Tracy Ifeachor won't be back for The Pitt season 2

Ifeachor already had a slightly weird run on the series, which covers, one hour per episode, an extremely eventful day in the life of a Pittsburgh emergency room. She’s main cast, bordering on a co-protagonist, for much of the show’s first season, culminating in an emotional conversation with Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby—which ends with him allowing her to go home, right before one more huge crisis breaks out. As such, Ifeachor is absent from the last four episodes of the season—with Wyle noting, in interviews about the series, that her removal was part of a deliberate effort to strip his character of his most trusted support systems. (Now said support systems can apparently be considered even more thoroughly, and permanently, stripped, we guess.)

Hospitals do, of course, have large amounts of turnover—and if there was ever an E.R. that seemed primed to burn people out, The Pitt’s would be a strong contender. But it’s still somewhat surprising to see Ifeachor not coming back, when she had so much of the focus of, and was such a strong dramatic anchor for, that critically heralded original season.

It’s not clear, outside Wyle, how much of the rest of the show’s cast will be returning for its second season. (We would have assumed “most,” before today, but, uh…) Casting notices for new characters have begun to roll out, though, including news that Sepideh Moafi will be joining the show as a series regular when it returns, likely some time next year.