Summary
The Pitt Season 2 really starts to heat up in “10:00 A.M.”, as if things were alarmingly hot already, and a sudden influx of new patients leaves everyone reeling.
I’ve never worked in a hospital, but I have seen one and a bit seasons of The Pitt, which I reckon is the next best thing. So, I can tell you with a reasonable degree of authority that 10:00 A.M. is where things start getting a bit nuts. Yes, Season 2 has now reached the stage where there are too many patients to keep track of, too many character-driven subplots to count, and already-bad circumstances getting rapidly, dramatically worse. Plus, someone actually says out loud in Episode 4 that 10:00 A.M. is where things get going, so who am I to argue?
As was teased in the previous episode, another local hospital, Westbridge, has closed, for reasons that are as-yet mysterious but are nonetheless the subject of a betting pool. A power cut? A flood? Could be either. But what’s for certain is that all the patients who were heading there in ambulances have been redirected to PTMC, which means a rapid influx of new cases for everyone to worry about. There are no prosthetic penises here, which is a nice reprieve, but a man does have his coccyx reseated through his asshole, so that’s nice.
In terms of pacing, what this means is that The Pitt can’t really do a mini-subplot like the Tree of Life thing last week. There’s a close equivalent, though, which gets a bit less time but still resonates. A patient named Mr. Diaz is a diabetic whose condition has worsened due to, it turns out, consistent and deliberate underdosing of prescribed insulin. Diaz works hard but doesn’t have insurance, and therefore can’t afford to keep reupping his essential, life-saving supplies. Now he’s in the hospital, he can’t afford to be there, either, but he’s too proud to accept his daughter setting up a GoFundMe. Noelle arrives like the Ghost of Christmas Budgeting to clarify that his family isn’t really entitled to any support either, given they make too much money to qualify for things being paid for on their behalf but not enough to pay for anything on their own.
That’s a pretty searing and refreshingly mundane example of how fundamentally broken the American healthcare system is. You can imagine — though don’t for too long; it’s pretty depressing — how many people are in this exact same situation, where being ill means bankruptcy, but working all the time probably means being ill. It’s an unsustainable nightmare scenario. I’m sure we’ll check back in as we go.
While we’re on the subject of patients, we get a bit more with Jackson Davis, whose sister Jada has arrived to see him and clarifies that he isn’t typically the type to act so violently that he has to be tased. His condition might be pretty serious, so this doesn’t bode well. Then there’s Vince, who fell through a skylight while doing parkour. His girlfriend won’t stop filming him, but she’s suddenly less inclined to do so when James blithely removes a deep-seated piece of glass, and Vince almost bleeds to death. I think we can all agree that James was due a humbling, and The Pitt Season 2, Episode 4 provides it. It’ll probably be the first of many.
What else? Well, we’ve got a touching sequence with a bulimic woman who is very tenderly treated by King and Santos, the latter of whom is visibly edgy since Al-Hashimi won’t stop pestering her about getting her charts done. We also have Willow, the girl with her eye glued shut, who demands to see Pittsburgh’s best doctor, the enigmatic social media icon Dr. J, who turns out to be Javadi, much to Langdon’s amusement.
Already, Al-Hashimi isn’t especially well-liked, but she’s taking to being in charge like a duck to water and is overruling Robby at every turn, most notably in pulling Langdon out of triage and sticking him back in the ED proper to help deal with the never-ending torrent of new patients. Now, granted, Robby is being pretty unusually touchy about this, so she kind of has a point, but he was clearly avoiding having to work with Langdon directly, and he isn’t convinced that this is the universe’s way of helping them reconnect.
We close with even more worrying news — a previous patient returns to triage with signs of MRSA “or worse”, which is certainly not good news, and the clues about Robby’s future death by horrific motorcycle accident just keep piling up. As I pointed out in the previous episode, there’s no way it’s a coincidence at this point. I’m starting to worry about everyone and everything, which is just how The Pitt seems to like it.
