Season 2, Episode 12: ‘6:00 P.M.’
“The Pitt” does not work the way most dramas do. It’s a medical procedural, but it treats that venerable TV genre like the intense opening reel of “Saving Private Ryan.” The action is visceral, intense, virtually constant and realistically random; there’s rarely a cohesive theme or narrative progression to be constructed from each episode’s pile of unconnected cases.
The show’s near-real-time gimmick, moreover, dictates the pace at which the staffers of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grow and change while we watch. We follow these people during a busy shift on a single day, not over the course of weeks or months. Amid that concentrated tumult, character development is squeezed into rare quiet moments between cases, or shouted over the cacophony of crowded hallways and beeping hospital equipment.
But in the dozen episodes we’ve seen this season so far, I can hear a steady, ominous drumbeat beneath the din. Looking over my notes, rereading these reviews, I see myself asking one question, over and over: Are Robby and Dana, the heart and soul of the E.R., ever going to return after this shift from hell is over?
Until this point, Dana’s distress has been easy to ascribe to specific causes. She visibly struggled while serving as a SANE nurse for a sexual assault victim, as anyone might. I have seen it suggested Dana is a survivor of sexual violence herself, and I appreciate how the show leaves that question to the viewer.
Dana is certainly a survivor of an assault by a patient: We all watched it happen in Season 1 and watched her walk away from the job as a result. Fortunately for the patients and staff (not to mention us viewers), Dana returned between seasons. But she understandably explodes when a patient assaults her young protégé, Emma; she apparently strikes the guy and injecting him with unprescribed Versed off-camera to stop the attack.
As Dana points out, this is the second time today Emma has been accosted by a patient. And she is the second nurse today to be seriously roughed up, following Nurse Jesse’s altercation with I.C.E. agents, who decked and detained him. This is why she feels it’s important for Emma to give a statement to the police, so charges can be filed: “We’re here to help, not to be punching bags.” An all-expletive outburst in the restroom shows the attacks have gotten to her badly.
But there’s another reason Dana’s voice is raised throughout the episode — and a reason her eyes are watery. It’s Dr. Robby. The hour of their leader’s departure grows nigh, and Dana is just one of several people who’ve noticed something has been very, very wrong with him all day.
McKay compares him to people she knew during her days as an addict. Robby’s friend Duke can sense Robby’s fear that he will never escape the Pitt’s gravitational pull unless he leaves as soon as possible. When Dr. Al tells Robby she’ll be recommending that the E.R. staff two attending physicians at all times, the burnout she hopes to avoid clearly includes his. There are times when we watch him walk down the hall, wincing and shaking his head, as if his emotional pain has become psychosomatic.
This, it turns out, is the thing that’s been bothering Dana all day but she hasn’t yet expressed. In a series of ugly conversations, Dana, near her own breaking point, reveals that Robby’s altered affect has left her concerned he is deliberately courting death during his so-called sabbatical. It upsets her so badly at one point that she breaks down and cries in the open.
Out in the ambulance bay, Dana yells at Robby for making everything about himself, from Langdon’s crimes to her own actions with the aggressive patient. The E.R. has gotten along just fine without his mentor, Dr. Adamson, who died during the worst stage of the Covid pandemic, she reminds him. It can get along just fine without Robby while he’s on sabbatical, just as it will get along fine if she loses her license for socking and drugging a country-club coke head.
As Dana angrily indicates, the status of Dr. Langdon remains another live interpersonal issue among the E.R. staff. Robby outs Langdon’s theft of medication to Al-Hashimi. Robby encourages Santos to find a way to work with Langdon but can’t bring himself to do so. (Physician, heal thyself.)
Santos — who steals a scalpel to self-injure with — tells Whitaker that Langdon’s acceptance by their peers is among the reasons for her present misery. It’s right up there with the cooling of her relationship with Garcia and Whitaker’s pending departure from their apartment to house-sit for Robby. Leave it to our boy Huckleberry to salvage something good from all this ugliness: He agrees to forgo the house-sitting arrangement and stay in their apartment if Santos will admit she likes living with him. Naturally, she refuses.
“You have no idea how much joy that just brought me,” Javadi says to Whitaker after their exchange. (The return of Mateo, the hunky night shift nurse played by Jalen Thomas Brooks, seems fill her heart with comparable levels of joy.)
The episode features three prominent new cases. An elderly couple, Frieda and Eddie, (Christine Avila and the “Law & Order” franchise veteran Dann Florek), come in after the husband accidentally backed into his wife in the driveway. For some time, Mohan and Mel are concerned that the couple can no longer take care of each other and will both require involuntary placement in assisted living.
(In one of the funniest sight gags in the show’s history, a particularly painful conversation about all this with their daughter takes place as a woman in an American flag bikini with a lobster-red sunburn staggers by in the background. Hey, there’s always room for gallows humor.)
A pharmacy consultation, however, reveals that Eddie is taking several medications that are no longer necessary; their negative interactions may have caused the accident. Eddie thanks Mohan for listening to them; Robby pays Mohan the backhanded compliment that her skill set and her work rate are both well suited to geriatrics.
Elsewhere, a diabetic man undergoing renal failure nearly dies because the hospital nearest his home has been closed by congressional spending cuts to Medicare, part of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Monica, Dana’s clerk friend, comes as close as any staff member ever has to espousing a right-wing viewpoint when she dismisses Javadi as a “snowflake.” And a man who incurred a gnarly scalp injury from a fireworks explosion teaches Joy a valuable lesson: Never say “Oops!” in front of a patient.
He also presents us with an object lesson in the value of nurses when Perlah talks his panicked brother down using breathing exercises. Whether this was ever a part of her official education, it is a valuable skill to navigate life as it is lived in the E.R. Sometimes you just need to breathe.
That’s the lesson Dr. Al tries to impart to Dr. Robby when the regional cyberattack is resolved. With the chaos finally coming under control, it’s OK for him to just sign out and head off on his bike. Joy makes a similar argument when Langdon encourages her to stay past her scheduled shift.
“All you lunatics need to learn how to set some boundaries,” she says. From where I’m sitting, it’s hard to disagree.
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