If you’ll excuse the highbrow start to a recap of a medical procedural, there were two pieces of classic storytelling on my mind throughout this week’s episode of The Pitt. The first is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which a musician heads down to the underworld to rescue his dead wife, only to lose her forever when he fails to follow Hades’ demand that he must lead her out without looking back to make sure she’s behind him. The second is Samuel Beckett’s seminal existential tragicomedy Waiting For Godot, in which two men sit around a wasteland, talking in inane circles while they wait for someone named Godot to save them. As the day seems to repeat, Vladimir and Estragon talk about hanging themselves the next day if Godot doesn’t arrive first. The play’s famous final moments end with Vladimir suggesting, “Well? Shall we go?” then Estragon responding, “Yes, let’s go,” and the stage direction “They do not move.”
Last season of The Pitt presented the day shift’s overtime hours as a war zone full of blood and bodies from the PittFest shooting. The staff couldn’t leave because lives would be lost if they did. This season, however, the hospital has become more like Godot’s wasteland—or maybe even the underworld itself. Physically and legally, there’s nothing stopping the day-shift doctors and nurses from leaving the moment their shift is over, the way Joy did last week. Yet, like Vladimir and Estragon, they can’t seem to walk out of the ER’s sliding doors. The best they can do is try to be like Orpheus and lead someone else out instead—even if that’s a quest that seems doomed in its own way.
That feeling of The Pitt as the underworld manifests in the unnerving details of Orlando Diaz’s return. At first, everyone assumes it must be an issue with his under-treated diabetes that caused him to pass out and fall off a catwalk at work. As his stats come back normal, however, Robby puts together a different hypothesis: Faced with $100,000 of medical debt, Orlando decided to kill himself—only to end up surviving in a state of potentially severe disability instead. Whatever the truth, Orlando, like Eurydice, has been sucked back into the ER in the cruelest way possible with the added irony that Medicare and Medicaid will now cover his medical bills where they wouldn’t when he was healthier.
The idea of “continuity of care” is part of what keeps Samira, Robby, and Javadi working on his case, even though they’re officially off the clock. Our other doctors, however, have a far more Beckett-esque reason for staying. Though the digital systems are officially back online, there’s now mountains of paperwork to be scanned into the Electronic Health Record. As with after-hours charting, the expectation is that McKay, Whitaker, Santos, and Mel will be “team players” and stick around to get it all done—not to mention continue to consult on patients when other doctors aren’t available. (Don’t eat too much turmeric, kids!)
It’s a grim reality check about how much health-care workers are expected to give to their jobs. Thankfully, the ER at least gets a much-needed jolt of energy from the night shift, who include not just our old friends Jack Abbot, John Shen, and Parker Ellis, but also confident, charismatic, ultrasound-loving senior resident Crus Henderson (Luke Tennie) and eager new intern Nazely Toomarian (Sofia Hasmik). Given how the night shift jumped right into the PittFest crisis last season, it’s fascinating to see a normal shift handover. The sense of discovery that was missing from the start of this season is recaptured here, as we watch the hospital’s version of the “changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.” The day and night teams round on patients together, ensuring everyone is on the same page about who is in the ER and what they need. Along the way, Crus and Nazely both make great first impressions as likable, competent doctors who are also slightly new archetypes for the show.
Still, the focus of “7:00 P.M.” is more on the health-care workers trying to leave than those just arriving. Dana ends Emma’s shift on an upbeat note by asking her to give Digby a complimentary shave and a haircut—restoring some of his humanity and learning more about his life in the process. (He’s got an adult daughter who’s currently living in his old house.) From there, Dana encourages her to actually leave now that her shift is over, advice Emma thankfully isn’t guilted into ignoring by Monica, even if she briefly pops back in, Orpheus style, to let someone know that Ogilvie is sitting in the ambulance bay, covered in blood and staring off into space.
He’s stuck in his own Waiting For Godot-style tragedy after his English-teacher patient winds up dying from the “triple A” that he and Samira missed. (Even more tragically, the patient’s electronic medical records would have alerted the doctors to the issue, if the system had been online.) After such a harrowing loss, Ogilvie feels like staying in emergency medicine would be impossible. Yet it’s clear that walking away from this day the way Joy did feels impossible too. Thankfully, Whitaker is there to offer a middle ground. He tells Ogilvie that it’s okay to clock out for now, take time to rest, and reassess how he feels the next day. Not everything has to be treated like an emergency decision, even in emergency medicine.
