Season 2, Episode 6: ‘12:00 P.M.’
You don’t expect casualties among the core cast of “The Pitt.” Yes, they deal with life-or-death stakes, and sometimes with infectious diseases or belligerent patients. But characters in a medical procedural are not in the kind of danger you expect in a show about gangsters, knights or rebel spies. When I sit down to watch this series, I expect to be affected by heartbreaking deaths, but not involving anyone I’ve come to care about over the show’s 21 episodes to date. Dr. Robby and the gang feel off-limits, somehow.
This week’s episode was different. While the doctors and nurses of the Pitt are spared, a man who has been such a fixture of the Pitt that he might as well work there is not so lucky. In a death scene that is shocking for its unexpected gruesomeness, Louie, the Pitt’s favorite patient, has a pulmonary embolism caused by liver failure. Blood pours from his mouth as a team led by Langdon, Robby and Perlah scrambles to save his life. But there’s nothing they can do. At 12:07 p.m., July 4, 2025, Louie Cloverfield, the Pitt’s most beloved patient, passes away.
The death has an immediate effect on almost everyone. Langdon retrieves a photo from Louie’s belongings showing a wife he never mentioned, and he and Whitaker attempt to track down the man’s family, to no avail. Whitaker recalls an alcoholic uncle who became unrecognizable to him before he died and finds comfort in how Louie always seemed happy.
Ogilvie, who is unfamiliar with Louie’s legacy in the Pitt, reacts with a callousness that outrages Perlah, who is badly shaken by the man’s death. Dana walks Emma through the difficult but important job of cleaning Louie’s body for viewing. The task is depicted in detail, slowing down the action to show us the labor of death. Honoring that process feels like a show of respect for both the dead and those who care for them.
But Dana is more shaken by Louie’s death than she lets on. In addition to the affection she feels for the man himself, the care being shown for his body reminds her of the rushed treatment received by the many victims of the Covid pandemic who died in the Pitt. She tells Emma how many of her close friends in the profession quit after that, psychologically broken by the horror of it all.
Dana also fends off an aggressive patient, a confrontation that brings up memories of the assault during Season 1 that nearly led to her retirement, which is brought up again in conversation by Langdon. Elsewhere, she seems transfixed by the sight of a mentally disturbed patient’s sister, who is crying over his condition. We’ve never seen the tough-as-nails charge nurse this shaken up, not even after the assault. By the end of this episode, I was left wondering whether she would finish her shift.
Dr. Robby, as he often does, serves as the Pitt’s unofficial patriarch during Louie’s viewing, staged entirely for the staff. His own eyes teary, he reveals that the woman in the photo Langdon found was indeed Louie’s wife. She died in a car crash in her third trimester of pregnancy, an event from which Louie never recovered.
Louie, a former groundskeeper for the Pittsburgh Steelers, was garrulous but guarded; Dr. Robby just happened to be around on a night when he felt talkative. Now what he learned can be shared. Now, when Dr. Robby says, “May his memory be a blessing,” everyone has a deeper, richer memory of Louie to hold onto.
But it’s not all dying patients and struggling caregivers. Some members of the crew act downright inspirationally, like the nurse practitioner Donnie, called back from triage to help with the influx of patients from the still mysteriously shuttered Westbridge Hospital. The man is so good at wound closing that his subcutaneous stitching is treated like a master class, with staff of all experience levels gathering around to see how a real pro does it. Nurse Kim (Ambar Martinez), previously a peripheral character, dazzles some of the newbies to the Pitt with her encyclopedic knowledge.
Al-Hashimi, meanwhile, leads the team treating the prison inmate recovering from both a beating and malnutrition, and she fights to keep him in the hospital so he can have a better chance of recovery. Dr. Robby wants to ship him back to the prison infirmary as soon as possible to clear up room in the crowded E.R. “This is not about social justice,” he says, a funny thing to hear from one of the most unironically committed social justice warriors on television.
It’s Dana who gets the final say here. Learning that the convict is a local who used to work at the bar where she had her first kiss, she messes with his machinery and skews his pulse oxygen levels. This ensures he will be admitted for observation rather than sent back to where he is being abused and starved. (I wonder just how eager everyone will be to bend over backward for the guy when we learn about whatever crime landed him in prison.)
The day is starting to catch up with Santos. She is constantly two steps behind on every case because she has to spend every spare second charting. Her charts are then screwed up by her use of Al-Hashimi’s A.I. tool, leading to angry confrontations by staff from other departments. Garcia, the imperious surgeon with whom Santos has been having a thing, gives her the cold shoulder.
Fourth of July-related injuries continue coming in. Langdon treats a patient who keeps vomiting up the evidence of his victory in a hot dog eating contest. A motorcycle stuntman in star-spangled clothing comes in with a badly lacerated knee, giving seemingly everyone in the E.R. a chance to give Dr. Robby a hard time about his coming sabbatical — and his lackadaisical approach to wearing a helmet. The baby left behind in the restroom is doing fine.
The sardonic Joy reveals she wants to be a pathologist and solve medical mysteries rather than work with people, which explains a lot about her. (“You have an interesting energy,” Donnie tells her.) Princess’s fluency in six languages does not, unfortunately, extend to American Sign Language, though she does her best to translate for a deaf patient. Dana angrily decries the doughnuts sent down by hospital admin as “blood pastries” delivered in lieu of tangible improvements; her intimidated sidekick, Emma, is surprised when Langdon reassures her that the charge nurse is “warm and gooey inside.”
Roxie, the terminal cancer patient with the broken leg, appears unhappy in her marriage and uneasy about returning home to be under her husband’s care. McKay, Lena and the other staffers who are treating her appear to sense that something is wrong, but it falls to Roxie herself to call off her transfer home.
We’ve seen McKay and other staffers spring into action before whenever patients show signs of emotional distress. Their failure to preempt Roxie’s move back home until she basically begs to stay reads as out of character.
But think of the pressure these people are under. Think of the number of cases they receive in the one day per season we see, then multiply that by 365. Think of the budget cuts, staffing issues, gaps in the healthcare system and other external circumstances that make their jobs even tougher. They can’t possibly catch everything.
Even so, lives depend on them doing exactly that. These professionals must make their peace with this incontrovertible fact before every shift. If Dr. Robby needs a three-month, 2,000-mile sabbatical, can you blame him? Perhaps it should be mandatory, Pitt-wide. (Helmets are not optional.)
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