can you dig a little deeper into your thoughts on adamson…? like what you said about how much of robby’s style was influenced by adamson, good or bad, and when dana said adamson would be proud of him like what parts of robby would he have been proud of…?
yes anon i will answer your question but first i need to tie it into something that's been bothering me about people's reactions to s2ep12. my apologies as this is beyond the scope of what you're asking.
when dana tells robby that the department survived without adamson, it survived without her, and it'll survive without him, he's not upset about the last comment. he already knows the e.d. will survive. he didn't know when he walked in this morning, but he knows now after seeing baran work that the e.d. will be fine if not better. that's not to say that this isn't detrimental to his psyche in the middle of a severe crisis, but at the point at which he and dana are in the ambulance bay, the fact that the e.d. will turn with the rest of the world come the next morning isn't the most relevant.
and you can watch this on screen. robby reacts to dana saying the e.d. went on without adamson and he doesn't react to the rest. and i think this is the first thing that's actually hurt robby all day. he's watched things and heard things that have piled on and piled on to the guilt and the resentment and the black hole growing in his head, but this is the first reaction today that he can't control. he recoils, he's shocked, his eyes are hurt beyond repair, because dana has said the thing aloud. both the truth (to us), and the biggest lie (to robby).
because in his mind, the department did not survive without adamson. it has not survived. the "e.d." - whatever it stood for and whatever it meant - died with adamson. this, as in post-adamson, is drowning. i think robby struggles with the fact that the world still turning. for him, adamson's death is as fresh as the day he died; the grief has been that intense everyday for five years. he doesn't understand how no one else is walking around like the light hasn't gone out, and i think he resents a lot of people for that, including dana. (which i think is why he likes trinity. trinity came in like she was raised in that dark.)
this scene actually clarified to me a question i had when i wrote the my original reblog about adamson and that is that i do think robby is trying to create mini-adamsons. not mini robbys. because robby sees himself as a failure because he hasn't turned himself into adamson, so he wants everyone under him to be better. (and tbh i think some things make more sense if we see robby and samira's mirror relationship as robby trying and failing to turn samira into adamson and samira trying and failing to turn herself into robby who's trying and failing to turn himself into adamson. fucked up geometric translation.)
this goes back into your question about s1ep15, phew. we understand adamson as someone who was very good at managing chaos. i think that's what dana mainly means when she says adamson would be proud on robby's actions on the day specifically, managing a huge mci response with minimal casualties with all staff still standing at the end of it. we see this throughout s1. i'm thinking of when robby teaching langdon tactile intubation and calls it "the adamson special," showing adamson was someone who worked on the fly and did what had to be done despite risks, and robby has inherited that. he throws out the book and protocol when shit hits the fan and decides to deal with the consequences after, a practical approach in emergency medicine.
robby has to innovate during the mic and we see his students innovating too. i think adamson would be proud of that. this also plays into the e.d.'s general relationship with surgery, in which the e.d. might have to make a mess of a patient to keep them alive which will be an absolute pain in the ass for surgery to deal with, but the patient isn't dead so that's a win. i think adamson would pat robby on the back every time a surgeon started getting snippy in a trauma bay and tell him to let it go. that they did what they had to do, the right thing in the moment. this makes medicine very intuitive to robby, and he struggles with people who are not intuitive yet still get good results, because i think he's internalized intuitive to also mean moral (because adamson is both), which is dangerous.
i also think adamson was probably way better at compartmentalization than robby, and robby despises himself for it, which is why he can't quite believe what dana's saying. because robby knows he didn't compartmentalize, he didn't keep it together, and that guilt eats him alive all the way to s2 because in his mind, adamson wouldn't have ever broken. he would've been there every second of that mci and probably would've saved every single person, and the season i think adamson probably had an unpleasant side is because why would robby think this if it wasn't shamed into him? we have that story from his residency in new orleans but that couldn't have been the only moment where he was taught that feeling is weakness. i think adamson probably told him to go home on days robby was teary over a tough case, when he was so frustrated with himself for missing something or the system or a patient's family member. "liability" is not a word you use on a person unless it's been used on you. (and this is the danger of intuitive medicine in this case; intuition is feeling and emotion is also feeling and when you say one is good and one is bad but never delineate where the two diverge, you get robby).
so i think dana says what she says because from what she's seen, adamson would love to see robby managing chaos, throwing out the book to save people, and doing it without ever been "weak" in front of the staff (except when appropriate aka when everyone is crying at the end of the day because they weren't allowed to feel up until that point). i'm sure montgomery adamson was indeed a great man but i have no doubt that he contributed to the current crisis in medicine in which the practitioner must strip themself of personhood to survive.
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