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The talk about the Adamson of it all in terms of the Robby and Samira dynamic has reminded me of something I’ve been curious about for ages… Do you think Wyle, Gemmill, and company genuinely believe Robby is a good boss/department chief, and that he’s a good fit for this type of leadership position?

After season 1, I was sure I was watching a show that was deliberately depicting the Robby character as a skilled doctor, a decent person in many ways, but also a toxic boss with unconcious biases exacerbated by his untreated mental illness. I figured we’d get a reveal down the line that, whether Adamson sought to shape Robby as his heir or not, Robby was always going to struggle in an admin heavy role like Chief, but especially so after being thrust into it prematurely/out of necessity due to Adamson’s death in the midst of the pandemic. I figured Robby may have been Adamson’s pick, but the higher ups at the hospital probably always had their reservations, but just couldn’t go to the effort of fielding outside candidates on short notice during peak Covid.

Even part of the way through season 2, I still assumed that, though the writing was not up to par with season 1, they were still staying the course. I figured the addition of Al-Hashimi would lead to some sort of reveal that several years after the height of Covid, the hospital was finally getting around to pursuing a change of leadership, and maybe they were giving Al-Hashimi a sort of trial run at the position while Robby was on hiatus. Robby has tenure, so he wouldn’t be fired, he’d just be demoted back to another senior attending, like Abbot, which is presumably the position he held prior to Adamson’s death. I thought Robby would be back in season 3 forced to reckon with no longer being the ultimate authority in the department, and over the course of the season might begin to realize that he had been using his position as chief an an unhealthy crutch/coping mechanism. If he could exert external control over the department and its staff, then he wouldn’t have to think about how out of control he feels internally. Basically, Robby being relieved of that crutch, plus removed from the stressors of leadership that he was never fully suited for and from the pressure of feeling that he has to fill Adamson’s shoes, would be a necessary first step in him finally confronting his own issues and getting help. I don’t know if you’ve seen ER, but I assumed they were utilizing Al-Hashimi as a sort of Kerry Weaver type character, where she’s brought in and she excels more in the admin-heavy aspects of the job as chief, vs Mark Greene (Robby). In VERY broad strokes, Mark frequently bristles at her proposed changes and her seemingly cozying up to some hospital higher ups, they clash at times, but he often concedes that she’s better suited to the role than him. Robby had felt he owed to to Adamson to step up, but it isn’t something that’s right or healthy for him in the long term after all, and admitting that doesn’t have to be him failing Adamson. Plus, Robby may have a shot at reconciliation with Samira when he eventually realizes that his attitude towards her was potentially a kind of projection, wherein by insisting she may not be fit for her desired role in the ED, he was actually battling his own insecurities of how inadequate he feels in his own role, with Adamson’s shadow looming over him.

But before Robby comes to those mature realizations, I figured we’d get some juicy stuff with Robby’s typical pettiness, shifting loyalties/ informal camps among the other staff, which would allow them to flesh out the Mohan-Al-Hashimi vs Robby mentorship dynamics. As Robby is being forced to recognize that Al-Hashimi is probably better suited for the role than him, and maybe starting to realize that in the future Samira could be too, given the proper support (which he has often failed to provide her), probably with Abbot pointing out to him that Samira was always cut out for the ED, Robby was just too busy hating himself and the parts of her that reminded him of himself to see the truth. Langdon could serve as a parallel to Robby as the presumed heir who ultimately is not suited to the stresses of higher leadership, but can still do great work as another doctor within the department. Robby realizing he and Langdon being similar in this way perhaps aiding to their eventual reconciliation. Maybe Mel or Santos or others feeling caught in the middle at various points, etc. Basically I thought it would be a sure fire set-up for meaty workplace drama in general, as well as great stuff for Robby’s and Samira’s overall arcs.

After season 2, Samira’s confirmed exit, and then reading some of the comments from Wyle and Gemmill in their interviews, I’m honestly baffled. It sort of sounds like they think Robby is a great boss/chief minus a few hiccups. Robby’s treatment of Samira is just him being a bit “mean” because she needs something to “get her in line.” Robby “loves” McKay. The writing ensured Robby was correct to mistrust Al-Hashimi, despite him having had no evidence at the start, and it seems to want the audience to agree with Robby that she actually IS unfit to lead (unlike Robby? LOL), and also that Robby is right about Samira as well? Other characters insisting how much everyone needs him specifically, ending with the halo around him… If Robby is just the tragic but ultimately correct hero, is the drama for future seasons solely going to just be how much of a sad but admirable martyr he is? Isn’t that…really boring? I’m baffled that Wyle seems to think the audience just can’t handle how complex Robby is when he and the writers seem determined to make Robby and the show itself as simplistic and straightforward as possible, even to the point of stripping away/contradicting things they set-up in season 1 to do so. Idk though, curious your thoughts?

I struggle with understanding what message they're trying to convey here because the bizarre choices they make wind up undercutting every possible message. I think my best understanding of it comes down to two main points:

They're interested in presenting a version of events where Robby is a victim of circumstance – where he's doing the best anyone can in a very difficult job.

They're really only interested in one flaw, which is a very boring anger issues and lashing out from trauma sort of thing.

But at the end of the day, regardless of what they want to convey, what they did convey is something very different. I am...going to put this under a read more, because I'm about to start rambling as I talk about all the related aspects of the story that this ask calls to mind. Bear with me; I have a lot of thoughts on this. Please forgive me for how long this is going to be.

