a (hopefully) comprehensive and harsh review of the pitt season 2
i uh hated it! spoilers.
what should season 2 of the pitt even be?
this is a question that i think underlies a lot of the issues i saw with the second season.
the pitt, first and foremost, is a story about the struggles of being a healthcare worker in the united states healthcare system. while we might have been endeared to the characters in season 1, their purpose is ultimately to deliver some of the realities of working in a place like the ER.
mckay (system-impacted) and mohan (a woman of color), for example, are characters that feel an obligation toward people who fall through the cracks, and they often reveal some of the failings of our system to more naive characters such as javadi and whitaker. collins and king are characters who have to push through intense personal trauma and/or stressors for the sake of their patients. santos is a rather overzealous character who is able to convey just how easy it is to fuck up a patient's life by neglecting to communicate because there's just so much to potentially miss. langdon challenges both our moral perception of healthcare workers and our perception of addiction as a disease and who it affects, and what it looks like. dana was an all around likable character who served as a vessel for depicting how nurses bear the brunt of a lot of patients' dissatisfaction.
at the end of the day, the show wasn't about *the characters* so much as what the characters reveal to us about the system. if you ask me, the most ideal way for the pitt season 2 to go would've been to focus on a different department entirely.
however, if you're unwilling to do that, then another direction that would've been far more interesting than whatever actually happened would've been to go all in on the white house's impacts on the department. they hang a lampshade on it in this season- mentioning that rural hospitals are shutting down, funding cuts, misinformation, and then that unbelievably glossed over cameo from ICE. don't tiptoe around it with these honorable mentions, make the whole goddamn season about this shit. what's it like for healthcare workers now that ice is crawling around the goddamn country? what's it like for healthcare workers now that the white house is actively lying about how people can handle their health? what's it like for them now that everyone has less insurance coverage and more and more hospitals are shutting down?
that is a far more compelling idea than hey let's do season 1 again except now robby is suicidal and making it everyone's fucking problem. it's also more compelling than having the internet shut down leading to zany antics akin to a fucking sitcom. is this fucking abbott elementary?
season 1 made me cry several times because the writing and emotion were just that fucking good. season 2 didn't make me feel an ounce of emotion even when they were trying desperately to.
the reliance on shock value also wasn't missed. why were we just rawdogging someones fake ass organs for the first 20 minutes of episode 1. why did we genuinely have a guy getting shit on joke. why did dr. robby fucking randomly cut into some woman's leg just to prove a point. shock value.
i can't go into every example of the writing just not hitting but here's a great example. the sexual assault victim: why the fuck are dana and the nursing intern the ones taking care of this patient? the purpose of this plotline is to convey how invasive and dehumanizing the process of sexual assault examinations are, and the people we've picked for the job are the matronly charge nurse with no nuances because she's not a main character, and the nursing intern with no nuances because she's a bad character.
imagine if santos did this exam- awakening her own trauma as she decides whether she'll be vulnerable to empathize with the patient or whether she'll wall up. imagine if mohan did this exam- creating conflict between robby's demands of her and her desire to give patients care and humanity. imagine if javadi did it- forcing her to reconcile with some of the ugliest and most heartbreaking parts of healthcare. there's no intellectual challenge that forces the viewer to reconcile with something if dana's the one doing the exam, because it's no challenge for dana.
turning the character dial up
as a tv show, one of the least respectable things you could ever do is see that people like a character, take the most quippy aspect of that character, and dial it up to 100 for the next season.
mckay is now just a gentle parent. dana is now a "mama bear" from boston?? (also i cannot stand people conflating matronliness with being a good nurse- so fucking insufferable) (she plays that fucking accent up so goddamn much it's mind numbing) mel is just like stupid and absent i guess now, though she gets better as the season progresses. santos is now 10 times whumpier than she was last season.
