Season 2, Episode 4: ‘10:00 A.M.’
Sports scores, movie story lines, the invasion of a sovereign country by the United States military: Americans can bet on pretty much anything these days. The doctors, nurses and support staff of “The Pitt” are no exception. They have gambling down to a science, which feels appropriate for a workplace that functions as America in microcosm. Anytime some debacle befalls their E.R., the security guard Ahmad (Jonath Davis) morphs into a bookie, taking bets on just how comically bad things will get.
In this week’s episode, Ahmad has our heroes betting on the unexpected closure of a nearby hospital, whose patients are being redirected their way. He comes up with three lines: “how come” the hospital shut down, “how long” it will take for them to reopen, and “how many” patients the Pitt will be forced to accommodate.
In this spirit, here are three questions on which you’re welcome to lay your own money down: How long will it be before Dr. Robby finally talks to Dr. Langdon, his estranged protégé? What will be the event that forces Robby to pull Langdon from triage, where he has been exiled? And what will Dr. Robby decide to do when that happens: forgive Langdon, or freeze him out entirely?
This is “The Pitt,” one of the biggest-hearted shows on television, so forgiveness is the likelier option.
In the meantime, Langdon’s big case this episode ends up becoming someone else’s case entirely. In the process of treating a woman (Elysia Roorbach) whose eye is sealed shut with super glue, Langdon discovers that Javadi has become an emergency room influencer. (That’s a category of person I had no idea existed.) The patient requests help from “Dr. J” by name, leaving Langdon to wonder just how many followers the student doctor has. The scene shows that Javadi has other tools in her arsenal besides unimpeachable book-smarts and a pinch of nepotism from her powerful parents.
Meanwhile, Javadi’s chief rival for advancement in the hospital, Ogilvie, makes a major blunder. In the process of treating a parkour athlete who fell through a skylight, he misidentifies and partially removes a huge shard of glass, prompting arterial bleeding. The action is so breathless from that point forward that I’m not sure anyone notices that he freezes almost completely. This is clearly a man who is not used to failure, so his first brush with a potentially life-ending mistake has rattled him badly.
Ogilvie may be a try-hard, but he’s hardly alone. Dr. Garcia mentions that Ogilvie reminds her of someone she knows very well, at which point the show cuts to a shot of Dr. Santos. It’s a subtle thing, but as a matter of film grammar it certainly lends support to the thesis of some observant viewers that Santos and Garcia are now an item. I couldn’t hazard a guess how Santos’s roommate, Dr. Whitaker, might feel about this, though apparently he is keeping busy with the widow of a farmer who died in the E.R. last year — just as friends, he assures everyone.
Nevertheless, romance is in the sweltering air on this Fourth of July in the Pitt. When she isn’t busy manually setting the broken tailbone of her ladies’ man older patient, Dr. McKay is also being flirted with by a younger guy with a minor injury (Lawrence Robinson). When he asks her if she is available, she reflexively demurs … only to turn right around and ask him out to an art gallery they’re both interested in visiting.
Meanwhile, Dr. Al-Hashimi may be alienating people in the E.R. — she’s coming down hard on the overworked Dr. Santos for not completing her charts in a timely fashion — but it’s hard to miss some blossoming chemistry between her and Dr. Robby. The two chief attending physicians are already getting along better now that she isn’t shadowing him on all his cases. Doesn’t her braggadocious offer to buy him a drink with her eventual winnings from Ahmad’s betting pool constitute asking him out on a date?
If it does, I get it. To borrow a term from Princess (Kristin Villanueva), one of the Pitt’s most valuable nurses, Robby is a hottie. But he is currently seeing Noelle, the hospital’s case manager. Given the way he crumbles when he hears Whitaker explain to Louie, the Pitt’s favorite patient, that his favorite doctor, Heather Collins, left the hospital for a new job in Portland, it is clear Robby still carries a torch for his old flame, too.
In other news from around the Pitt, Javadi works with the sister of the law student who was brought in kicking and screaming by an overzealous security guard, hoping to find out what caused this out-of-character behavior. Whitaker saves a melodramatic patient (Derek Anthony) from his self-foretold appointment at the Pearly Gates by diagnosing a severe heart attack in the nick of time. The new nurse Emma drops a vial of blood that gets comically crushed by a rolling cart. Joy goes from doctor to patient when she cuts herself on a bloody glass fragment embedded in that poor parkour guy.
Dr. Jefferson (Christopher Thornton), the hospital’s wheelchair-using psychiatric attending, reminds Javadi not to call him to see a patient unless the patient is actually conscious. He also lectures Dr. Robby on the perils of riding a motorcycle without a helmet. When Jefferson encourages Robby to try Zoom therapy during his upcoming motorcycle trip, Robby breaks out the dad joke of the night: “A motorcycle trip is ‘zoom therapy,’” he quips.
Dr. Mohan deals with the episode’s trickiest case — from a financial perspective, that is. Her patient (William Guirola) is experiencing complications from diabetes brought on by rationing his insulin. Despite both working multiple jobs, neither he nor his wife receive health care benefits from any of them. Now, because he was forced to avoid necessary medical expenditures, he and his family are on the hook for potentially thousands of dollars for the E.R. visit alone. His daughter (Savannah Ruiz) sets up a GoFundMe, but he immediately orders her to take it down. He’s no charity case, he says.
“The Pitt” loves its teachable moments. If a patient doesn’t have insurance, characters will discuss the way many families fall in a coverage no man’s land: too poor to afford health insurance, not poor enough to receive Medicaid. If a nurse ignores a deaf woman in favor of her A.S.L. translator, he — and the hearing members of the audience — will be gently reminded to address deaf people directly when speaking to them. If a secretly bulimic patient’s pneumonia is caused by her eating disorder, the safe money says that the friendly emergency room doctors will persuade her to accept help almost immediately. They will also note, correctly, that Black women with eating disorders are underdiagnosed.
Every episode of “The Pitt” features moments reminiscent of “very special episodes,” in which 1980s sitcoms briefly silenced their laugh tracks to address serious societal issues. Moments like those in “The Pitt” work as much like educational programming or civics lessons as they do drama.
But the skill of the actors and filmmakers goes a long way toward lessening the sense that you’re being lectured. It would indeed be nice to live in a world where the differing needs of people from different backgrounds and with different conditions were met with care, respect and understanding. No matter what cases come their way — and the cliffhanger ending, about an antibiotic resistant infection, suggests they’ve got a doozy on their hands — it is a safe bet that the staff of the Pitt, for all their imperfections, will teach by example.
The post ‘The Pitt’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: Wanna Bet? appeared first on New York Times.