I totally agree with you when you say that the setup was all there for Robby having to accept that he's not a skilled administrator and what that implies about how he's been treating his residents, how he feels unable to live up to Adamson's memory. Or rather...what I think the build up was really for was, yes, an acknowledgement that Robby is not a natural fit for the role and really only got it as a matter of circumstances, but more of a shared responsibility plotline, because Robby and Al-Hashimi have different skillsets, the show kept stressing this idea that it's too big a job for one person, and in a lot of ways the two characters were set up to balance each other.

I think there are two issues intersecting here: teaching and management, which are related, but not the same. Robby and Al-Hashimi have such different approaches to both of these. And I think you're absolutely right that season one establishes that management is not Robby's strong suit at all, setting up for a storyline of him being replaced. He spends the entire season alternating between avoiding Gloria and butting heads with her, and his department is explicitly under threat – she raises the possibility of him being replaced like three times! There are aspects to his job he refuses to take seriously until he's faced with looming consequences. And this ties to how he behaves as a teacher, which is the other part of his job.

The teacher-manager balance is really interesting when we consider how entangled the job and the education are in this setting. Robby needs to both teach residents how to be good doctors and manage how the entire department functions, and that's such a hard balance for one person to strike. I've previously called Robby a poor teacher due to how he struggles to communicate with Samira in season one as he tries to mould her into his vision of an ideal doctor. But that's not exactly accurate, because those interactions are so fundamentally tied to how he thinks the department should run – it has very little to do with her work itself. It is being a poor teacher, because his only method is to just tell her to move faster without really understanding or acknowledging her concerns, giving her no guidance as to how she can do that effectively and safely, but the bigger guiding factor is that his way of managing her is less about actually making her better and more about trying to use her to solve an institutional problem, thereby failing to understand her very important perspective, failing to take advantage of her unique approach, and failing to takes any steps to reduce the risks she's been trying to avoid. Robby thinks he's trying to teach her – he talks about how he has been trying to break her of bad habits, he frames it as a matter of personal improvement – but it's all fundamentally linked to him thinking she needs to operate in a certain manner for the overall department to work, and he's not good at getting that to happen, in large part because no matter what she does or how good the outcome is, he is so fixated on his own vision of what she needs to be doing that he can't acknowledge her successes that deviate from it.

One of the things hindering him from being effective in shaping his department is that he isn't treating all his employees the same way. Robby's department is dysfunction junction because he is not holding consistent standards. He hovers over Samira, but lets Langdon do whatever he wants. When Whitaker has a setback, he's so concerned about him and even asks Dana to keep an eye on him, but when Javadi faints, he's dismissive. Mel can go pet a dog for half an episode without comment, but Samira simply talking to a patient is "wasting time". I thought this was more or less intentional in season one – not that they were trying to show that Robby treats men and women differently, or that he's harsher on brown women, even though those things were true, but I really, truly thought the way he treated Samira was meant as a way of showing him being more invested in her than in anyone else. In season one, he's constantly paying attention to Samira. He's holding her to higher standards. He doesn't display that level of investment in anyone else, including Langdon – he gives Langdon much more thorough and thoughtful praise than he ever does Samira, but that is a moment, not the consistent attention he pays to Samira. This made where they went with it in season two jarring as all hell.

I've said this before, but season two really felt like it was constantly setting up for things that never came to fruition. Robby's inconsistency in management is one of those things, because in season one, there was plausible deniability for his behaviour – he was paying so much attention to Whitaker because Whitaker lost his first patient; he wasn't going to be as tough on Mel as on Samira because it was Mel's first day; he was letting Langdon get away with whatever because he saw Langdon's faults as less troublesome to the main thing he was trying to achieve; his behaviour towards Collins was rooted in treating her as his ex-girlfriend more than a resident. The pattern was suspicious, but each individual thing could be explained away as not inherently indicative of bias. This was especially true with his treatment of Samira – it was notable that he was being harsher on her than anyone else, and it is impossible to fully disconnect his treatment of her from him having less empathy for women of colour, but the full picture, with his deep investment in her, did ultimately feel like it was the result of a flawed man with good intentions trying to push a woman he sees a huge amount of potential in to be better, unable to really communicate with her but thinking she's their best shot. But then came season two, and Robby is still paying undue attention to Whitaker. He's still letting Mel get away with stuff he would – and has – yelled at Samira for. He's still clearly being overly permissive with Langdon because Langdon's got zero restrictions whatsoever, with no one supervising him or needing to sign off on his orders. And now he's being so, so invested in these other characters in a way that used to be exclusive to Samira, while Samira, he straight up ignores for two thirds of the season. I'm pretty sure she is the only character he offers zero praise to or about for the entire season.

Season two makes it so glaringly obvious that he's playing favourites. And even outside of his favouritism, there are times when he just refuses to deal with interpersonal issues that are an important part of being a manager. Robby clearly doesn't care about either Ogilvie or Joy, but even there, his weaknesses as a manager pop up, because his reaction to Ogilvie interrupting and talking over her and her snarking back is...amusement. Joy should not have to speak up for herself in those situations! She should have someone that cares about her education making sure she has a good learning environment! So season two really did build on what season one set up of Robby not being good in this role. And yet there were no consequences whatsoever!

