‘The Pitt’ Episode 2 Recap: “Hour 2: 8AM-9AM”

Episode 2 of The Pitt begins inside a panic attack. We had heard about Adamson, Dr. Thomas “Robby” Robinavitch’s professional mentor and his predecessor as attending physician at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital. But Adamson committed suicide in 2019, during the health emergency phase of COVID-19 lockdowns, and in The Pitt, as Robby’s post-traumatic flashback stops him in his tracks, it’s sparked by a waiting room full of the weak, the coughing, and the desperate. He imagines himself to again be covered in PPE, and consumed by the same crushing sense of hopelessness that contributed to Adamson’s fateful choice. It’s only episode 2, because this is only the second hour of his current shift. But it’s obvious that Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby is masking his own trauma beneath an outward projection of confidence.

There is also zero time for flashback panics, because as charge nurse Dana Evans pulls him out of it, it’s with the confirmation that in the Pitt’s emergency department, the hits just keep on coming. 

When a mom, irate over her young son’s consumption of her husband’s weed gummies, begins to shout over and push away Doctors Langdon and King, it’s the attending’s job to step in and regulate. This is not Jerry Springer, Robby clarifies. It’s a hospital. And while they aren’t gonna detain or further harm this woman’s child, they will have her arrested if she doesn’t stop impeding and threatening the staff. It’s another example in The Pitt of Robinavitch – and in turn, Wyle – representing a willingness to speak pragmatic truth to societal power. In the emergency department he runs, he will not let anyone’s outside beliefs or their sense of entitlement to override regulations or endanger his people. 

It’s the same with the adult children of an elderly man who arrived at the Pitt via his senior living facility. He signed a form: no machines. No intubation, the insertion of an endotracheal tube, even if he’s having trouble breathing. “If things get worse,” Dr. Robby tells the man’s family, “sometimes allowing for a comfortable natural death can be the most humane path.” But when they push back, he backs down. They threatened a lawsuit, and given the unstable ground of Robby’s department with hospital administration, he has to respect the family’s wishes, no matter how invasive.

Hospital administration might hate it that an unhoused man receiving treatment also loosed a bunch of rats into the emergency department. But the biggest gross-out moment from this episode comes courtesy of Dr. Langdon using his finger to prop up a guy’s busted facial bones. The bloody, broken bone-y aftermath of “stand-up scooter rider versus car door – no helmet” is suitably queasy – and suitably timely, in a “trending medical topic of the week” kind of way – though it’s no more grisly than any other medical show, of which there are so many that The Pitt bearing links to ER in spirit and personnel feels less and less relevant as the hours of Dr. Robby’s shift tick off.

The Pitt as teaching hospital and its staff as knowledge guides is becoming the biggest thematic set piece in this series, bigger even than its one-episode-as-one-hour timeline. That gimmick could retain more of its significance, if there was a time stamp bug in our screen’s corner, like in 24, or it emphasized the advancing timeline in relation to Wyle’s character. But since it doesn’t, it’s seeing experienced doctors like Robby, Langdon, Collins, and Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) challenge their med student charges that’s generating watchability. Aching to prove herself, 20-year-old Victoria Javadi is getting to know Dr. McKay while shuttling through patients beside her – such as a guy with a dog zapper glued to his neck, which he bought to silence his girlfriend’s puppy – and that means Javadi has to process a lot of information on the fly. Which we process with her. Like how McKay is a single mother with an 11-year-old son, for example. Or that her ankle monitor suddenly beeps in the middle of a shift? Dr. McKay isn’t a flight risk, so we’re going to gather she has some history of drug use in her past. Whatever the reason for it, we’re as interested in the monitoring device as we are the character of Dr. McKay.

“You just stand there looking pretty, ‘ER Ken,’ and let me fix this.” Just two episodes into The Pitt, we’re also finding enjoyment in something crucial to any medical drama, a sequence we’ll call the “Above Patient Scrum.” While two doctors fight flirtatiously – flirt fight-atiously? – in the busy airspace over an examination table, two of their colleagues trade thick ropes of impenetrable medical jargon, two more manipulate the different types of tubes and implements attached to the patient’s body, and two more apply a salve of gallows humor to the entire affected area, cut with a few hundred cc’s of workplace yuks. When this is done well, as it is three or four times an episode in The Pitt, you can almost hang on it the emotions of an entire medical drama.

Dr. Robby and Dr. Collins, one of his two senior residents, do not see eye to eye. When he notices her discomfort during a procedure – it’s likely from her pregnancy, which we know about but he doesn’t – Collins dismisses Robby’s “You OK?” with a “You OK?” right back at him. Perhaps it’s a function of ourselves trying to get to know everybody in this bustling emergency room all at once, but it feels like the attending physician’s staff has occasion to bristle at his expectations and demeanor. They all have solidarity with the Pitt itself – their hard work is validating, even as the department has its financial back against the hospital administration’s wall. But how dangerous are the panicky stress demons Dr. Robby is hiding beneath his hoodie and stethoscope?

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.