It’s a welcome bit of basic human empathy from Whitaker, who’s not just speaking about his patients when he says, “I like being here for people on the worst days of their lives.” Indeed, I wish he would give the same “just sleep on it” advice to Samira, who for some reason has decided this chaotic Fourth Of July is the day she needs to rethink her entire future and actively apply for PTMC fellowships. Between Orlando’s fall and losing the triple A patient, her already bad day becomes a full-on spiral here. Yet given that she still has the New Jersey job to fall back on, what she really needs is some perspective. There’s no reason she can’t take the rest of the week to think about her future rather than solving it all today.
Unfortunately, part of the reason she doesn’t have that perspective is because Robby doesn’t foster it in his staff. While Whitaker encourages Ogilvie to step away, Robby pushes Javadi to stay and learn a procedure from chief neurosurgeon Dr. Linda Conley (Mary McCormack). On the one hand, he’s trying to encourage her not to get hung up on her past mistakes while empowering her to pursue a career in emergency medicine. On the other hand, he’s also pushing her to ignore her work-life boundaries and seize “amazing opportunities,” even when she’s overworked and exhausted. There’s a real harshness in his voice when he says, “Step up to the plate. Do it.” And it’s notable that he doesn’t ultimately let Javadi make the final call; he volunteers her.
Much as Abbot tries to enforce his workaholism on others, Robby is a big part of the reason PTMC is a vortex no one can leave. He’s set an example that’s become toxic. Yet he’s the ultimate victim of that mentality too. Though Dana keeps telling Robby he can walk away whenever he wants, he keeps finding excuses to stay—whether it’s waiting for test results (Duke has an ascending aortic aneurysm that needs surgery sooner rather than later) or checking up on Al-Hashimi or ensuring all his residents are in the right headspace before he goes.
That impulse to linger stems from an inflated sense of responsibility, but it also stems from a fear of what might happen when he goes. As Duke inadvertently hit on last week, Robby is scared that if he doesn’t leave for his trip tonight, he won’t leave at all—not because he might bail on the vacation but because he might bail on life. He essentially admits as much to Dana at the end of this hour. And while “7:00 P.M.” mostly reiterates the main themes and conflicts of the season rather than introducing new ones, the latest Dana/Robby argument comes with the brief but potentially seismic reveal that Robby’s mom “left” and he doesn’t tell people about it because he doesn’t think it matters.
Given how quick he was to jump on Samira for her own “mommy issues,” however, there’s a good chance we’ve finally found a missing puzzle piece to unlock Robby’s internal arc over the final two episodes of the season. Right now, though, his immediate struggle is clear: Staying in the hospital might kill him but leaving might too. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Robby is stuck. The hospital is his underworld. The question is whether someone is coming to lead him out.
Stray observations
- • So if Abbot and Shen are both working at the same time, does that mean the night shift regularly has two attendings but the day shift only has one? No wonder Al-Hashimi wanted to make some staffing changes!
- • Dr. Shen is bummed there’s no goodbye cake for Robby. It’s too bad he wasn’t around for “admin’s blood pastries” earlier in the day.
- • Guest star Tianna Mendez does excellent work as the mom of the asthmatic kid suffering under Medicaid bureaucracy and out-of-pocket expenses. A lot of actors would overplay the distress and frustration, but she conveys the sense of someone actively holding back their tears.
- • It’s kind of crazy to have the actors out there denying the Mel/Langdon ‘ship when the show has him look at her like that when she says, “With Robby gone, I really don’t want you to leave either.”
- • In fact, that moment stands out because of how little chemistry Robby and Noelle have as she bids him farewell before his trip. It’s hard to invest in a situationship when we only get a scene or two of it across a season.
- • While I’m glad the waterslide collapse didn’t turn out to be the same kind of mass-casualty event as the PittFest shooting, I think introducing it as a “breaking news” story on TV ultimately made it feel too big for how the season wanted to position it. Given that The Pitt seemed to be inspired by a headline-grabbing accident from 1997, it feels odd that other patients and our new doctors aren’t mentioning it as a big, defining event of this Fourth Of July in Pittsburgh.
- • Gnarliest moment of the week: As I mentioned in my previous recap, head injuries are my weakness, so everything with Orlando Diaz’s external ventricular drain was a big no from me. It was also freaky how casually Crus poked his finger into that kid’s chest to fix his collapsed lung.
Caroline Siede is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
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