Has anyone remotely recovered from watching the gut-wrenching child drowning case The Pitt offered up last week? No one? Great, me either. And that shot of Esme on the janitorial staff picking up Amber’s tiny hair clip off the floor isn’t going to remedy that any time soon. Although I feel like I’m suffering from cognitive dissonance using a word like “glad” in relation to that storyline, I have to admit I was glad to see that The Pitt didn’t simply move on to the next case here in “3:00 P.M.” When we hop back into the action at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, the whole staff is still processing what just happened. Langdon calls home to hear his son’s voice, Mel is listening to calming ocean sounds, and even Trinity tries to offer some comfort to Javadi, a first-timer for something like this. And while I have become deeply trauma bonded with Dr. Robby, even I can admit that his speech to the staff about losing a 5-year-old during his first day of residency and how the only way he could cope was to find a metaphorical mausoleum for his feelings is vulnerable, sure, but, as Dana points out, pretty terrible. “You just gave a speech titled ‘How to Literally Bury Your Feelings,’” she tells him with a pat on the back. Not his best work, but, you know, everybody’s trying. And with that, the team carries on with its day.
Dana is really mothering to her fullest at the top of the hour. She comforts Heather once she tells Dana about the miscarriage (Heather’s “I shouldn’t have bought that fucking stroller” really tore me up) and keeps Robby off her back after he pushes a little more as to what’s up with his senior resident. She is amused by but does not shame Javadi after her utterly cringeworthy attempt to ask Mateo out on a date. She deftly handles our hothead in the waiting room, Doug Driscoll, as he continues to berate the staff over his long wait time, call everyone else in the waiting room losers because he decides they’re probably poor, and harass sweet Mateo with racist comments, by calmly and repeatedly informing him that patients are seen based on severity and he will have his turn. Doug almost takes off when Langdon hands him an AMA form, but alas, we are not so lucky, and Doug takes his seat once again after hearing about how he could drop dead in the street if he doesn’t wait for the doctors to go over his labs. He remains, as ever, fuming.
What is most impressive about what Dana pulls off in this hour is the way she shuts down two women fistfighting in the waiting room when one offers the other a mask for her coughing child. The woman with the coughing kid is angry, you see, because masks are bullshit, and the woman who offered the mask is a liberal piece of shit obsessed with Dr. Fauci, et cetera; you probably get the picture without me having to tell you that the anti-masker’s husband gets his back up at the mention of vaccines. The anti-masker throws a punch and winds up with the other woman’s tooth in her fist. It’s Dana who walks out and screams at them both to remember they’re at a hospital, there are kids around, and they should be ashamed. Now, as a Philadelphia girl myself, I’m trying not to be too offended by Dana’s initial reminder to the two women that “this ain’t Philly,” but also the whole scene did make me laugh. Dana deserves to be commended for being, as she puts it, “inspiring and terrifying, also a little bit shaming.” “The holy trinity of crowd control,” Robby applauds.
But Dana isn’t the only one who has a standout moment, thanks to these two ladies who continue to yell at each other through the walls of their rooms in the ER. Langdon tells the anti-masker that she’s going to need surgery because the other woman’s tooth went into the joint bone — “Good! You assaulted me!” the woman greatly in need of dental work yells. But when Langdon offers his patient the option to make sure the surgeons don’t wear masks in her surgery even though doctors “strongly believe masks minimize risk when it comes to spreading disease and infection,” you know, in order to respect her views, well, it shuts that woman right up. She’ll take surgery with the masks, as it turns out. Oh, reader, did I clap.
Langdon has a bit of a wild ride in this episode. If you’ve been waiting for the tension between him and Dr. Santos to erupt, this is your time. An MDMA overdose case comes in from PittFest, and the woman’s core temp is 107. That’s not just hot, friends, that’s could-fry-your-brain hot. They get her into an ice bath, but while Dr. Mohan and Trinity are cooling her down, she starts seizing. Before the labs are even back, Trinity realizes the woman’s sodium levels must be dangerously low from her dehydration — she has hyponatremia — and pushes saline. It’s risky, but she’s right, and the seizing stops. Langdon, who is supervising the case, comes in at the tail end of this, and while he’s glad someone caught the sodium levels, he is livid that no one grabbed him from across the hall as soon as the seizing began. Trinity tells him that the delay in alerting him was her fault and the saline idea was Mohan’s. Later, she explains to Mohan that Langdon already had it out for her, so why make him angry with both of them? Consolidate his ire, she says. It seems … very unlike her, but okay. Langdons rips into Trinity. He’s loud, he’s mean, he’s degrading, and Trinity is doing her best not to cry. Thankfully — for her, not for Langdon — Robby walks in and shuts it down.
