Thoughts on Trinity Santos post s2e10
It's easy to forget that Dennis is the only person in there that has had the chance to know Trinity outside of work. Yolanda too, but it's pretty clear by now that she established some boundaries—whether we like it or not— and she's maintaining them.
Dennis is maybe the only one that can contextualize Trinity's brashness into a bigger picture, into everything else she is outside of emergency medicine. And this was shown to us in earlier s2 episodes, where the way he reacts to her stress implies habit and understanding.
As for everyone else, Santos is, simply put, reaping what she sowed: She spent nearly a whole year setting the pace of her work relationships through brashness and sarcasm, to the point I see her considered an asset (like dealing with the Gunner) more than she is a coworker or a friend. People still get miffed when she's "mean" to them, patients either don't understand or are intimidated (interesting parallelisms with Garcia on this).
We see her bummed about Garcia ditching their fireworks plans, but I can't help theorizing that Trinity never actually communicated to Yolanda that she might want more from their relationship. Not necessarily more in terms of standardizing it, but for sure in a "the benefits aren't benefiting me enough if the friendship underneath it isn't rooted in affection". Affection that Trinity probably feels, but that never had a spotlight by itself, because they established their interactions around banter and sex.
Santos is a R2 now, she's in a very hot spot when it comes to experience she gained and her learning curve. Add to it that her profession technically requires certain levels of empathy AND emotional distance.
Santos is quickly discovering that it's not enough to know your aggressive attitude is a defense mechanism, that knowing is not enough in the face of everything you might have to face outside the scope of your talent (external interference like going analogue, being requested to work differently/more like the charting). If you only work well in a very specific combination of cases+coworkers, you're not a well balanced resource for your department, as capitalistic as that sounds (and it is, capitalistic, let's not forget Gloria's looming threats from s1).
Part of her job is not to judge addiction.
She is the one who kept saying that she had only known these people for a few hours (s1) and therefore could not claim that she liked them or had an opinion about them in general.
She has every right not to trust Langdon, but she can't act hurt about what happened.
We all have biases, it's normal the narc gets judged more than the betrayer himself, because unlike Langdon and Garcia, no one had the time to understand Santos' aggressiveness before she "used" it to rat Frank out. They are hurt about the trust Langdon broke, but it's their friend they got back, it's their friend who's owning up his mistakes. Has Santos ever had a chance to be their friend with that start into her career in the Pitt?
And still, she doesn't look actually giddy about Robby mistreating Langdon (also, I feel like if Robby didn't want him back at some point, he would have told on him instead of sending him to rehab on paid time off. But hey, I guess he hadn't decided he was gonna kill himself in ten months at the time).
I read someone on here saying that it isn't fair she's forced to work with Langdon so much, but I feel like that's part of the realism the show is trying to achieve aka working in an understaffed emergency department. Choosing is a privilege (and a frowned upon one, like everybody said to anyone trying to cherry pick cases).
Finally, as much as she's grown work-wise—and she has—, she's still refusing to follow her seniors' advice and struggling with pointers. In this sense, I think Robby is the worst mentor she could have: she's been mimicking her seniors, attitude-wise (cockiness, too much confidence, bad bedside manners), since the beginning of the show, and the way she interacted with Langdon in this episode proves to her superiors that she doesn't have a solid ground to stand on while she acts like that.
One of the key factors in Langdon's arc—making him feel like no one saw how much worse it could have been, how good he's been despite his addiction— is that his knowledge/experience were never actually doubted. Santos challenging that makes her rightful bitchiness pass as unfairness. The lack of awareness about patients picking up on the tension, makes her the unprofessional one.
I love Santos, I love how multi-faceted her character is ♡
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