Samira Mohan Appreciation

Haven't used Tumblr regularly in two years; returning for the sake of my darling Samira

[doctormohansamira]

Unstoppable force (Samira trying to singlehandedly solve the institutional problem of inequitable treatment in the hospital leading to outcome disparities) meets immovable object (Robby trying to get Samira to singlehandedly solve the institutional problem of the hospital's understaffing by moving faster).

[doctormohansamira]

To prevent myself from getting mad about ASOIAF years after finding my chill about it, I’m rewatching Scrubs, and it’s actually shocking how much Elliott’s awareness of Cox’s favouritism and dismissal of her is actively a part of their relationship??? Like, I was remembering it as mostly subtext that they called attention to a couple times and then again in the revival, but no! It’s on ongoing thing that colours how they interact! It makes it even grosser that The Pitt won’t address that with Robby!

[doctormohansamira]

I’m in a “put kimchi on everything” stage in my life. Kind of in love with the sour contrast. Put it in some avocado toast with a slice of cheddar, and man, I could eat this all day.

[doctormohansamira]

so what is the correct term in tamil for mom?

Amma.

[doctormohansamira]

There are two good things that came out of The Pitt. One is Samira Mohan, and the other is that one Tweet where someone posted a screencap of Robby on the floor, in tears, covered in blood, with the caption "me struggling with a menstrual cup".

[doctormohansamira]

Okay, this is very niche, but I need you all to know something real quick. So Samira is canonically a Tamil speaker. As such, it is very important to me that you all know that in Tamil, the word mama means uncle. Therefore, if you are writing fic in which Samira has a child and that child calls her mama, I need you to understand that this fic will immediately become a comedy to me.

[doctormohansamira]

It amuses me when people think my frustrations with Robby as a character are in any way to do with not being able to handle mental health struggles or a character doing bad things. Literally my favourite character of all time is Jake Berenson from Animorphs, best known for several mass murders and untreated clinical depression. My favourite Leverage character by an enormous margin is Nate. I deeply adore Arianne Martell, who accidentally got a child mutilated by using her as a pawn in her conflict with her father. I am obsessed with Cersei Lannister. And you think my issue is Robby being mean or having mental health struggles.

[doctormohansamira]

I saw a Robby fan delighting in the fact that Samira is gone and season three is going to be focused on Robby's healing journey, and I'm just...I don't think you like Robby as much as you think you do if you think he can have a good and satisfying healing journey without Samira!

[doctormohansamira]

Guys, can I be a huge bitch for a second? We have now learned which episodes actors submitted for the Emmys, and Gerran Howell, obviously, submitted the only one in which Whitaker did anything of note all season – his melodramatic speech about why he loves emergency medicine in the ambulance bay. Setting aside the fact I think the other actor in that scene was the better performer, I find it so infuriating that post-production cut out Samira's reaction from that episode, from a plot that would have made way more sense if it were about her, in order to shove a white man front and centre, and they're all getting rewarded for it.

[doctormohansamira]

God, sometimes I see a comment about something, and while technically I am closer to agreeing with that person than the original poster, it feels like it's based on a really bad faith interpretation of what the original person was trying to say, so I get mad at someone I mostly agree with.

[doctormohansamira]

It’s like…there are shorthands that people use when discussing fiction because context enables us to understand certain comments without needing to define all our terms. And having this context is extremely important, so the shorthand can sometimes be hard to understand! The same sentence can mean very different things from different people. This is a big problem with shortform text – if you see something from a new person, it can be hard to tell what they mean, because the shorthand is tailored to people too whom we're in conversation, and the context can't be present in the post itself because of the format limitations. Longform text makes it much easier to understand shorthand, because the shorthand exists as part of a broader point, meaning there is clear context to understand what people are talking about that doesn't need to rely on knowledge of previous things this person has said – just the text. We almost see both of these when it comes to Samira a lot! The sentence "Samira is a complex character" coming from, say, me means...she's fascinating and interesting and I adore her. Coming from some other people, it's not actually about her, it's a way of downplaying Robby's treatment of her or denying that she's a harmed party, or it's microagressive, coded language where they claim she's mean or aggressive or any number of things. And given just another couple sentences, it always becomes apparent which it is!