Now it’s Langdon’s turn to get ripped into. Robby pulls him aside, and for maybe the first time we’ve seen, he raises his voice. He yells, “Shut the fuck up” at his senior resident/little buddy. Shaming and belittling are not effective teaching tools, he says! He’s been watching Langdon ride Santos harder than any of the other younger residents, he loudly points out! This kind of behavior will not be tolerated, he makes quite clear! And then he finishes his tirade with one of the most cutting sentiments a person can — he thought Langdon was better than this. “You are senior leadership here. Step up and act like it.” Oof, that’s rough for Langdon. For us, it’s kind of hot. If only he were wearing his slutty little glasses. I guess we can’t have it all.
Robby brings up an interesting point: Langdon has been disproportionately rough on Trinity Santos, especially in comparison to, say, Mel King. He and Mel have created a rather sweet rapport. When he sees how unsettled she is by the pediatric drowning and orders her to go take 20 minutes in the break room — she needs it, she should take it. After he gets reamed out by his boss, Langdon goes to check on Mel, and, as instructed, he tries to be an empathetic teacher. It’s much easier to do with Mel. “You’re all pretty green, but you’ve grown on me,” he tells his “least problematic trainee.” When she explains that the sisters in the drowning accident hit a little too close to home, he is basically oozing empathy and understanding out of his pores. Could you imagine if Trinity saw this? He reminds Mel that what they do is hard. And all of them, at one time or another, question whether they’re cut out for this job. Not only does he think she is cut out for this, but thinks this place is better having someone like her, someone so sensitive, there. It’s all so nice! Langdon remains a mystery to me. What is his deal? Why is he so lovely and charming here and such an asshole when it comes to Trinity? I know she’s prickly, but his fuse seems nonexistent when she’s around.
He ends his conversation with Mel by bestowing her the greatest of gifts: a chance to sit and pull out a thousand-ish pieces of gravel stuck in the leg of a patient with road rash. She honestly couldn’t be more excited. After her break, Mel is back in action. It was desperately needed. Everyone working in this ER needs a break from time to time, even Dana, who demonstrates exactly how to handle the ups and downs of this work. Unfortunately for her, for us, for everyone, Dana’s latest smoke break at the end of the hour is disturbingly interrupted. Out on her break alone, Dana is suddenly sucker punched with a blow that knocks her to the ground. Things are blurry, but make no mistake — it was Doug Driscoll, who tosses his AMA form on top of her as he walks off, telling her he’ll take his chances. I gasped. I’m still processing just how unsettling and frightening the encounter is. It is a splash-of-cold-water reminder of how vulnerable these workers are dealing with some angry people every day. Not to wish ill on anyone, but if Doug doesn’t have some kind of cardiac episode that lands him right back in the hospital to face all of these people — to face Dana — again, there is no justice in this world.
• Wow, The Pitt is really sending mixed messages with this postpartum-endometritis case. On the one hand, Heather calls Cassie out for missing signs of Paula’s infection and gives the patient a less-than-thorough exam because she may have been biased due to Paula’s weight. It’s nice to have this show highlight this very real issue and for Heather to specifically say the words “her size doesn’t inherently make her unhealthy.” On the other, when Paula first comes in after crashing her car due to her going into sepsis, there’s a gag about Robby hurting his back from lifting her off the gurney. Really? Did we need to?
• McKay’s having a rough hour: All the work she and Dana do to get Piper, the young woman in the middle of the sex-trafficking situation, to ask them for help is for naught. Or is it? After Piper leaves with her boss, Dana notices she took the pen they offered her with the number of a national crisis hotline hidden inside.
• I’m sorry, does Dennis Whitaker have game? He certainly impresses Nurse Kim first with the way he handles the Kraken, who isn’t coming off a meth high at all but hasn’t been unable to keep up with his antipsychotic meds for his schizophrenia due to his unhoused status. Whitaker works with Kiara to get the guy added to the street team’s list, and he’ll personally go out once a month and administer the medication at his encampment. But also don’t sleep on Whitaker’s other move: snapping one of the still-loose rats’ neck under a sheet. Disturbing, sure, but the farm boy in the ER proves quite helpful. Ask him out, Nurse Kim!
• Theresa finds Robby after finishing up with the therapist but still hasn’t heard from her son David. He asks her to stay a little longer and see if he shows. Before he knows it, Robby sees a few cops approach Theresa. Did McKay call them in?
• Earl — who is collateral damage from the anti-masker fight — watching that awkward-as-hell interaction between Javadi and Mateo like it’s a car crash is all of us.
