This article contains major spoilers for The Pitt Season 2 Episode 12.
In Season 1 of The Pitt, the show reached its climax when a music festival shootout forces all of the day shift doctors to put in extra time. It’s an intense sequence of episodes that highlights just how brutal the ER life is and the toll it takes on the doctors. In The Pitt Season 2, we’ve yet to encounter a major crisis on the level of the shooting; nevertheless, my stress levels have never been higher watching this show week to week.
The Pitt Season 2 may end up not having any sort of major crisis, but I’m starting to think maybe that’s okay. I mean, just look at our main cast. They are seriously having a rough go of it. I’m not even sure they could survive another crisis right now.
While Season 1 introduced an external factor to kick things into overdrive, Season 2 opts for a more introspective look into what it means to give so much of yourself to this insane, fast-paced job. Nowhere is it clearer than with Robby, whose facade cracks just a little bit more with each episode. In Episode 12, things come to a head when we finally see him explode at Dana, who’s not backing down from defending new nurse Emma from a violent patient.
It’s obvious that the shootout and the fallout with Langdon are still weighing heavily on Robby. And while his breakdown is surely the result of countless years of bottling things up inside, the events of Season 1 were likely the final straw for him.
Robby isn’t the only one demonstrating the effects of burnout, though. Langdon’s breakdown was on full display in Season 1 with the reveal of his benzo addiction, Mel is beginning to struggle with possible abandonment issues with her own sister, Mohan suffered a literal panic attack with the stresses of the ER and her own mom closing in on her, and Santos — who often hides behind a tough veneer — shows signs of vulnerability this episode as she contemplates going back to her self-harm ways.
The Pitt‘s episode structure makes it such that we’ll never have full context for the things that plague our doctors. We only see them over the course of one shift, and all we have are contextual clues. If we extrapolate and assume that every shift plays out in pretty much the same way, though, it becomes clear how quickly and easily that stress can build up even in just a few days, let alone a whole year.
The context is irrelevant, though, as The Pitt simply wants to focus on the effects of the burnout and stress the doctors face each day. From Mohan’s panic attack to the subtle buildup of stress on Robby’s face and the way he flinches just from hearing the phone ring, The Pitt drives home the point that this line of work is almost unsustainable without proper psychological care or, say, work-life balance and boundaries.
Amid the darkness of one of the most intense episodes of The Pitt, there’s simply one ray of hope in the form of Joy Kwon. As the day shift comes to a close, she packs up and gets ready to leave, but Langdon stops her to say that the doctors all voluntarily put in the extra time if they’re needed, to which she responds by saying that over 60% of ER doctors suffer from burnout. She’s not getting paid for the OT, and maybe that shocking statistic should be a reminder that they all need to be better about setting boundaries.
The Pitt is now available for streaming on HBO Max.