I am personally terrible at using shorthand for conveying a point, even when I could. Everyone that has ever read my posts knows that I am never concise. I include countless caveats, numerous nods to the nuance that exists. Hell, it’s the reason that in pretty much every post I make about how Robby treats Samira, I make sure to highlight that it is my favourite dynamic in the entire show by a huge margin and how as viscerally ill as I felt after the scene of him yelling at her after her panic attack, it was also genuinely the first time in all of season two where I felt actually engaged with anything happening. The fact that it’s messy and unhealthy and intense is compelling, even as I had a million issues with the execution of that storyline. Clarity and precision is important to me, and I want people to understand why I'm saying what I'm saying. This is especially true in terms of characters I talk about less frequently and so even people who have followed me for a while don't have the context to immediately know what I mean when I say something without the context of the post. So I'm not going to say "I find (redacted) a generally thinly written character even though I think they have a lot of potential and that frustrates me" even though it's true, I'm going to talk about narrative structure, roles, behaviour, and the things I do like about them to try and convey exactly what I mean (...the post has been in the drafts forever and I haven't actually explained what I mean yet, which means the name has to be redacted, though it is probably obvious). And I apply this even to discussions of topics where I think it's pretty obvious what my stance is and I don't need to clarify every point. But despite my own need for clarity making it impossible for me to use it, the shorthand does exist. If people pay attention to the overall point, the ambiguities in a more specific statement become clear.

All of this to say...when someone criticizes the writing for Samira and points to her extremely limited role in season two, where she is used as a prop to demonstrate Robby’s great pain, and says that while audiences perceive her as a wonderfully complex character, writers didn’t see that as worth exploring in season two so the net message is that she’s there for someone to yell at, they are not flattening her or not seeing her complexities, they are expressing frustration in a season that failed to engage with those complexities in any meaningful way. Someone that is so smug about how “unlike those fans, I see her as more than that” is missing the entire fucking point. Because it’s not about the audience at all. It’s fundamentally about writing. And season two Samira and season one Samira are not the same character. Are there ways to connect them in a way that makes sense? Yeah, sure. Many. But the writers didn’t write that throughline. What they did instead was this really, deeply cruel story where not one plot point is actually about her. The entire story with her mom turns out to be setting the stage for Robby screaming at her to convey his poor mental state – and the mother that had been calling the hospital phone just stops calling after because she'd served her purpose, and that purpose wasn't Samira. Her, a character that was defined in season one by her fear of missing a detail and a patient suffering for it due to her own experience with losing a father from medical racism, makes a mistake that leads to a patient death, and the person that gets to react is a white man – and another white man got an Emmy baiting speech out of it, in an episode we now know was his submission that he got a nomination for. Not one of the plot points are actually about her, even the ones that so clearly would make more sense if they were.

I don't know, I'm just frustrated by the refusal to actually engage with the substance of arguments and insistence upon intentionally misunderstanding what people are talking about.

[doctormohansamira]

God, sometimes I see a comment about something, and while technically I am closer to agreeing with that person than the original poster, it feels like it's based on a really bad faith interpretation of what the original person was trying to say, so I get mad at someone I mostly agree with.

[doctormohansamira]

God, I said something stupid at work (day three of the new job) several hours ago and I'm still cringing. I have got to get over my intense anxiety over things that don't matter.

[doctormohansamira]

I keep thinking of more ways in which season two failed Samira and didn't treat her like a main character, and the one I'm stuck on now is...for both the med students, their stories (limited though Joy's was!) came specifically at her expense. Which is to say, Joy's backstory got revealed through Samira being unable to solve a problem. Ogilvie's whole deal was framed as a Samira mistake, and Samira didn't get to react to it in any real way. It's just terrible in every way, shape, and form.

[doctormohansamira]

...help, I'm on the verge of another "god, why is this fandom so weird about sex" post.

[doctormohansamira]

So one of the asks that I've been slowly working on a response to is about fic and The Pitt, and it makes me think...I'm really, really picky about Samira fic, and a lot of it comes across as very strange to me, because people have like three different ways of being weird about her, often in ways that I do think are well meaning but also very misguided. There are people that don't consider the fact Samira is a South Asian woman in any way. There are ones that resort to common stereotypes. And then there are people that are deeply overcompensating, aware enough of basic stereotypes to care about avoiding those, but completely failing to consider that they're talking about an American in her late twenties from New Jersey, whose relatively different frame of mind from her peers will be because she's her, not because she's Indian. I don't know, it's just...please remember she is a human being.