This is all a really interesting contrast to Al-Hashimi, because Al-Hashimi's broadly consistent in how she treats the residents. She is firm but fair with Santos – she provides criticism when it's merited, but is also quick to praise her work, and while I initially thought she came in unnecessarily hot with the whole "you wouldn't want to repeat your R2 year because of this" comment, having thought more about all the factors that went into that, most notably the fact we know Al-Hashimi had raised charting as an issue several hours before this conversation, it seems way more reasonable. Despite having preexisting relationships with both Mel and Samira, positive enough that she greets Samira with a hug, she doesn't exhibit any kind of favouritism towards them. The one instance that seems like her picking favourites feels less a matter of her as a character picking a favourite and more a matter of who the narrative prioritizes – which is to say, her responding to Robby being cold with Langdon by being very friendly (pulling him in from triage, telling him that she thinks it's great that he's part of a PHP, reassuring him that she's glad he's back) in contrast to not saying a word to Samira after Robby screamed at her felt less like a matter of her caring more about Langdon and more like a matter of the show being unwilling to prioritize Samira's perspective enough to give her a scene reacting to any of this treatment that isn't about how it affects Robby.

Al-Hashimi isn't perfect in her interactions and management style – for example, she visibly struggles with trying to communicate with Santos and effectively manage her authority issues. But it's a function of being new to the environment, and she adapts throughout the day! And some of the ways in which Santos bristles are simply not her fault – Santos's "Robo-Doc" comment is clearly less about anything Al-Hashimi has done and more to do with Santos not knowing what to do with someone that's so reserved. In general, when it comes to management, Al-Hashimi is better than Robby. She comes in and she sees so many areas where things aren't functioning efficiently and she tries to fix them. She's not picking favourites. And she actually cares about the administrative part of her job! Such a big part of being a manager is serving as a shield and enabling others to do their jobs. The fact that the CEO calls her over Robby makes it clear Robby has burnt bridges, and not in a way that has actually gained him anything, further supporting the value of Al-Hashimi's more collaborative style.

Despite her empathy, deep desire to improve systems, and sharp managerial competence, though, Al-Hashimi isn't necessarily a great teacher, but for very different reasons than Robby. For example, in that first trauma case in 2x01, Robby and Al-Hashimi clash over teaching methodologies. Despite her having this relationship with Samira and clearly liking her, Al-Hashimi still is very assertive in providing instructions, rather than letting Samira make the decisions on what to do – and this same situation applies throughout the season. Samira is a senior resident, but she spends the majority of the season with Al-Hashimi closely monitoring her. I remember watching that for the first time and being totally baffled as to just what the hell that was about. Samira was working more autonomously in season one as an R3. And while I think this is in general part of a broad pattern of the season refusing to treat Samira like a senior resident – Robby also closely monitoring her cases, Whitaker doing most of the teaching of med students, no one reporting to her – and therefore, more about the writing and less about the character, this first moment of it was something Robby explicitly called out, making it an actual moment of contrast that we can look at as a little odd.

Now like I said before, Robby is a poor teacher himself at times – the bigger issue is that he's a poor manager, but it manifests in his teaching by his complete inability to give Samira a reasonable protocol she can follow. Everything to do with how he handles the Nandi case demonstrates this: he tells Samira that being a good doctor is about knowing when to dig deep and when to move on...except she's totally right that she should be digging deep in that case! He tells her this, but not only is he wrong in the specific case he's talking about, he makes no attempt at giving her advice on how to know when to do this. As we see during the MCI, that protocol is hugely helpful for her! She doesn't linger on any case because the "five minutes per patient" protocol is consistent, logical, and clear. It was the sort of effective protocol that means she doesn't have to worry about her biggest fear: that certain patient populations are getting worse treatment! Having it leads to her thriving! So we see Robby being so hard on Samira it harms her confidence. When she's vindicated, he doesn't apologize or offer her any praise for a job well done, and in fact, gets mad at her for not consulting him. He even gets mad at Collins for supporting her! Effectively, the Robby-Samira relationship lays bare all of Robby's worst flaws as both a teacher and a manager.

Robby isn't always great at staying out of the way in traumas – at one point, he interrupts Collins when she's running one; in season two, he spends a lot of time hovering over Samira as well (which really truly should have been a matter of the two attendings feeling territorial, rather than treated as totally normal, but I digress). In general, though, he does give his residents room on how they want to run their cases, and the times he doesn't are connected to his goals in running the department. This post is getting way too long, so I'll table the discussion about how Robby's favouritism plays into his teaching quite apart from his management in ways that are very comparable to how Langdon operates, such that his teaching is mostly procedural and he struggles immensely while still making more of an effort because he very much sees himself as a teacher for later, but setting aside all those caveats, I think the real conclusion there is...I think all the evidence is indicative that Robby would be an infinitely better teacher than he is without the pressures of running a department to consider to consider, and I think Al-Hashimi's strengths have not been demonstrated to be in the domain of teaching. So the balance of the two really would be Al-Hashimi handling the higher level concerns and Robby being more of the detail guy. And the struggle to settling towards that idea could have been such a meaty thing to explore, not just in terms of Robby adapting to not being the ultimate authority and workplace drama through shifting loyalties, but also through an exploration of some of the things that felt underbaked about Al-Hashimi as a character.

What I mean by this is...Al-Hashimi felt to me like a lot of character concepts thrown together in a way could make sense through generous readings and heavy examination, but felt underwritten, like the writers just didn't want to do the work to flesh out the ideas they presented. This was true about a lot of season two, but with everyone else, we had season one, with its more consistent character work, to fall back on. With Al-Hashimi, we have to do the work to connect the dots. And one of those dots that seems really weird and hard for me to square with the rest of her behaviour is what I mentioned earlier: micromanaging Samira's trauma case. She immediately requests gloves; tells them to convert to a clamshell instead of letting them decide a plan; wants to try clamping the bleed herself when Garcia can't get it. This was primarily an unfortunate consequence of the show being mostly interested in introducing this contrast between Robby and Al-Hashimi's approaches and setting the stage for Robby to recommend the riskier hilar flip, but even so, it did occur, and so there is this precedent that Al-Hashimi is eager to do the hands on work. Which makes sense when we consider what we know about her!