in fact lets talk about santos a bit. i never liked the fact that they gave her sexual trauma. it felt like a half-assed way to get people to see her behavior with depth. girls can't just be brash and overzealous because that's who they happened to become, they have to be EXCUSED WITH HORRIFIC TRAUMA! (also giving lesbians sexual trauma, let's just stop doing that no?) now, in season 2, they said okay not only is she going to have a shitty home life and sexual trauma but she's also gonna have self harm issues in her late 20s! and none of this will really come to fruition in any way we just added it because it's fun!
even the new characters are so unbelievably one dimensional that i can't believe they wasted my time with them. ogylvie is a fucking asshole bitch with daddy issues no one cares about. joy is a sarcastic cornball with no other purpose on the show. emma is a deer in headlights, pretty much exists to be a victim.
and dr. robby, well we'll talk about him later.
the only characters with even an ounce of emotional depth this season are langdon and al-hashimi. langdon's arc almost writes itself so i'm not inclined to give them that many props for him. patrick ball also seems to have experience with addiction so i'm sure many of the complexities of his performance just came from him, not from the actual writing. al-hashimi proved to be an extremely competent leader despite some of her less favorable ideas (the AI whatever), not that it ends up mattering.
the santos v. langdon drama
"oh it's two sided" this "oh they're both right and wrong" that brother langdon gave her an extremely earnest apology and she just didn't care because at the end of the day her issue isn't just that he yelled at her it's that he questioned her at all.
'he made me doubt my skills' no you FUCKED up over and over and he called you out on it. are we all forgetting that langdon chewed her out for far more than just coming too close to figuring out about his addiction? she was making medical decisions on day 1 of her residency without the approval of anyone senior to her, decisions that put patient's lives at risk (far more at risk than langdon stealing drugs, mind you).
not to mention she was actively putting down the other interns and continues to prove herself not to be a team player. this entire season langdon has not let this conflict affect how he treats her when they're working on patients, yet she has no problem letting it influence her conduct.
santos says she's been a pariah ever since langdon left, yet it seems like literally everyone is completely chill with her and in fact langdon's gay best friend garcia is literally cracking her. so what's the issue here?
at the end of the day, he hurt her feelings and she wanted him to go down for it. she sees addiction not as a disease but as a moral failing that dwarfs her own discrepancies and therefore should cancel out anything he's ever criticized her for. it's whiny and it's immature and i'm quite glad that he took the high road, said his piece, and left her to it. i'm extremely sick of her feeling bad for herself.
i will never be one of those 'that's a felony that's a crime' bitches yeah they make all kinds of shit crimes doesn't mean they should be. he was prescribed benzos and got addicted to them, it's not a fucking moral failing it's like the entire cause of the opioid epidemic. is your sense of right and wrong really gonna be dictated by the parameters set by the united states criminal justice system? get a grip.
anyway this was more of a personal vent than anything tbh it doesn't have to do w the writing.
the woman of color issue
a troubling pattern i took notice of on season 2 of the pitt is dr. robby's extremely weird relationship with women of color on the show as a whole.
example 1: probably the most obvious one, the way he treats dr. mohan.
in the first season, he was riding dr. mohan not because she was an incompetent doctor, as she proved at the end of the season, nor because she brought her personal issues to the workplace, something several other characters do; but because she took her time with patients, caring for their agency and comfort which is something the american healthcare system simply does not care for. in fact, dr. collins actually contradicts him to mohan, saying she should trust her gut, so it's not even that dr. mohan was doing something unquestionably wrong.
in season 2, dr. mohan is devolved into a petulant, immature character i assume solely so she could be written off at the end for whatever godforsaken reason. she's introduced as having a conflict with her mother that garners 0 sympathy from the audience because it's not written to be something serious. then she gets a fucking panic attack? are you shitting me? did noah wyle just really want a scene where he could berate her with the line 'wait, is this a panic attack because of your mommy issues?' then she just fucking spirals and starts fucking everything up, really?
the thing about the way he treats dr. mohan compared to any white character is the sheer humiliation he forces her to endure. she isn't left with any semblance of dignity at the end, the entire thing is written in such a way that she just seems like an incompetent person.
