“I don’t know if I want to be here anymore.”
Duke, Dr. Michael Robinavitch’s motorcycle-riding mentor, can understand why his younger friend would say this. In his long day as a patient in the E.R., he has seen the nonstop chaos Robby battles on a daily basis. If the biker worked there, he would want out, too.
But that’s not what Robby means. Working in the place he has called the Pitt is the only thing that gives him purpose, he says, standing with his friend in the ambulance bay. But he can’t stay in the E.R. forever. Outside it, he is lost.
“I don’t know that I want to be anywhere anymore,” he clarifies.
The lines, which the actor Noah Wyle (who wrote them) forces through Robby’s trademark grimace as though they’re physically painful for him to utter, land with the weight of a Stonehenge plinth. Dr. Robby is our hero, the heart of “The Pitt.” We have seen him power through the pain of post-traumatic stress before, not to mention the myriad heartbreaks that are part of working in a hospital emergency room. To hear from his own lips that this professional lifesaver finds life without meaning and no longer worth living is devastating.
Robby’s solution is to get on his bike and ride, just ride, with neither a destination nor a return in mind. “That’s not riding, that’s running,” Duke says, all grizzled wisdom courtesy of a fine, lively performance by Jeff Kober. “That’s your final lesson for these kids?” He means the younger doctors who look up to Robby the way Robby looks up to him.
Does Duke get through to him? It’s hard to say. What’s certain, though, is what happens next: Robby gets back to work.
He throws himself into it, too. Robby publicly chastises two emergency medical technicians for risking a woman’s life out of misplaced fears for her modesty. Every woman in the E.R. backs him up on it, with Santos getting in a dig in the bargain. He and Al-Hashimi exchange sincere compliments, having come to respect each other during this crazy day.
Then Dr. Al reveals to Robby that she has had a seizure disorder since she was a child, likely the cause of her occasional “freezes” throughout the day. One look at Robby’s shocked face shows that when confronted with a problem larger than his own, he can’t help but continue to care.
Dr. Robby’s arc in this week’s episode, from his confrontation with Dana at the end of the previous episode to his heart-to-heart with Al-Hashimi at the end of this one, is the show’s crowning achievement. Featuring series-best work from Wyle, Kober, Katherine LaNasa and Sepideh Moafi, it finds the show’s single most load-bearing structure, Dr. Robby, and applies as much pressure as it can.
But Robby’s personal crisis is interwoven effortlessly with the professional crises that, to paraphrase Duke, are like a song that never stops playing. (“It’s dance till you drop,” Robby replies.) You couldn’t get to the scenes described above without Duke’s heart trouble, Al-Hashimi’s neurological ailment or the E.M.T.’s mistake with EKG leads. Even the ambulance driver who bumps into Robby’s bike plays an important part, since that is the whole reason Robby and Duke are in the ambulance bay.
Robby has both good and bad moments leading up to this final breakdown. He wrongly chastises Javadi for shooting TikToks on the clock, when in fact she was using her phone in an effort to locate Jesse, the nurse abducted by ICE agents earlier in the day. At first he is kind to Mohan regarding an uninsured patient who left the hospital against medical advice, telling her she did all she could before he fell at a work site, injuring his brain. But he then makes a wisecrack about how the man’s mistake was that he “should have found a higher place to jump from.” (Robby has suicide on the brain.)
For this, Robby gets righteously and rightfully chewed out by Caleb, the psychiatrist friend he has been blowing off all day. “‘Should have found a higher place to jump from’? That’s an interesting diagnosis, doctor,” he said. Chastened, Robby is silent. “No pithy retort?” Caleb asks. “No, I didn’t think so.”
But we do see glimpses of Robby at his best, if brief ones. He is finally kind to Langdon after his former wonder boy performs a genuine medical miracle and realigns a patient’s dislocated spine by hand, saving him from permanent paralysis. It is perhaps the tensest and most thrilling medical procedure the show has ever given us, and that’s saying something. It impresses even Robby, who offers Langdon a grudging but well-deserved “nice job.”
It is a magical moment for Langdon, whose face beams over the successful procedure and the compliment from his idol. As Dr. Ellis explained to him earlier, Robby isn’t mad at him, he’s mad at himself for failing him. Can he really have failed if Langdon is clean, sober and one of the best doctors in the hospital?
By this point the night shift has taken over, with the day shift still on site mostly to digitize the paper files they amassed while the computers were down. This means characters like Ellis, Crus, Shen and Abbot are taking point on most cases. Some members of the day shift, like Lupe and Donny, head home. Others, like Mel and Santos, recede to the background.
Meanwhile, the Fourth of July casualties keep rolling in, including a tug of war gone wrong and a bar fight that ended with one participant’s being stabbed with an American flag. It is still poking out of his chest when he arrives at the hospital.
At least one of last season’s newbies, though, isn’t so quiet this episode. In an uncharacteristic moment of anger, Whitaker lashes out at Langdon for treating him like a little brother or a sidekick. “Play whatever part you like,” he tells Langdon after a funny digression about which “Gilligan’s Island” character everyone in the E.R. corresponds to. “Just don’t pick mine for me.”
Langdon both apologizes and expresses admiration for Whitaker’s willingness to stand up for himself. But was he really wrong to treat Whitaker like Gilligan? In this episode alone, “Huckleberry” loses his hospital I.D. card, setting himself up for a mountain of paperwork, and hires a Lyft for an elderly patient who spews racist invective and vomit in the car, costing Whitaker hundreds in surcharges. This is “little buddy”-coded behavior, I’m afraid.
Not everything in this season’s penultimate installment works as well as Robby’s depression or Langdon’s pulse-pounding spinal surgery by hand. Early in the episode, characters have a tendency to talk in alliterative quips of the sort you’d find in Stan Lee’s Spider-Man dialogue: Monica talking about her life of “mahjong and margaritas,” Ellis complaining about “white knight white noise.” I understand these folks are probably punchy after their long days, but a little variety in the comedy is crucial.
But I keep coming back to Dr. Robby’s statement “I don’t know if I want to be here anymore.” Depression is a dark journey, and passive suicidal ideation is one of the hardest stretches of road you’ll find on it. Yet it is strangely validating to hear sadness this profound come out of the mouth of such a mensch. This is a disease to which no one, not even the Superman of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, is immune.
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