Summary
The Pitt Season 2 has reached the point in the shift where things are getting just a bit too much. “4:00 P.M.” is a tough hour for several characters as the strength of their relationships (and stomachs) is tested.
Everybody has a breaking point, and The Pitt Season 2 has hit the stage where several characters are experiencing theirs at the same time. Episode 10 has mommy issues on multiple fronts, terrible bedside manner, petty squabbling, another godforsaken degloving injury, assisted suicide, a missing leg, a missing son, and even more foreshadowing about Robby’s inevitable motorcycle-related demise. Where to even begin?
I suppose it makes sense to begin with the aftermath of the water slide collapse, since that’s where we left things. As far as horrific accidents go, this one doesn’t seem to be all that bad; only two fatalities, and three new patients, albeit one of them an eight-year-old boy. Robby and Ogilvie — who, hilariously, brought a tattered paperback to work for his spare time, as if he’d have any — receive the first patient from the roof, a woman whose leg has been lopped off below the knee thanks to a long fall onto a metal fence.
Gnarly practical-looking injury notwithstanding, this is relatively unserious by the standards of The Pitt. It’s even framed for laughs, since Ogilvie has to carry the leg around in a plastic bag, and at one point the patient snaps awake from a ketamine stupor to see the loose limb being washed a few feet away from her. You’ve got to get the gags in where you can, I suppose.
The other water slide victim has a partially crushed lung and — worse, at least for the audience — a degloving injury. His wedding ring got caught on something and — imagine me theatrically retching here — rolled the skin of his finger all the way from the third knuckle to the tip. This becomes the responsibility of Langdon and Santos, who still aren’t getting on, though I guess it has only been an hour. In case you needed a clue about who’s on the right side of this dispute, even Garcia berates Santos for acting like a big baby around Langdon.
The third and final water slide victim is, worryingly, a young kid with major neck trauma. Al-Hashimi keeps him alive with a risky procedure that she later reveals she was performing for the very first time, so she’s obviously pretty cool under pressure, and she’s much less susceptible to a Garcia telling off than Santos is. I do still wonder if she has some kind of connection to Langdon that we don’t know about, since she seems oddly fond of him, but that can be a matter for another day.
Maybe she just has a good bedside manner, which is a topic that comes up a few times in The Pitt Season 2, Episode 10. Langdon’s is really good, for instance, which we see constantly, but especially with Mel’s sister, Becca, who has a urinary tract infection from having loads of sex with her boyfriend. Thanks to doctor-patient confidentiality, Becca delivers this news to Mel right after she has returned from her — unusually harsh, apparently — deposition, which is pretty funny.
Robby’s notably less empathetic. When the stress gets too much for Samira, she starts experiencing heart attack-like symptoms, and it’s only through Joy’s quick thinking that she’s able to get through the throng of patients badgering her for updates. But when it turns out her symptoms are stress-induced from her mother calling her all the time, Langdon is mockingly awful about it and tells her to get her head in the game or go home. He later apologises, but only after a bit of a reprimand from Al-Hashimi.
Robbie’s better with his pal, Duke, a motorcycle engineer with intermittent hoarseness, but then again, I suppose he would be. In the week’s obligatory bit of “Robby is going to die” foreshadowing, Duke, who doesn’t even seem especially concerned about his own health, tells Robby that riding a motorcycle for 12 hours right after a shift is utterly brain-dead. I concur! And braindead is likely to be how Robby ends up if all these clues are anything to go by.
But we’ve danced around the issue for long enough. Of particular note in this episode is, of course, McKay helping Roxie shuffle off her mortal coil by steadily dosing her with increasingly large amounts of morphine while her tearful family crowd her bedside and say their goodbyes. This has been an awful subplot in the best possible way, and the nice touch of McKay consoling one of her sons really adds to it. “Cancer sucks” is a pretty adroit summary of the situation. I feel you, kid.
On a brighter note — Dana committing insurance fraud to get Monica nicotine patches so that she can keep working without a smoke break? She’s the best.