[doctormohansamira]

Still can't believe Samira's cancelled research funding was just a throwaway line, mainly there to present her as a weak fellowship candidate, and not a major anchor of her story in a season when shit is going wrong for her for reasons totally outside her control.

[samirasystole]

actually i do need to talk more about why samira's storyline in regards to her future was so messed up in several ways, so here is me yapping again. and thank you to @doctormohansamira for giving me fuel to talk about this mwah!

i think there are several reasons why her 'where will she go now that her partnership track position is not an option anymore' storyline sucked, but the main reasons are about how geriatrics is presented and how samira feels about it, how different the other R4's are depicted in contrast to her and the lack of explanation why, the difference in who samira is shown to be in season one compared to now, and why it's upsetting that they wrote samira to have an undefined ending with very little depth about her own wants and needs, or any chance of her getting to do something she loves.

so when i mean contradiction to what is being shown vs what is being said, i mean that they show samira to be good with the elderly and then tell us that that's where she should be because she's too slow, while also showing us that samira had not considered this, and isn't particularly very excited about the idea. it's not a natural thing that she gravitates towards or some gift that she's discovering and loves. she visibly has to get used to the idea when several people present it to her.

next, in the scene with crus, we find out that getting into any decent spot is apparently not an option anymore, because she has no credentials or clearly is far too late; but in season one, langdon (several months further into his R4 than samira is currently) still had options and got offered something by robby. and so they kind of break their own rules and make it so that samira is just a hopeless case with no chance of anything after her residency i guess. and when she wants to ask abbot for a rec letter, she says that she just wants 'any spot that will take her' and 'kill me now, it'll hurt less' which reaffirms that she's far too late and has no options left except being incredibly lucky.

she has her partnership track position, yes; but after that fell through the show makes her look devastatingly unprepared while also it's also completely contradictory to the samira in season one. the samira who knew every case study and incredibly determined and motivated to keep learning; she is the type of person to have a five year plan, and would make sure to have backups just in case. yes, her research got defunded. but a setback never stopped her in season one. and it's all done with no proper explanation.

not giving her a backup plan and killing all her motivation feels like the writers were just deliberately setting her up for failure with no options to fall back onto. which is cruel and feels misogynistic compared to how the male R4's in this show are treated and depicted.

and i'm not saying characters can't have sad and depressing endings, i'm saying that in order for that to feel satisfying or like it has a good reason, there should be explanations given as to why she's so far behind on her peers. a reason why crus is far more prepared than the determined and motivated samira we saw in season one, or why a person like langdon still had time in season one to find a spot. why is R4 samira so different from R4 crus or R4 langdon? because if it was her being a brown woman and not getting the same opportunities, they should have talked about that. but they didn't, and so it feels unintentional and hurtful to depict her in this way.

and the conclusion is that she just simply doesn't know, and might settle for something she doesn't really want or has considered before, like geriatrics. and even if she does want it, we are told her chances of getting into any spot at this time (the very start of her R4 year) are already abysmal, in contrary to what we saw with langdon in season one. on top of there being no explanation as to why she's so behind on her peers or why she has no backup plan.

we don't even get to find out why she picked partnership track position in jersey compared to doing a fellowship or elective; we find out nothing about her actual passions or wants, which would have given more depth and care to her story. we only hear only about her failures and indecision. it's just unnecessarily cruel and doesn't make sense to me, and it hurts even more knowing she isn't coming back.

[doctormohansamira]

Okay, I broadly agree with your points here, but I want to add a few things, particularly about her alleged lack of preparation, because I think there's a major point of dissonance here as a result of the writers bending over backwards to frame her as unprepared and unqualified which contradicts what they actually wrote. It's a whole plot of blaming her for things that are not her fault. The plot is so close to being something coherent, but the writers had no idea what story they wanted to tell.

I think something that often gets missed here is that Samira committed to the Jersey job. She has a job for the next year. She knows what she's going to do over a year in advance. So the backups aren't actually relevant because it's a timing issue! She presumably had backups, but she turned them after accepting the position near her mom.. The entire starting premise is that her plans have blown up and she could still go to Jersey, but she doesn't want to, because without her mom, there's nothing left for her there. So the core issue is that her own preparation did not matter in the slightest, because it all comes down to her mother's timing putting her in a really difficult position – whatever backups she had, it's too late to accept them. So that puts her in a challenging spot for fellowships – not out of her own skills or preparation, but just due to really unfortunate timing.