when dr. langdon treated dr. santos like this, he got bitched out for it by robby and we spent an entire two season arc on him feeling sorry for how he treated her. however when dr. robby treats dr. mohan this way, she has to put her tail between her legs and apologize to him instead of giving him the fucking cold shoulder and never talking to him again the way santos was allowed to.
example 2: javadi
javadi also has a plot here where she makes some fuckup and every single person in her vicinity bitches her out for it. it's almost a microcosm of what happened to dr. mohan; she makes one mistake and it completely tanks her self confidence and everyone's perception of her competence.
example 3: dr. al-hashimi
throughout the season, several characters hammer it in that they do not believe that dr. al-hashimi will succeed in taking over the ER from dr. robby. this makes no sense, as for this entire season she has shown herself to be an extremely level-headed and intelligent leader, far better than dr. robby, with an ability to balance empathy with realism. in fact santos is one of the characters to express reservations about al-hashimi, which comes off more like a personal grudge because ah-hashimi dared to criticize her work.
however, at the end, they reveal that she has some sort of seizure disorder that has begun to come back as a result of her first day at the ER, and now she is not capable of running it. why did this need to be written into her character? why does she, like mohan and javadi, need to have some sort of fatal flaw that completely tears down her confidence in her own abilities? these characters are portrayed like they're doomed to fail when in reality their mistakes a) get berated far more than similar mistakes from others and b) are altogether extremely contrived to the end of... just writing these characters off i guess.
meanwhile, none of the white characters experience even a fraction of this. santos spends the entire season bitching about taking on patients because she needs to chart, something everyone has to do. she's never yelled at for going slow or for prioritizing charting over patient care. not to mention she basically accused several patient's family members of abuse in the morning.
mckay was having a whole fucking mtv episode in the breakroom last season and she never got yelled at for bringing her personal issues to work.
that fucking medical student, ogylvie or whatever, is openly rude and disrespectful to patients repeatedly while fucking things up a decent amount, and yet no one rips him a new one- in fact he ends the season with some touching comforting scene after one of his patients dies, are you fucking kidding me?
mel spends the whole season basically zoned out because of her deposition and her sister getting laid and she's NEVER chastised for being slow or inattentive.
whitaker barely even faces any challenges this season and is mostly glazed by the entire cast.
langdon, for all the shit he faces from everyone, still maintains his own dignity, stays confident in his recovery, and has a couple of medical wins by the end of the day. you didn't see langdon having a fucking panic attack or breaking down or blanking.
but all the brown women needed to be torn down. the brown women needed to be written as not knowing when they can trust their own brains.
the second aspect of this is that dr. robby is constantly having romantic tension with these beautiful women of color on this supposedly serious show. him and dr. collins were a cute ex-partners relationship in season 1, but then it just got..... weird. he has a relationship, apparently, with this random social worker that has no bearing on the show whatsoever. and then at the same time he has romantic tension with dr. al-hashimi. the way noah wyle insists on writing these women as irrevocably allured by him....... baby, they're all out of your league. stick to your chopped z*onist wife.
robby, and the glaze in the room
so uh, dr. robby is actually a genuinely unlikable person in season 2. like a total abusive asshole. like borderline evil. like i lowkey want him to khs and do us all a favor.
in season 1, dr. robby was a guy undoubtedly trying to do the right thing in every situation. he had a good amount of patience that withered away as the day went on, reminding us that he is just human at the end of the day. even if something wasn't his problem (ie. the incel kid, ie. the kids putting their dad on hospice) he tried to provide as much comfort and support in every way possible. he had blind spots, he had weaknesses, and it's clear that he had a temper that started to jump out after he figured out about langdon. but he cared about people, both his patients and his fellow workers.
in season 2, dr. robby is a loose canon who's a cocky asshole from the second he walks in. the show pretty much shirks reality so as to give robby 'savage' moments like cutting some woman's leg open or asking the 'ladies in the room' about the issue of modesty. yeah, nice job making it into every 13 year old's 'dr. robby being unhinged for 12 minutes gay' compilation.