She chose to specialize in emergency medicine. She had the laser ablation that cleared her to drive and work as an attending twelve years before the season, when she was twenty eight. If we operate on the assumption that hers was the standard US path to becoming a doctor – med school at twenty two, residency at twenty six – it's a reasonable assumption that she got the ablation during her residency such that she could work independently. She was working at the VA, which isn't a trauma centre, but jumped at the chance to work on less routine things – not just when it came to taking the PTMC job, but by choosing to work with MSF! One way to read this is...just as Robby is clinging to being the department chair and ultimate authority as this huge part of his identity, Al-Hashimi is clinging to the ability to practice. She very much wants to be seeing patients, doing procedures. So part of the potential conflict with Robby could have been that...she doesn't actually want to be managing, necessarily! She's good at it, she cares about it in a systemic way, but all her choices have been about enabling her to be hands on with patients. And Robby's whole resistance to her at the end of the day is because he wants to believe the most important part of the role is practising. So the end result is...both Robby and Al-Hashimi are better suited for specific aspects of the role, and they're for different reasons, reluctant to accept that.

I think a lot about Adamson in the context of Dana telling Robby that the department is bigger than one person. She specified that it survived without Adamson, and will survive without her or Robby, too. Someone pointed out a while ago that as far as Robby is concerned, the department didn't survive losing Adamson. Him struggling to live up to Adamson's memory is such a critical part of season one. Season one portrays Adamson as this larger than life figure. We do have to assume that some of this is just Robby's biased viewpoint talking! He was a real person, so he had to have flaws in how he operates, but we never meet him, so we can't understand what those flaws were. And what's more is, time and time again, we get reminders of how good Adamson was at his job that aren't just from Robby. Gloria compares Robby unfavourably to Adamson when pointing out how other hospitals are more effectively managing their patient load, telling him that Adamson understood this as a nationwide problem. And Adamson was apparently both a good teacher and a good manager! An old man with dementia comes in and remembers, fifty years after the fact, that Adamson was an amazing teacher. We watch Robby trying to do the same, to be a good teacher and a good department chair, and it's killing him! He can't do it! And even Al-Hashimi, who is in so many ways better, who is calm and methodical while Robby is out of control and emotional, isn't demonstrating an ability to do both parts of the job. So there's just so much room for really rich character work that the writers seem reluctant to lean into.

This has other implications as well. If they were to actually lean into the idea that Robby's struggling in this environment – not just as a matter of his mental health, but as a matter of not being a fit to fill his mentor's shoes – it would make a lot of the decisions with other characters – particularly Al-Hashimi and Samira, but also, to a lesser extent, Javadi, and for the opposite reason, Mel – taste less bitter. Let's start with Al-Hashimi. It is gross that Robby gets to be vindicated in his suspicions of Al-Hashimi for a reason that had nothing to do with why he was hostile towards her! It just is! This woman spends the whole day proving herself and proving that though her style may be more conservative, they do have value, only for circumstances to force her to have to demonstrate that she can operate in Robby's style as well, and after that, the conclusion is that it doesn't matter: no matter how good she is and how much she adapts, she can't do it.

Don't get me wrong – I like that Al-Hashimi is dealing with a physical disability and how that contrasts with Robby's mental struggles. I like that she's taking steps to ameliorate the problem, whereas he denies there is one. But the message is broken. It doesn't make sense. Yes, Al-Hashimi needs accommodations in the workplace, but she was aware of what she needed and took steps to getting it – and these are accommodations that would help everyone! It's stated time and time again that they're understaffed! Robby is clearly incapable of doing it alone! We see that in how both seasons involve these really tricky cases where he and Abbot wind up working on the same patient! The "what if there's two trauma patients" situation applies to him, too. He may not have a physical disability, but he also can't be two places at once! Her seizures only last seconds. It takes that long to cross to the other room. It ends up being this really gross thing where Robby can push through his struggles because they're mental, and even though he can't do it forever and he needs help, once he gets it, he'll be able to do the job, no problem, unlike Al-Hashimi. If they had instead leaned into the idea that Robby can't do it either, it would have felt way less gross and way less like part of a broad pattern of the show presenting the idea of brown women not belonging in emergency medicine.

A similar situation applies to Samira. Lots of viewers have claimed that Samira's arc is about not belonging in the ED. The producers haven't said that, exactly, but I remember one of the times they were defending the decision to cut her, they made sure to assert we'd watched her "struggle". Setting aside for a minute the fact that that very clearly is not what her arc actually is – all of season one is dedicated to her proving just how good an ER doctor she is, season two is about her struggling with temporary outside stressors, and literally the entire point is that everyone is struggling – if the writers really, truly believed they were telling a story about someone that's working so hard but not suited for what they're doing; truly thought Samira was the best character to tell that story; and were committed to also having their other South Asian female character not end up in EM, the most logical way to make it not racist and misogynistic that out of all the residents, it's somehow only the brown women that don't belong in EM, that it's somehow just Samira that can't cut it despite other characters exhibiting her flaws and far worse would have been to delve into the fact Robby isn't suited for his position, either! Season one illustrated that Robby and Samira are so similar. If he can recover and keep doing the job, but she somehow can't, it's just deeply, deeply sexist. But if he also can't? Then we have a story that isn't just unforgivably misogynistic.