All of that makes sense! But where it stops making sense and just starts being just meanspirited and stupid is everything that comes after that: the shift towards talking about how she doesn't have the skills or experience to be competitive in ultrasound, the terrible advice she keeps getting from her atttendings, the lack of consistency when it comes to why she (until season two, the only resident we had any indication of doing research or keeping up with the literature) is the one in a bad position.

Now it is absolutely believable to me that Samira isn't a competitive fellowship candidate, but again, not because of her skills, but because from what we see of her, she has diverse interests! Her research was in racial disparities, and that's important to her, but we keep seeing her pick up information like a sponge throughout season one, and the two studies we actually hear her cite have nothing to do with racial disparities whatsoever! They are about...well, seemingly trauma procedures in fast paced, under resourced environments. Those citations were why I'm convinced what would really make Samira happy is a disaster medicine fellowship. This could have tied into why she had initially not opted for a fellowship! She cares deeply about keeping up with the research and learning and geeks out over new techniques and procedures, but she's fundamentally more of a generalist than a specialist. She wants to be the doctor drilling into a patient's skull in the middle of a crisis. She also wants to be the one carefully finding the right diagnosis. So it makes sense to me that she isn't an obvious candidate for a lot of really competitive fellowships, because other people have resumes that, while not necessarily better over all, are more targeted to the specific subspecialty – like Henderson, who is so focused on ultrasound. But what breaks this is how they explained Samira as knowing Al-Hashimi!

I'm on the record as thinking the Samira-Al-Hashimi relationship was ill-conceived and terribly executed. It could have meant something, but it didn't, and what's worse is, it completely screws with Samira's character, because they decided that she did not one, but two elective VA rotations during her residency (not during med school, which would have made way more sense and actually aligned with how Al-Hashimi described them as having met "a few year ago" in 2x01). If they had bothered actually developing the Samira Al-Hashimi relationship it could have meant something and been indicative of Samira's unfulfilled need for mentorship at PTMC. But they didn't, so her going back for two rotations just doesn't make any sense with the character established as being so driven and interested in broad scope knowledge, and doesn't make sense in terms of someone looking for fellowships.

That could have made sense, too! There is absolutely a version of Samira where she's so focused on one path, one right way of doing things, that she just doesn't prepare for alternatives, so once she decided she was going to get a job, that was all she considered, instead of breadth of knowledge and personal enrichment. But they didn't bother actually telling that story. And it gets even stupider! Because later there's a scene with Mel, after their elderly patients, where we learn Samira did a clerkship at NJMS Senior Care. How does that make any sense? You're telling me she did a clerkship in this field she has explicitly not considered? A) Then why did she do it, senior care doesn't seem to be a core clerkship anywhere. B) She didn't consider it even after the clerkship? So they're making it even more apparent that it means nothing to her. She isn't interested in geriatrics in the slightest, and they're forcing her to settle.

What's even more insane is that Samira shifts towards talking about applying for an elective rotation, not a fellowship – she's going to apply for electives so she can have a better chance at a fellowship, and it'll be "whichever one will take me". Which doesn't make any sense! She's applying for electives she doesn't want so she has a better chance at a fellowship that she doesn't want, and no one is even telling her, hey, slow down, you remember you don't actually have to do this and you can just get a job and decide if you want to apply for a fellowship next year??? It would be easier to get a job in Pittsburgh than to get a fellowship, so it'd be easier to stay!

All of this makes the progression of the story flat out absurd: she has a job she no longer wants. She decides to apply for fellowships. She's late in the game and her research was cancelled (treated as a throwaway line instead of something that would deeply affect her, adding to the intense cruelty of how they treated Samira this season), so the really competitive fellowships are a long shot. Her attendings suggest something she couldn't be less interested in. One of them makes it about her pace (something which there is zero indication is a problem anymore, and is clearly him just being a dick). She has a conversation with a couple patients that make her maybe it could be satisfying. Except then she has another conversation where it's clear that she's unqualified for something that actually interests her, so if she does do it, it'll be her settling. All of this while Langdon was treated as a very competitive fellowship candidate, despite us having zero indication he did any research, and the possibility of him (married! Two children!) doing any serious elective rotations or away rotations seems incredibly low.

The story is dumb. They tried so hard to make it about Samira not being good enough, but that's not what the setup was at all. It makes no sense.