season 2 robby is far more unglued despite having far less to do than season 1 and far less emotionally taxing cases. meanwhile, the cases that are emotionally taxing he shows utter disregard for.
young boy injured by fireworks being cared for by his sister because their parents got deported? he waves them off. malnourished prison patient who al-hashimi wants to keep in their care rather than pimping him back out to the prison doctors? robby barely gives a shit. diabetic father of an uninsured family faces horrific repercussions after leaving the hospital AMA? he says the guy should've KILLED himself. his own fucking nurse gets detained by goddamn ice agents after he defends this poor woman they're terrorizing- causing several workers to flee the building for fear of their own safety????? WHAT DOES DR. ROBBY DO??? HE FUCKING BRUSHES IT OFF. he was more concerned with losing fucking workers from ice's presence than he was for the safety of that woman. that shit fucking pissed me off. robby turns into such an irredeemable asshole that i couldn't care less about his goddamn suicidality they want me to fall over my feet about.
he's a dick to langdon and everyone is trying to convince me it's because he's frustrated that he let langdon down, yet it seems far more like he's mad that langdon even got better. there is so little semblance of care in the way he treats langdon, similar to how he treats all the other goddamn characters.
the conclusion of this whole season is that robby is riding everyone and being a goddamn asshole because he plans to kill himself and he needs to know that all his little ducklings will be in a row before that. is there an ounce of self awareness about how utterly absurd it is to imply that the attending physician has sole control over how everyone in the ER behaves? that if he leaves the entire place will just fall apart? similar to dana, they seem to conflate the roles of doctor and father on this show, which is not endearing but rather childish.
i could go on for hours about the ridiculous psychological profile they're attempting to draw up for dr. robby but the fact of the matter is dr. robby should not even be centered in the plot like this. this show is not the dr. robby fucks bitches and whips motherfuckers into shape show, as much as noah wyle seems to want it to be. the reason anyone cared about his suicidality last season was because we saw the emotional distress of the ER setting, particularly after a mass casualty event, and we understood the toll that took on someone who's done this job for decades. it's not because we're emotionally attached to fucking dr. robby himself.
langdon finally hands it to him at the end of the season, but even in that conversation langdon basically says dr. robby is trying too hard to be perfect- IT'S STILL FUCKING GLAZE. the MARTYRDOM is fucking ridiculous. it's like this whole season was just a dr. robby ego trip. it's pathetic.
by the way, i gave not one fraction of a fuck about his goddamn friend who for some reason was moved up the ER waitlist and STILL wouldn't stop bitching and moaning about how long everything was taking. this guy took up so much screen time i wanted to scream.
writing was just... off
remember that scene where langdon makes some harmless joke about whitaker working on a farm and whitaker fucking crashes out at him for no reason? despite him being weird as fuck to langdon all day he somehow makes himself the victim of maybe one of the most useless scenes in the entire show? if i were langdon i would've bitch slapped the fuck out of him bro showed olympic levels of restraint.
remember the one where the internet goes out and they're worried because no one got a picture of the chart and then joy just conveniently has photographic memory?
remember when that waterslide malfunctions and they act like it's gonna be some big thing and then it wasn't?
remember that entire scene with that guy flirting with mel and how fucking useless it was?
remember when we spent 15 years on this fucking hospice patient who shouldn't've even been in the ER?
remember every single shitty quip they forced dana to make with that ridiculous fucking accent?
remember when garcia unironically called javadi a nepo baby while crashing out at her?
remember when they broke the fourth wall by having that girl thirst after langdon?
remember when oglyvie, a character no one gives a shit about, breaks down and then gets comforted by whitaker, a character no one should give a shit about because he barely has an arc or a personality?
remember how they completely retconned dr. mohan's personality?
writing was ass, is my point.
anyway, let bro do drugs. also bring dr. collins back. thank you for listening.