I don't actually think Samira's story in any way set up for her to leave. I think if anything, regardless of what the writers intended, what they wrote was a poorly executed story of bad management driving her out. And like you said, I do think a much better arc that follows the what we actually saw as set up would have been that Robby isn't suited for managing the department, but Samira is – she's his younger self, she's demonstrated strengths he doesn't have, she is explicitly the person he needs more of if he wants to keep his department. But damn, if they were insistent upon her leaving, it would have made infinitely more sense in the context of Robby not being suitable for leadership, whether it be Robby also not being suitable for the job or Samira being perfectly suitable for the job but Robby's bad management preventing her from doing it. The bad management part was almost there. But they refused to commit, and so something that could have been there is made kind of nonsensical by the utter refusal to let any resident truly look to Al-Hashimi for leadership.

A huge problem with season two, as I see it, is the complete lack of logical follow through. Nothing was taken to its natural conclusion. The question that drives how I approach stories when trying to understand them, understand my opinion of them, is so what. Why does each scene matter? What does it all build to? What are the creators trying to convey? Ensemble stories are big, complicated things. By their very nature, they introduce all kinds of ideas. Not all of them can be explored in depth, or be a major driving arc. But in season two, it felt like nothing did. Every single plot line felt underexplored, and it feels so evident when it comes to the Robby Al-Hashimi of it all. For all that Robby and Al-Hashimi come into conflict about procedure, teaching philosophy, and management approach, we don't actually see their different styles having an impact on the residents, because the season just kept bending everything back around Robby. At no point do we actually see Robby's behaviour actually pushing people towards Al-Hashimi, or real reasons why people would prefer Robby. The closest we get is Dana tampering with a monitor to keep a patient longer like Al-Hashimi wanted, which is different because she's a nurse, not a doctor in their chain of command. It's got nothing to do with being frustrated with Robby or choosing her over him. Their conflicting visions for the emergency department mean nothing!

It's especially odd when you take into consideration how much of Robby's story revolves around the idea of him wanting to be needed and belief that the department will fall apart without him. One would think that would make other characters looking to Al-Hashimi for leadership over him be the obvious thing to do, such that he has to struggle with what it means for him and coming back! There are the slightest traces of this happening when Samira starts talking to her about her fellowship search while not bringing it up to Robby, but because it's in the context of her having not spoken to Robby at all up to that point, it really does not feel like her making any kind of choice about mentorship. Even less so when Al-Hashimi's advice is something that clearly doesn't appeal to Samira and is the same advice Robby gives her later completely independently, not to mention when Samira tries to ask Abbot about a recommendation letter but not Al-Hashimi.

I think maybe a part of this was that the writers wanted to have it both ways: they wanted to have Robby have emotions about being replaced, but they didn't want him actually replaceable. Robby had to be the ultimately most influential figure. So Langdon can't develop a real and meaningful relationship with Al-Hashimi. Santos can't realize that Robby is responsible for putting her in this terrible position and that Al-Hashimi's more worthy of trust. Samira can't turn to anyone else, she just has to beg for Robby's approval and end the day telling him that they need him. It's not even just Al-Hashimi! It also felt absurdly incomplete that Samira never got that talk with Abbot about her fellowship options. It's a basic rule of three situation – Samira has three attendings. She spoke to two of them about her future, both of whom recommended geriatrics, which clearly disappointed her. The set up was right there for her to get to speak to a third attending, who would recommend something different. But that couldn't happen, because Robby has to get the final word.

There was a broad refusal to allow characters to have relationships outside of Robby, and it was especially jarring when it comes to Samira because there were just so many underexplored relationships – even apart from Al-Hashimi and Abbot, there was Santos and Whitaker, with whom she had really significant interactions with last season that were erased as if they never existed. But I do think the Al-Hashimi one might be the most glaring. Samira's primary identifying trait in season one is her ridiculously polished professionalism. She's deeply compassionate, but she's rigid. She treats empathy as a skill that can and should be developed. She follows strict protocols. Her approach is straight out of a textbook. Now, gee, I wonder who that sounds like!

Before season two, I was deeply skeptical about what we heard about Al-Hashimi because it felt like she was filling a spot that was naturally Samira's in terms of this conflict with Robby over how to practice medicine. I also feared her introduction, with her history with Samira, was intended to reduce the significance of the Robby-Samira relationship, to diminish the Robby-Samira similarities, through giving her a different mentor. And what happened was some unholy combination of terrible choices, because none of it mattered. They reduced Samira's role in the conflict with Robby and gave part of her role to Al-Hashimi without really taking advantage of how Al-Hashimi being an attending means there should be more influence over the entire department whereas the Robby-Samira conflict was thematically broad, but narrower in scope to specific patients. And yet they didn't actually explore any of the implications of her having worked with Al-Hashimi because they completely erased all those details about how Samira operates as if they were never there to begin with! So they gave Al-Hashimi her style, and instead of leaning into the idea that Al-Hashimi was a good mentor to her when Robby wasn't, or into the trait season one Samira had of learning from all kinds of sources, or anything about this relationship, they just...basically pretended it didn't exist.

