This article contains spoilers for The Pitt Season 2 Episode 4.
Going into Season 2 of The Pitt, I was more excited to see Season 1’s med students than anything else. It was fun to see how much they’d grown in the 10 months since we’d left them. The newcomers, on the other hand, left me somewhat unimpressed. Ogilvie comes off as an annoying little know-it-all (which he is), while Joy Kwon barely left an impression at all as she didn’t have all that much to do.
Now that we’re four episodes into Season 2, however, Joy is finally starting to come into her own and I find myself looking forward to seeing more of her each week.
It all started with Episode 2, when she made that little quip about Dr. Al-Hashimi’s AI charting app. “Almost intelligent,” she snarks, when the program proves incapable of charting accurately, making critical errors that still require a human eye for checks. Then she starts talking a little bit more over the course of the last two episodes, often making jabs at or about Ogilvie and how desperate he is for the approval of the other residents and attendings.
Episode 4, however, is what really cemented her as my favorite newcomer. As she’s slowly picking out shards of glass from a patient’s body, she lazily jokes that these menial tasks are definitely worth her student debts of $200,000. The Ogilvie jabs continue here too, as she quickly cuts back at him when he answers a question Robby had meant for her. “I didn’t realize your name was Joy,” she shoots back and says she’ll have to tell her parents how trendy they were for choosing such a trendy name for her like Joy.
After suffering an accidental cut while picking out the glass, she’s then taken to a room to get looked at and get her blood drawn. This whole time, Joy’s just completely uninterested in whatever’s going on around her. “You’re supposed to remove the tourniquet now,” she casually remarks to Emma, the new charge nurse, before looking away with that classic laissez-faire attitude of hers.
Honestly, Joy’s entire attitude is probably just stemming from having been stuck with Ogilvie this entire time, who is obviously shaping up to be the villain character among the newcomers. She’s snippy and quick-witted, not unlike Santos, but because she’s not such a try-hard like Santos, she comes off as a lot more relatable and likable. It doesn’t help that Santos has been particularly unlikable this episode, with her brushing off Mel and Whitaker when they’re just trying to be nice.
Put that attitude together with the cool septum piercing and the shiny ear piercings and you just get the impression that Joy simply does not care about what’s going on around her. Which, to be clear, is not a great attitude you want to see in an aspiring doctor, but it sure does make for good television. Joy Kwon feels like the sleeper favorite character of The Pitt Season 2 so far, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets a badass arc later on where she finally steps up to the plate and does something cool like, y’know, saving lives.
The Pitt is now available for streaming on HBO Max.
