By 
This article contains spoilers for THE PITT season 2 episode 4.
Near the beginning of The Pitt season 2’s fourth episode “10:00 A.M.,” deaf patient Harlow Graham (Jessica Flores) politely requests some eye contact.
“It’s okay to look at me. I don’t bite,” she says to nurse Donnie (Brandon Mendez Homer) via a hospital-provided American Sign Language interpreter. In trying to get information about Harlow’s condition, Donnie has committed a common social faux pas when communicating with the hard of hearing: he’s exclusively addressed the translator, not Ms. Graham herself.
It’s good that Harlow spoke up because I was ready to snap my fingers in Donnie’s face myself. My recognition of his accidental rudeness was not due to me being more empathetic than an emergency room nurse or having any experience communicating with deaf people but rather because I had just watched an episode of ER dealing with this exact topic.
Perhaps now is the right time to reveal that, concurrent with The Pitt‘s second season, I’ve been watching the show’s spiritual successor for the first time. While I caught a few episodes of ER here or there in my youth, I’d never actually sat down to consume all 15 seasons and 331 episodes of the hospital drama that put Noah Wyle on the map as an iconic fictional healthcare provider.
The experience of watching five seasons and counting of ER has been… a bit of a slog. Following a fresh (for its time) and creative first season, the series settles in to standard network schlock soon after, despite Wyle and company’s undeniable charms and (increasingly occasional) commitment to medical accuracy. But the watch has also produced several moments of incidental assonance with The Pitt season 2. One such moment arrives in ER season 5 episode 6 “Stuck on You” when surgeon Dr. Peter Benton speaks to deaf colleague Dr. Lisa Parks through her interpreter.
“Dr. Parks asks that when you speak to her you look directly at her so she can read your lips,” the woman cheerily tells Dr. Benton, who immediately works to correct his behavior.
“Stuck on You” premiered on November 5, 1998. Now, some 27 years later, ER doctors in Noah Wyle-starring medical dramas still need a helpful reminder now and then. Even in an environment that brings the nurse Donnies of the world into regular contact with a diverse cross-section of human beings and their medical conditions, there’s always something new to learn…even if some of your peers learned it nearly three decades ago.
Learning experiences abound in “10:00 AM” and not every doctor in the Pitt acquits themself capably. Despite his early status as the med student golden boy, Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) commits the trauma room’s cardinal sin by hastily removing a foreign body from a living person. The foreign body in this case is a shard of glass and the living person is Vince Cole, a 23-year-old parkour artist who fell through the skylight of a floral shop. Turns out that shard of glass was load-bearing and blood immediately begins to rush out form the wound, stopped only by an impossibly cool and somehow-not-science-fiction tool that injects microscopic sponges into the human body. Of course, Ogilvie wouldn’t have even been in that situation if radiology didn’t miss the obvious foreign object in their initial scan. Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) chalks it all up to “first week in July syndrome.”
Elsewhere in the ER, our beloved Pitt-sters continue to take L after L. Santos (Isa Briones), who is already in danger of repeating her R2 year, can’t focus during an examination of a patient alongside Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden). It falls to Mel, herself distracted by her incoming deposition (“Yeah, still counting down the hours. There are five left if you were wondering,” she helpfully notes for the audience), to make the diagnosis of bulimia, which often goes unrecognized in Black female patients.
Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) has to admit defeat with patient Willow Baptiste, whose superglued shut eyelid won’t yield to any known dissolving agents. Langdon submits to further indignity when the TikTok-famous “Dr. J” the patient insists on seeing turns out to be Dr. Javadi (Shabana Azeez). Dr. J fixes the situation but the cost might be too much to bear for poor Willow. Losing one’s left eyelashes hours before hosting a Fourth of July party is one of the season’s grandest tragedies yet.
Then there’s poor med student Joy Kwon (Irene Choi) who just can’t buy a break. Moments after bemoaning her $200,000 in med school debt, Joy accidentally gets poked with one of the shards of glass porcupine-ing out of Vince Cole’s body, drawing blood and making her a patient. New nurse Emma successfully draws Joy’s blood to test for pathogens but then drops the vial, which rolls across the floor and gets shattered by a passing gurney in almost cartoonish fashion. If it weren’t for Ogilvie screwing up just minutes later to lift her spirits, this very well could have been Joy’s final hour in the Pitt.
Many of the patients in this hour languish in a liminal space between diagnosis and solution. The doctors aren’t anywhere closer to figuring out what triggered Jackson Davis’ psychosis, even if Javadi is so eager to get to the bottom of it that she summons psychiatrist Dr. Jefferson (Christopher Thornton) to question Jackson while he’s still asleep. Meanwhile, Mr. Diaz’ diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) has been resolved but his nightmare is only just now beginning due to a lack of health insurance. The poor man all but slaps his loving daughter’s phone out of her hand when she announces she made a GoFundMe page. It’s not all bad news though as the flirtatious Mr. Montrose (Michael Nouri) does get his butt pain resolved courtesy of Dr. McKay’s (Fiona Dourif) bold rectal maneuver.
Truly, the only resident of the Pitt who could be having anything close to resembling a good hour is the increasingly impressive Dr. Whitaker (Gerran Howell). Not content to chalk Mr. Jean Samba’s condition up to simple exhaustion, Whitaker runs a few more tests and gets a result so troubling he immediately starts to tremble.
“ST elevation, V7, V8, V9. It’s a posterior STEMI. Worst kind of heart attack,” Whitaker tells Samba, who immediately confirms the diagnosis by flatlining. Thankfully Whitaker got to it early enough to save the man’s life and receives a well-earned attaboy from Dr. Robby for good measure.
Amid this moment of unambiguous heroism and success, however, The Pitt also begins to lay track for Whitaker’s inevitable downfall. Whitaker’s roomie Santos reveals to Javadi that Whitaker has been hanging out with the widow of a farmer who died in the Pitt last year following injuries from a propane tank explosion. Whitaker is adamant that the woman is just a friend and he’s looking after her, her farm, and her baby.
“Sure, just a friend. With farm benefits,” Santos says.
“What are farm benefits?” Javadi asks.
“Ever seen a miking machine?”
We don’t need to know what Whitaker is doing on that farm or whether it involves a milking machine to understand that this is not a healthy situation for the young man. Extending one’s emergency room obligations into husbandly duties for every lost patient’s widow is a recipe for burnout at best or exploitation and litigation at worst. But the qualities that drive Whitaker to make questionable house calls are also undoubtedly the same qualities that allow him to identify the worst kind of heart attack before anyone else. Is it worth trying to change Whitaker even if it means creating a less empathetic physician? That’s a question that Dr. Robby himself has been pondering for years.
One thing is for sure on The Pitt and it’s that you just cannot win. Whether you’re a first-year resident trying to do too much or a seasoned nurse not doing enough, some dickhead on the internet is going to critique your approach.
New episodes of The Pitt season 2 premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.
The post The Pitt Season 2 Episode 4 Review: First Week in July Syndrome appeared first on Den of Geek.