Samira and Al-Hashimi have a shared history. Robby screams at Samira after her panic attack, and Al-Hashimi calls out the lack of empathy in that response. But Al-Hashimi doesn't talk to Samira after that. And Samira's response isn't to gravitate towards a mentor that doesn't scream at her, either – it's to lean further into caring about Robby's opinion of her. All the significant conversations she has after that point are with Robby. Not one is with Al-Hashimi. Which is especially insane because when I heard they had worked together, I completely assumed it was a med school rotation. This had seemed supported by the first episode of season two, when Al-Hashimi says that they worked together "a few years" ago. But when Robby asks Samira about it, the revelation is that it wasn't just one, but two rotations, and rotations that occurred during her residency, one as recently as within the past year. Al-Hashimi therefore has recent experience with Samira – recent and very positive, as evidenced by the fact Al-Hashimi's reaction to seeing her was to beam and hug her. Which makes Al-Hashimi's urge to instruct during a trauma, rather than trusting her judgment, seem really freaking weird! So there's no exploration of how they have similar styles and Samira may have learned her style from observing Al-Hashimi. No exploration of how Robby and Al-Hashimi must have vastly different understandings of Samira and her skills, at the very least because they've known her in two entirely different contexts. Not even Samira grappling with what it says that these two mentor figures independently give her the same advice about what to do with her career that she hates. They didn't have to introduce it at all if they were going to do that! At the end of the day, the Samira Al-Hashimi relationship served no purpose except for giving Robby a person to interrogate about her.

To go off on a bit of a tangent for a minute (it relates, I promise), there's a scene in 1x14 that I thought about a lot in the aftermath of watching season one. And that's this brief transitional scene that starts with Robby coming in with a patient and talking to Dana about where to put him, with the camera angled such that we see Robby in the foreground, then Dana and Langdon further back. Robby calls for Samira, who comes from the opposite direction as where Dana and Langdon were – the camera swivels to her and follows her for a bit before focusing back on Langdon, who watches them go into the trauma room, clearly aware of Robby having chosen her over him, before turning to Abbot and asking if he needs anything, after which we follow him to a different patient. For me, this scene felt like such an obvious follow up on some moments in 1x13 – Robby turning down Langdon's offer of help on Leah when Samira was putting in the IO for her; Robby calling to ask Samira to go check on Mel when she and Langdon were working on Martin. It felt so clear to me that Samira and Langdon season one arcs – which ran in opposite directions! Samira grew in Robby's esteem while Langdon fell from grace! – were building to them coming into some kind of conflict! This only felt more plausible when we started learning details about season two.

Robby has a new acolyte. Robby and Al-Hashimi have very different styles and attitudes about the right way to practice medicine. Al-Hashimi comes from the VA, where she worked with both Samira and Mel. It's Langdon's first day back from rehab. All of this on top of the Samira-Langdon stuff from the end of season one, on top of the way the Santos and Langdon conflict was obviously unresolved after season one, on top of the way Santos and Whitaker were obviously set up by season one to have gotten a lot closer, on top of how in the time between seasons it seemed obvious that Samira would have had to step up a lot to make up for the fact they were a resident down. All of this felt like it should have been set up for factions in the department, and given where Robby and Samira left season one (in a much better place than they started season one), it seemed to be that the most logical way to connect all of those puzzle pieces would have been having Samira, torn between two mentors. Her relationship with Robby is better than it was, but now here comes someone that knew her from before, and is maybe in more of a position to see how she's changed under Robby's influence in ways that aren't quite so good.

But instead, what did they do? A Samira-Al-Hashimi relationship that meant literally nothing. Instead of a Samira and Langdon, the former problem child and golden boy, swapping places and now being on equal terms as fourth years, they half-assed a tension between Langdon and Whitaker that was ultimately all about Robby and had nothing to do with different visions of how to be a doctor or different ways of viewing the world. There were vague hints of Langdon and Santos, at least, gravitating towards different attendings, but it was incredibly weak and extremely personal, meaning even if it were better executed and more thoroughly explored, it still wouldn't enable the sort of exploration of Robby's flaws as a teacher and manager as having Samira, the character who demonstrates Robby's worst tendencies, be in that position of having to choose which path she wants to take.

The brittleness of this is heightened by how they opted to have Al-Hashimi find out that Robby covered up a federal crime and let Langdon come back with full privileges and zero restrictions, and take it as a reason to share her medical history with him instead of doing anything about the fact Robby and Langdon ought to both be reported to the medical board for this. It's pretty certain she doesn't do anything because otherwise, there is no excuse for Robby and Langdon both being back for season three! We're talking about actually criminal activity! Fandom often frames this as a matter of people's attitudes towards addicts, or about whether people do or do not support American drug laws, but I think that pretty much misses the entire point. He was tampering with medication that was used on patients. Yeah, addiction is a disease, and yeah, drug diversion is a multi-victim crime, but the primary people being harmed are the patients. It's not a punitive mindset to put in measures to protect those patients! If Langdon were in any other profession, the consequences would be more severe, but he didn't even have to deal with the limited consequences of additional supervision. So having Al-Hashimi find out about this and not immediately report it has the impact of making Al-Hashimi a worse manager for no reason.

I completely agree that the creative team as a collective – though the writing was definitely weak, the problems with the season clearly extended beyond just them, as evidenced by how many important scenes we know were filmed, then cut – are opting for the flattest, most boring possible route. I do think there is an honest belief that they're portraying Robby as a flawed, tragic hero, but they don't understand what the flaws are. A lot of the biases were accidental reflections of their own biases, so they fail to recognize the scope of what they did with him, and they also are defensive and unwilling to grapple with it. The way that they reacted to people being angry with Robby for how he treats Samira – the condescension suggesting people just don't know how to handle complex characters, the insistence that it's really a compliment because he has high expectations of her (something that I completely believed in season one but season two diminished by having him straight up ignore her for two thirds of the season), the refusal to acknowledge the chauvinism underpinning the way he runs the department – suggests to me that what they wanted to convey was a guy whose main flaw is equal opportunity abrasiveness. But their own biases leaked through, and they're unable to accept that it's not equal opportunity at all – he treats women, particularly women of colour, much worse than he treats men, and in ways that simply cannot be dismissed as "oh, there are more women in the cast than men". This is a season in which everyone is constantly talking about how mad he is at Langdon, but that was a result of Langdon actively doing something awful, and it just manifested as ignoring him and making a couple petty swipes. His treatment of Samira, though? Samira, who hadn't done anything to deserve any kind of anger, much less public humiliation? Where she doesn't get a fraction of the reassurance Langdon gets? It doesn't say good things about them that they expected they could write this and expect people to care more about how he's treating Langdon.

