Samira's story being lazy writing is an udoubtable truth. it is also ironic that what she (Samira/Supriya) is going through is the reality of most ambitious women ever.
it's the casual misogyny of it that gets to me. do you see Whitaker worrying that he won't get into his desired fellowship? is Oglivie conscious of his performance? not to mention Crus, who is introduced to us as the pinnacle of everything ever. sure, we see Langdon and his anxieties but there is a well-established reason for them.
with Samira, her being worrisome and unsure with regards to her capabilities is a character trait. she's a woman, so she must prove herself. she is the embodiment of us all: all the women that had to work twice as hard for half as little. and every mistake you make will be judged so much more harshly (true for all Pitt women, actually, and women in general [1]).
Samira, whose first instinct is to protect the patients most likely to fall through the cracks, is the first resident to fall through the cracks. there is a case to be made that newly hired women are expected to pick up things faster than their male counterparts, and make less mistakes. women receive higher performance scores, but consistently are rated lower in potential [2].
on a related note, in s1, even though she has the highest patient satisfaction* scores and figures out complicated cases, and then is shown to thrive in the fast-pacedness of a mass casualty event, she is nicknamed Slo-Mo. her thoroughness is shown as something she must let go of, and there is little nuance placed on the general skill of boundaries (so that you maybe don't listen to every patients absolute life story with couch details) that every resident has to learn.
*Baran Al-Hashimi is also introduced to us as someone with high patient-satisfaction scores, and it is again framed as something we should frown upon. see a pattern? surely if a man can't be both empathetic and efficient, then it can't be done, no?
someone pointed out really well that during PittFest, she performed very rare procedures expertly—yet not one attending suggested she wrote and published a case study. also, she figured out Joyce, who had sickle cell, that is still a rare and understudied condition, but no one cared enough to help her look into her research options either. she was a part of a later-defunded study, which supposedly she found herself, too, but there were so many missed opportunities where anyone could have stepped up and help her advance her career. a male resident we have just met is introduced to us as scientifically focused, and he's the mirror to everything that Samira did not get to achieve.
it broke me, when she shredded her radiology application. no one believed in her, so why should she? no one suggested that the worst that she could be told is no, so she is setting herself up for failure by not even trying.
what's even worse is that we have established that Samira is a very competent doctor. she is said to be outsmarting everyone in the pitt. she would have excelled in every specialty she chose, and she could have chosen to do a double. but the second season seems to be establishing her exit to geriatrics, and it does so in such a mean way, framing it as a slow, boring, unappealing specialty. like some other doctors would be wasted on it. it's both ageist, and a disservice to Samira, who, again, is God's gift to medicine. but a quicker man would be wasted, so he must stay in the ER. but you, a woman, are expendable. there are so many hopefuls for your place. you will be replaced with a different woman, who will be replaced with another woman, who will be...
to further my point that through lazy writing, Samira is all of us: there are some studies that show that when there is a woman on a recruitment committee, the odds of a woman being hired decrease, because the men's bias is activated. like, we already have a woman on board, so let's recruit the 17th man[3]. you should see Baran as expendable too, because women often are promoted in times of crises, and expected to bear the fallout of it all (like, since she couldn't unsink a ship, no woman should ever be captain—the effect of a glass cliff) [4]. this is why Robby, after berating Samira relentlessly, goes to her to ask about Baran, scout out dirt on her. sure, it is an attempt to find a reason to stay, but I don't know, it must have broken Samira's heart.
and also, it's the way empathy is framed as a feminine trait, and too much of it is obviously bad, so you shouldn't, as a woman, expect to excel in a space of such tragedy. the unfeminine space of the ER. The Pitt, a show about American burnout, caretakers guilt, healthcare workers' exploitation, could not bother to figure out a better exploration of needing to find balance? what message does the exit of the empathetic doctor send? that you have to contort yourself to utter emotionlessness, or leave?
and don't even get me started on the mommy issues.
her character could have been such a wonderful opportunity to showcase the real struggle of balancing relationships & wanting motherhood with residency and career ambition, or a story of early burnout (Robby hints to it when hashing it out with Dana in 2/13), or a story of learning to believe in your own competence again after terrible management, or a story about finding yourself in the sea of others' expectations, or anything else. instead, we got Samira who did everything right and got nothing, because the world is fucked and we, women, don't deserve to be a challenge to it.
but women aren't supposed to have everything! you can have your career stint and then settle down, but not too late so your eggs are spoiled, choose a family-oriented fellowship or position, believe every diminutive thing that has ever been said about you, lest you get any grandiose ideas about yourself.
this is not a post against any one person or showrunner, just a general sigh, I suppose. I will miss Samira. I hope Supriya's career flourishes, and that she's doing all right—especially since it seems that she expected to be in season 3.
to end, every show is political, and HBO is a politically charged capital. you should view hiring and communications decisions through this political lense, and should expect better from your showrunners. maybe the curtains are just blue sometimes, but there is an influx of anti-women propaganda in the US and it will be reflected in the shows you watch. that is why the subtlety of the misogyny that Samira faced is so insidious, in my opinion.
[1] Kincaid, K., "Why Can’t a Woman Fail Like a Man? Gender Differences in Perceived Competence Following a Mistake" (2017). Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection. 397. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ugtheses/397
[2] Li, D. “’Potential’ and the Gender Promotion Gap,” taken from https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/women-are-less-likely-men-to-be-promoted-heres-one-reason-why
[3] Lambert, P., & Pineda Moquete, M. A. (2025). Gender Quotas and Women’s Substantive Representation: Evidence from Municipal Governments in the Dominican Republic. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 46(3), 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2025.2507551
[4] Johnson, T.S., Thomson, S.B. (2023). Times of Crisis: Women and Leadership. In: Singh, A. (eds) International Handbook of Disaster Research. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8388-7_183
