Summary
Things start to get extremely frayed in The Pitt as the end of the shift approaches, ICE agents arrive, and things continue to go badly wrong.
A lot can happen in two hours. Nobody is learning this quicker than the staff at PTMC, who keep reminding everyone that they’re only a couple of hours away from the end of what has been a veritable shift from hell. But we’re not there yet. There are still four episodes of The Pitt Season 2 to go, which means nobody is getting out of the hospital as early as they think. Every time somebody mentions the time, it’s like an older detective in a cop drama reminding his young partner he’s due for retirement.
So, how much can go wrong this week? Most of the problems in “5:00 P.M.” come from new arrivals, but there are a few ongoing cases to consider. Most notably, perhaps, is Roxie, who finally slips away in a peaceful morphine-induced haze. To say this has been building for a while, it’s a surprisingly unceremonious passing, but that’s how these things go when death is an everyday occurrence. Not that there aren’t knock-on effects, obviously. Javadi doesn’t feel great about it, not yet old and callused enough to properly grasp the idea of helping a patient to die being its own form of care, and McKay misses it, for reasons we’ll discuss in a moment. Robby later tells her off for stepping out at the wrong time. It’s not like she took a smoke break, but Robby’s getting closer and closer to the bone, as we’ll see.
For once, Robby’s issues aren’t anything to do with Langdon, who remains the go-between for Mel and her sister, Becca. The former, still rattling from the deposition, has been thoroughly wrong-footed by news of Becca’s flourishing sex life, and she’s adamant about proving that it’s somehow the fault of negligence. It takes both Langdon and, later, Dana, to explain to her that Becca is an adult who can make her own choices, and that those choices have nothing to do with her.
Feeling good about having helped to patch up this issue, Langdon also tries to make amends with Santos, at Al-Hashimi’s urging, but that doesn’t go quite so well. Santos is still furious with him for having stolen drugs from the ED and returned like a conquering hero after a stint in rehab, so she doesn’t want anything to do with him unless he tells everyone the real truth about why he disappeared. This feels… a bit unnecessarily punitive to me, but given how desperate Langdon is to win everyone over again, I imagine that’s the direction we’re heading in.
“5:00 P.M.” is also another deeply terrible hour for Ogilvie. First, McKay takes him to the park to help treat an unhoused patient named Kiki whose leg is necrotizing thanks to a drug addiction (this is why she misses Roxie’s death), and Ogilvie is just not equipped to deal with it. He has similar views about addicts as he does about overweight people, and his lack of empathy and smug know-it-all attitude are both going to get him in serious trouble. The latter does exactly that in this very episode, with his kidney stone patient suddenly crashing because Ogilvie basically diagnosed him on pure guesswork and wasn’t thorough enough with his examinations. It takes Javadi and her mother cutting the guy open and restarting his heart with internal compressions just to keep him alive long enough to have surgery. This should be a lesson learned for Ogilvie, but I thought that the last time he messed up.
Robby finds a way to blame this on Samira, too. As the senior resident, she should have double-checked Ogilvie’s work, and it’s another excuse for Robby to berate her about bringing her personal problems into the hospital. As I say, though, Robby’s becoming increasingly stressed. The big development in The Pitt Season 2, Episode 11 is the arrival of two ICE agents escorting a woman named Pranita, who has supposedly had a fall. They won’t allow her to make a phone call or be treated with anything even resembling dignity, and their presence alone causes several patients in need of care to flee rather than be treated. Eventually, Robby loses it completely and sends the agents out of the way, but they respond with characteristic maturity by trying to drag Pranita out of the hospital and then arresting Jesse when he tries to stop them.
As if that wasn’t enough bad news, Robby’s friend, Duke, has a worrying X-ray and needs a CT scan to rule out anything more serious. Since it’ll take more than the two hours remaining in Robby’s shift for those results to come back, he’s going to be sticking around longer than he anticipated. And how much more might go wrong in that time?
But let’s shift, briefly, to the new patients. One of them is a kid named Micah who has developed serious heatstroke from falling asleep in the car. His mother only took her eye off him for a moment, as is always the case, but that’s all it takes. Joy suspects she might have even been neglectful. But she doesn’t respond to the news that Micah might have suffered long-term cognitive impairment particularly well. On the contrary, she stumbles outside into traffic and almost kills herself before Al-Hashimi is able to pull her to safety. But as a result, she’s placed into an involuntary psychiatric hold, meaning that if Micah is discharged before her… well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Also new is an aggressive golf bro who doesn’t seem to be interesting at all until he wakes up at the very end of the episode and gets Emma in a headlock, which is where we cut to credits. Seriously, will this shift ever end?