Season two's approach to Robby is weird. I don't even know how to describe it. A lot of people describe what was going on with him as him being a jerk to everyone and lashing out at his colleagues, but I don't actually think that's what was happening. I think it's more insidious than that because he was lashing out at very specific colleagues. When I compare season one to season two, by most measures, I think they actually softened a lot of Robby's edges. Seems strange to say when I'm talking about a character who outright screams at a subordinate for having a panic attack, but what I mean by this is that season one Robby is not speaking to anyone with the kindness, gentleness, and endless patience season two Robby has for Santos, Whitaker, and Mel. That side of him was pretty much just reserved for Collins. Him giving Whitaker a pep talk was solely to do with Mr. Milton dying. He certainly wasn't giving out his house keys to one of his employees. But season two turns him into this mentor figure that's kind even as he's deeply struggling, and it retroactively asserts that that's how he always was – we saw no evidence of him and Langdon being that close in season one, and yet season two has multiple characters talk about how close they were, has a scene of Langdon feeling supplanted not because of anything going on with the work but because Robby asks Whitaker to house sit, makes it known that Langdon has been to Robby's home before. So now he's a character that's so aware of other people's needs that he'll repeatedly remind Santos to see the trauma counselor; so understanding of Mel's distraction that he will praise her for being one of the best and ask her repeatedly how she's feeling; that has so much pride in an intern that he'll praise him and give him gentle advice and hand him the keys to his house.

At the same time as season two shows Robby as much softer and more caring a mentor, it also showed him behaving terrible towards women – particularly brown women. He spends the whole day undermining Al-Hashimi. He doesn't provide Javadi with any encouragement or kindness, he just keeps pushing her and holding her to what would be high standards for an actual resident, much less a med student. And, of course, there's how he treats Samira. It got far worse than in season one, and it stands out as so awful in comparison to how he treats everyone else. With Al-Hashimi, he's being a dick. With Javadi, he's being more or less the same as he was to season one Samira. But with Samira, he's actually mean, and it's impossible not to notice that a) it stands in absurd contrast to how he treats Mel, who has pretty much the same plot as Samira, and b) it's worse than he treats Langdon, a character he has actual reason to be upset with.

B is an important point to keep in mind when evaluating all the other plot choices being made. Robby treats Samira worse than he treats a character that committed a federal crime and put patients at risk, and yet the creators have decided that's not worth continuing to explore. That the Langdon relationship is important to show being repaired, but the Samira one is insignificant, something that can just have any conclusion shunted offscreen. People keep talking about how oh, obviously that's because they're exploring Robby's biases, but it's not! Exploring Robby's biases would be to centre Samira's perspective on this matter if they were telling a story about him driving her out, or to have her back and have her react and have it all play out on screen. It's not any kind of clever commentary, it's just reflection of creator biases. It's hammered in even further by what they keep saying in interviews.

I think it was Gemmill who once started talking about Langdon when asked about Robby's poor behaviour. I can't remember the exact context, but the reason it stood out to me as so egregious might have even been that the question had been about Samira. While it is true that Robby has not been very professional when it comes to Langdon, and it's true that there's a relationship to be repaired there, it speaks volumes that this is what the creators think represents the worst of Robby, and not his treatment of the women, who don't, as Langdon does, have Dana jumping to their defence and speaking up for them and asserting their value. Even after the drug theft, Robby treats Langdon with more respect than he does the women, and in fact, the lack of professional there is really, truly mostly in Langdon's favour. Robby is ignoring him. He's not berating him or mistrusting every single thing he says or does or hovering over him to verify his work. He hid the theft so Langdon could come back with full privileges, and his "poor treatment" is pretty much just a matter of not being happy that someone that lied to him is back in his department. None of that compares to how he has treated female characters, Samira in particular.

They chose to have their biggest demonstration of Robby's worsening mental state in the entire season be verbally abusing a woman of colour for a panic attack. It wasn't about her arc or her development – if it had been, the focus of the camera wouldn't have been on his face pretty much the entire scene. We would have stayed with her after the fact, and got to see her reaction. We would have gotten someone talking to her about it after the fact and not Robby. We got none of that, because as far as the creators were concerned, that scene was all about Robby. By doing this, by seeing the criticism of Robby for it, and then choosing to remove Samira – the canonical workaholic with no life, the least likely person in the cast to be taking a day off – altogether suggests a profound unwillingness to engage with the realities of Robby's behaviour and what the actual consequences might be. Everyone exists such that they serve his mental health arc. His lashing out matters because it's dramatic and loud and he's so tortured, not because he's harming other people. I get the feeling they think his apology was sincere and meaningful, and that he may have been mean, but he was right that she should leave, and their conversation was adequate closure for their relationship.

