season 2, episode 10, “4:00 P.M.”
As viewers, we know this season of The Pitt is going to last for 15 hours, but as far as the staffers at PTMC are concerned, they’re relatively close to the end of their 12-hour shift. And you can tell they’re reaching their workday limit because the vibes at “4:00 P.M.” have turned absolutely rancid. When the victims of a horrific waterslide collapse are holding it together better than the doctors treating them, you know something is wrong. In fact, almost everyone is on their worst, most passive-aggressive behavior this hour, which seems like both an intentional part of The Pitt’s season-long storytelling and also, perhaps, an example of the show’s writers getting a little burnt out themselves.
In other words: “4:00 P.M.” is a strange hour of The Pitt. After last week’s episode was a real masterclass in subtle, evocative character work, this hour is much clunkier with what it’s trying to say and how it’s saying it. Some of it works—mostly notably the fascinating choice to take Robby into full-on villain territory here—but a lot of it feels unbalanced in a way this show avoids at its best. While the waterslide collapse turns out to be less of a mass-casualty event than I was expecting (there are just three collapse-related patients this week), perhaps the real mass-casualty event is the odd character turns we make along the way.
Still, it’s the waterslide victims who anchor this hour with some of the gnarliest injuries we’ve seen yet this season. The first arrives with the bottom half of her right leg cleanly guillotined off, a fact that feels even more eerie when Ogilvie is casually handed the dismembered limb on the helicopter pad. Thankfully, it actually turns out to be a best-case scenario for such a horrific accident—the cut is clean enough that arrogant ortho-surgeon “Park The Shark” thinks he can reattach the leg. (This is a medical procedure I genuinely didn’t realize was possible with such a major limb loss.)
The next patient is also “lucky” with his injuries. Though he fell 20 feet through the air when the slide cracked, he walks away with just some blunt chest trauma and a freaky but fixable “degloved” finger. Unfortunately, he has to deal with Santos, Langdon, Al-Hashimi, and Garcia hashing out all their simmering interpersonal drama while working on his injuries. Santos snipes at everything Langdon says. Al-Hashimi and Garcia take his side. And Santos is once again left feeling like she’s all alone in the world—a tough reality that’s probably not as tough as, you know, not knowing if your seven-year-old son is dead or alive.
Indeed, the waterslide dad through-line is a prime example of a story where I can’t quite tell if The Pitt realizes just how poorly the doctors are acting. The idea of trying to hold onto your son only to drop him to his potential death because your finger is being ripped apart is one of the most horrific things I can imagine any parent living through. And yet the doctors barely even seem affected when the dad recounts the experience—even someone like Langdon, who’s had a bunch of fatherhood centric moments this season. (In fact, he almost immediately jumps back into his sassy workplace banter with Garcia.) I understand that there’s nothing they can actively do to help the son and that doctors often need to emotionally compartmentalize in order to do their job. But why introduce such a horrific backstory if it’s not even going to make our protagonists crack at least a little bit?
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