‘The Pitt’ Season 2, Episode 9 Recap – Don’t Play With Fireworks

When it was revealed that Season 2 of The Pitt was going to be set on the Fourth of July, everyone envisioned a lot of firework-related nastiness. In Episode 9, over halfway through the season, we finally get some of that. But it’s the least of anyone’s problems in PTMC. The digital systems are still down due to the threat of a possible cyberattack, and at the end of “3:00 P.M.”, we hear about another disaster, a collapse at a water park, that is going to be sending even more patients to the ER. Given that all of the other local hospitals have succumbed to the cyberattack that PTMC is trying to avoid, there’s only one place for those patients to go.

How much is too much? You have to wonder. Every glimpse of the hospital’s waiting area is so teeming with people that it’s difficult to imagine how any more could fit in, and I’m already worried about several of the patients we do have, at least a couple of whom are on death’s door. As if the redirection of the Westbridge patients wasn’t trying enough, now the hospital’s totally analog – which causes its own share of serious problems this week – and we’re due another influx? Nothing about this sounds promising.

In case you needed a reminder of how slick The Pitt can be, storytelling-wise, just look at how we discovered that information. The red phone ringing – after Monica had earlier berated the stand-in clerks for using it for personal calls – cutting to Dana’s forlorn expression, but then following Donnie into the bustling waiting room and panning to the TV news broadcast of the disaster. It’s just lovely, neat storytelling that doesn’t need to pander to the audience by over-explaining everything. The Pitt is good for a lot of reasons, but this kind of thing, that you barely even notice unless you’re looking for it, is chief among them.

Speaking of things you may not notice unless you’re looking for them, Robby is going to die, isn’t he? I know that seems a bit drastic, but we’ve already chronicled some of the ways in which this season is making that implication – the abundance of motorcycle injuries, the fact he’s taking his three-month sabbatical at a place called “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump” – and things are only getting more obvious. Towards the end of this hour, Robby has a conversation with Abbot about his mental state and how the self-reflection while he’s out on the road might lead to some darkness that he’ll need his support system to help him through. Even more alarmingly, Robby also asks Whitaker to house-sit for him, saying outright that if he “doesn’t come back,” then at least Whitaker will have a bachelor pad to call his own. It’s almost like he’s preparing for things to go on in his absence.

This perhaps seems a bit too cutesy in terms of storytelling, given how The Pitt usually does things, but it isn’t just me who has noticed it. Robby’s historic suicidal ideation can’t have just disappeared, and when the clues that something is amiss are this obvious, it’s something we need to be paying attention to. Everything – and everyone – is in place for the show to continue without him. But will it need to?

We get a couple of new patients in The Pitt Season 2, Episode 9. One of them is a young boy named Jude who has blown two of his fingers off with a firecracker, which is the kind of obligatory Fourth of July injury we’ve all probably been expecting. But the crux of his story is how he got into that situation in the first place. His blood work reveals he was drunk – he’s only 12, so this is alarming – and his sister, Chantal, clarifies that the local kids are a bad influence. This would be a problem at the best of times, but Chantal is raising Jude alone since their parents have been deported back to Haiti. The blood alcohol content mandates a social services intervention, but if they decide that Jude would be safer with his parents, that’d mean being sent to Haiti, a country he has never been to.

That horrible possibility aside, we had other new arrivals, including a woman with seemingly non-serious symptoms whom Javadi forgot to add to the board on account of the system failure, leading to her almost dying and an all-timer telling-off from Garcia, and Mel’s sister, Becca, who has a stomach ache probably stemming from a UTI and is tenderly treated by Langdon. I don’t think this is anything serious, but Becca’s presence is mostly a distraction for Mel, who is dragged away for her deposition.

Langdon continues to be a kind of hovering angel in this season (look at the way Jacqui and Jackie look at him on their way out), which makes his ongoing fallout with Robby more difficult to take. I think there may be something in the near-future that either allows them to repair their relationship or really tests Langdon’s commitment to being on the right path. Speaking of which, I’m worrying about McKay’s relationship with Roxie, who is definitely on her way out, potentially with some complicity, and if anything happens to Howard, I’m going to be very upset.

This show, man.