t see any of the waterslide patients again this week.
- • On the other hand, it’s tossed off very casually in Dana’s updates, but Howard made it through his surgery! That’s a welcome win on this stressful day.
- • This show’s geographical limits are so funny. The park across the street falls under The Pitt’s boundaries (we saw the crew drinking beers there after their shift last season too), but we haven’t followed Mel or Al-Hashimi upstairs for their various meetings/depositions.
- • This is a good week for Ogilvie, who pulls it together to treat McKay’s unhoused patient Kiki and is appropriately humbled when his English-teacher patient codes because of his mistake. The moment he asks to go up to surgery to help with the rest of the case is lovely, and his fear of crossing the street also really made me laugh.
- • Potential blood-clot patient Mrs. Torres delivers some beautiful philosophical wisdom (“Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?”), but unfortunately disappears when ICE arrives and misses out on the test results she needs.
- • Like the staff of PTMC, I know so little about sports I had to google whether professional baseball teams actually play on the Fourth Of July. They do!
- • I’m curious to know what you all make of this show’s love of dramatic cliff-hangers. I feel like they tend to awkwardly break up the rhythm of the episode rather than entice me to keep watching. Here we end with Emma being strangled by a drunk, combative golfer.
- • Gnarliest moment of the week: Kiki’s “xylazine wound” skin necrosis and that non-medicated elbow reset are brutal, but the English teacher’s emergency thoracotomy felt the most intense to me—even as it’s also a sweet surgical bonding moment for Javadi and her mom.
Caroline Siede is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
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