‘The Pitt’ Season 2, Episode 3 Recap – This Is Getting Pretty Heavy

The secret to The Pitt – or, more accurately, one of several secrets, but arguably the most important – is realism. Case in point: There’s a burn in Episode 3, “9:00 A.M.”, that almost made me gag. But lifelike injury isn’t the only form of realism, and it isn’t the kind that powers this instalment, which is the point in Season 2 where you can comfortably say, “Okay, now things are going to get really awful.” Are we excited about that? I’m not sure “excited” is necessarily the right word, but this is why we tune in.

But the realism I’m talking about is this: PTMC feels like it exists in the real world. The Pitt feels like it’s about real people. Sometimes that’s just a consequence of how it’s written and performed, but sometimes it’s something deeper, a kind of overriding, nebulous feeling that the stories it’s telling and the societal issues it’s touching on are coming from a place of intimate experience. That takes a very literal form here, since Robby’s latest patient, a woman named Yana Kovalenko, is a survivor of the Tree of Life shooting.

On October 27, 2018, a man named Robert Bowers – who was sentenced to death in 2023 and remains on Death Row – shot and killed eleven congregants in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in a horrendous act of senseless antisemitism. That really happened. Yana, a fictional character, wasn’t really there, but she speaks in the voice of those who were, who survived the first wave of the violence but have been living with the resulting tremors ever since. She has suffered serious burns after dropping a samovar on the ground, startled by the sudden sound of firecrackers. On that day in 2018, she was entering the synagogue when the shooting started. You don’t need me to tell you how these two things are related.

Yana doesn’t just represent the long-lasting impact of these terrible tragedies, but also how people engage – or don’t engage – with their faith in the aftermath. It’s easy to feel disconnected from the idea of a higher power when things happen that are so heinous that it seems inconceivable a benevolent God would allow them to pass by without intervention. In the instances in which we’ve seen Robby – a Jew – turn to God, it has been in desperation, almost disbelief. Yana recognises immediately from his surname that he’s Jewish, but Robby can’t really articulate his relationship with his faith. It’s something that, I suspect, he’s going to have cause to think about across the remainder of his shift.

Why is this important? Well, aside from its obvious value as touching homage, and its more pragmatic function as a way to further characterise Robby, it also gets at something deeper about why The Pitt is an important, valuable show. It understands at its core that medicine is about compassion and connection. People can’t be effectively treated without these things. Just look around in The Pitt Season 2, Episode 3. A man discovers he has a mass in his brain that might be a tumour; that might have ruined his relationship with his ex-wife, who remains his emergency contact, back in his life now, perhaps when it’s too late for them to meaningfully share much more of it. A man is accused of child-abuse, counters that accusation by accusing his new girlfriend of the same, and then learns that his daughter is very sick and neither of them is an abuser after all. An addict, initially jovial and comfortable, turns suddenly desperate once he realizes that he needs that addiction to cope.

These are all little tightropes of human experience, to be carefully navigated by people with flaws of their own but a surplus of empathy. People willing to help. People like the Muslims who rallied around the Jewish community rocked by the Tree of Life shooting, which Yana has never forgotten. It’s never quite as easy as just figuring out what’s wrong and sending someone on their way. Each little capsule case speaks to something bigger and more important; reveals more about the patients and the doctors who treat them, and the world they’re both trying to navigate.

I’ll leave you with something worrying. The Pitt isn’t necessarily prone to mystery-box-style storytelling, dropping clues every episode about where things might be going. But I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe that we’re not supposed to be having some suspicions about Robby’s upcoming sabbatical.

We already know that Robby rides his motorcycle without a helmet – something he lies about in “9:00 A.M.” – and that he has flirted with suicidal ideation before, although admittedly only in a moment of pretty extreme stress. This episode includes a dead motorcyclist who wasn’t wearing a helmet. When Robby mentions his upcoming sabbatical in front of Yana, she berates him about how stupid it is for a man his age to be riding such a dangerous vehicle.

And where is Robby going? It was clarified earlier that he’s going on a three-month motorcycle trip to a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Alberta called, and I kid you not, “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.” And we’re supposed to not be concerned about this? In the coming wave of emergency casualties, it might be easy to forget. But I’m going to be keeping my eyes on any more suggestions in this regard, all the same.

This show’s really good, isn’t it?

RELATED:

• The Pitt Season 2 Episode 2 Recap