You are completely right that as much as Wyle seems to think viewers are incapable of handling a complex character, the problem is actually the opposite of that. Between seasons, my most frequent refrain was that my favourite part of The Pitt was the relationship between Robby and Samira. I loved that it was complicated and messy. But season two didn't make it complicated. It made him a dick specifically to her, refused to acknowledge that was what was happening, and then wrote her off without any exploration of what it all meant for her. I remember that interview where Wyle called it projection and said that him being hard on her was really a compliment. And the thing is, that was entirely how I read their relationship in season one – it was the natural reading. But season two undermined that. Him being so hard on her and unable to offer her any reassurance when she's practically begging for it did feel perfectly in line with their season one dynamic...but the whole thing turns sour and takes on a super sinister tone when viewed alongside him being so nice and sweet and complimentary to everyone else. Ultimately, the producers treat him projecting on her as an excuse, rather than a rich topic for exploration in its own right that is inextricably entangled with how he is infinitely kinder to all the other characters he sees parts of himself in. It's deeply distressing, because in season one, when the focus was on Robby's intricate, unique, complicated relationships with different women, he was an interesting, well developed, and realistically flawed character. Shifting to what they did in season two, where he gets to be right every time he and Al-Hashimi come into a conflict over the appropriate way to treat a patient and is ultimately even right to be suspicious of her; where they act like, yeah, he was harsh with Samira but he's right because she's making mistakes because of her emotions and he isn't? It sucks. It's not complex, it's just boring.

I've said this more times and in more ways than I can count, but cutting out Samira is cutting out the clearest avenue for Robby's growth. The story needs her. She's loadbearing. It is genuinely harder to work Robby's story around her no longer being present than any other character – this isn't disparaging any other character or saying that they're uninteresting or unimportant, but very specifically, in terms of Robby, even if we completely ignore all the reasons she matters as her own character, Samira is essential, because for two straight seasons, she has been the character that has borne the brunt of his mental health crisis.

Season two tried very hard to make other characters take on different aspects of what made season one Samira unique. They gave everyone else her attention to detail. McKay and Mel got her awareness of care disparities. Al-Hashimi took on what was really Samira's season one role about conflict with Robby over the appropriate way to practice medicine and goal of improving the system (all without the show ever really leaning into how Al-Hashimi being an attending makes it different, or how other characters might respond to that). Javadi got the way Robby was pushing her more than the others. They even started leaning more into Robby's similarities with Santos and glossing over how similar he and Samira are. But no matter what they do with these other characters, they really can't fill the role Samira has in her conflict with Robby, because not only is she all of those things, she is the resident that most pushes back on Robby; she is the only character that has ever been completely, undeniably, indisputably right when she did so; she is the person that has consistently been the target of his lashing out. Even Al-Hashimi – also representing trying to fix a broken system, also getting undermined by Robby – can't fill that void because Robby and Samira have known each other for longer and Samira cares so deeply about his approval; their conflict is heavily linked to the power differential and Robby punching down; Samira being younger adds contrast and weight to how she's fighting this uphill battle against a system that has broken Robby. She represents something unique, and it's not replaceable. Which means there is no one else that can fill her role to make a Robby healing arc believable.

Theirs is the most fraught relationship in the show. It's the one where Robby has done the most harm. And so it has the most room for growth, for repair, for development, for reflection upon who Robby is and what he's done and the harm he's caused. Season three is supposedly going to be all about Robby's healing journey, with him rethinking his relationships and behaviour and doing the work. So what's the point without Samira? How can that be done without Samira, the only character who really represents just how low a point he reached? It doesn't work. Samira is indispensable to that story, so cutting her makes it impossible to believe they have any intention of telling a story that involves that involves any measure of accountability.

This is doubly true because even without Samira – if we accept for a minute there are ways of exploring his accountability without her – they are making choices that soften Robby's behaviour by diminishing the roles of other characters that demonstrate his failings. Not only did they decide to vindicate Robby for mistrusting Al-Hashimi, they're reducing her role in season two! We know she isn't going to be in the first episode, and we don't know when she comes in, or how much of the season she'll be in, or in what capacity. Similarly, Javadi will be off in her psych rotation. Robby isn't going to be her boss anymore, so it seems incredibly unlikely that there'll be any exploration of how pushy he was with her and how little he cared about what she actually wanted – especially because the writers don't seem to realize that he did it. From what Shabana Azeez said about a scene being written where she responds well to what Robby says to her, but she instead played it as her being furious with him, they don't even realize that that wasn't actually an example of him being a good mentor. All of this on top of the precedent of having already removed Collins, and completely ignoring all the reasons McKay would have had to deeply distrust Robby in season two after the events of season one. What that tells me is that the writers aren't interested in exploring Robby as a deeply flawed man, because they're going out of their way to remove or reduce all the characters that could actually highlight it, which means they're just systematically taking away all the avenues to explore Robby's failures.

it would make more sense for Langdon to be gone in season three. They presented a situation where he never actually owned up to what he did, and a character who cares deeply about the appropriate ways of doing things finds out about it at the exact moment when Robby isn't going to be there to protect him anymore. There is no logical reason why Al-Hashimi wouldn't say anything. I've seen people argue that it's mutually assured destruction, but it's not! Maybe that was Al-Hashimi's thought process about sharing her medical details with Robby, but it is not an "I'll keep your secret if you keep mine" situation because Robby tells her if she doesn't tell administration, he will. So what they're doing is throwing aside all realism such that Langdon can be the sole character with a damaged relationship with Robby who's going to be around with whom Robby can rebuild said damaged relationship. He is also the only person in comparison to whom Robby holds anything resembling a moral high ground. It's hard to see that as anything other than a series of choices aimed at avoiding exploring any of Robby's actual complexities and grey areas.

...I honestly forget what I was supposed to be talking about. I hope this at least was kind of relevant.

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