This was a very heavy episode, albeit in a different way than last week’s. That was heavy because we lost someone. This was heavy because the world and the people in it can be very cruel.
It does not surprise me at all that Dana is trained as a SANE. I consume enough true crime to know in a very academic sense what a rape kit requires. I did not realize how long the process could be. Or just how invasive.
This quiet room was the one constant that we returned to throughout the hour. Even though the rest of the episode had the fragmented, harried energy that has burrowed into the season as a whole, this room was quiet. It was consistent. It continued.
It was very hard to watch. It was meant to be hard to watch. I cannot accurately convey how happy I was when Emma decided that Ilana deserved the good snacks, because it was the exact kind of care that reaffirms that there are people in this world who are good.
Also, Dana leaning forward like she wanted to take Ilana’s hands but restraining herself broke me a little.
The rest of the episode did feel fragmented, and again it felt repetitive. I thought that we had settled Orlando, but instead he secretly has over $100,000 in medical debt so he’s still leaving. Robby tries to have a conversation with the Hamler family about Roxie staying in the hospital, and he’s almost immediately pulled out of the room for an incoming trauma twice.
And I get it. You need to prioritize, and Robby was right to leave to handle those cases. He couldn’t afford to spend the ten minutes talking them through everything. But he was literally there for all of 90 seconds both times and nothing progressed.
We did get a little bit of forward momentum with Jackson’s parents arriving, but even those scenes were repetitive too. Javadi and/or Jefferson try to tell his family that Jackson is in a psych hold. Someone gets annoyed and storms off before the conversation can finish. Rinse and repeat.
I’m sure that it’s realistic, and I’m sure that it’s intentional too. Robby leaving multiple times conveys just how busy they are, for example. But they made that point several episodes ago. Can we please start actually wrapping up storylines? Maybe it will feel better on a binge watch, but right now it’s just dragging.
Elsewhere, Robby and Langdon finally got to talk… kind of. Langdon forced the apology, and Robby told him that he didn’t really want him in his ER anymore. This was the first time that Langdon seemed shaken professionally. Normally, he’s on the ball whenever there’s a case, but Robby managed to destroy his confidence in one sentence. Thankfully, Mel was there to jump in and help, and he seemed to get some of his old swagger back when Garcia snarked at him.
Langdon shouldn’t have pressed the issue with Robby. He was warned not to multiple times. And Robby does have the right to not accept the apology or absolve Langdon of what he did. But it really goes to show what one word from a mentor can do to someone, especially when contrasted to Robby telling Mel that she’s one of the best residents he’s ever trained.
Santos is a character that I occasionally have trouble with. I want to like her. She has so many traits that I normally adore in characters. But then she does something that makes me want to scream.
At this point, I’m almost waiting for something to be seriously wrong with Harlow that they could have prevented if only she had been given care at a reasonable pace. While I’m glad that Santos at least tried writing things down, it also showed very clearly the drawbacks of such a tactic. But then they had an actual, human interpreter there, and just because Harlow took a moment to express her incredibly reasonable frustration, Santos left to go do something else.
I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Harlow and the interpreter looked like they wanted to do the same as well.
But then, right when I’m angry with her, she turns it around again. The whole scene with Baby Jane Doe is an excellent microcosm of who Santos is. She’s very abrasive and sharp-tongued, easily annoyed at inconveniences, but when it comes down to it, she cares. Deeply. She will stand there and sing a lullaby and finagle a conversation with Robby so that he checks in with Whitaker without her needing to actually say the words.
I’m also getting a little concerned about her physical and mental health. It seemed like she had fallen asleep in the bathroom and only startled awake when Javadi made noise. And the scars on her thighs made me audibly gasp. Some of them looked relatively fresh.
She frustrates me. And she’s not the right doctor for Harlow at all whatsoever. But I still want her to be okay. I want at least one person here to be okay! I know that might be a lot to ask from a show set within a hospital, but still!
It’s interesting watching the injuries change as the day progresses. The morning started with pretty “normal” aliments, and now we have football players overheating and swimmers losing battles with boat propellers. As people get drunker, I’m sure that we’re going to get more burns too. (And I’m still waiting for the inevitable “firework exploded in my hand.”)
I didn’t expect an armed robbery to be one of the incidents, or for that to be the way Abbot gets brought back to the ER. I don’t think that joining a SWAT team as a medic is what his therapist meant when they said that he needed a hobby. It does feel like consistent characterization, though. This is a man with a bag of tricks that’s almost perfectly tailored to a mass casualty event.
I like Abbot a lot. His dynamic and easy banter with Robby does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to shading in how Robby acts and exists when he isn’t having a shift from hell. And he’s hyper competent, and it’s really nice to just watch someone excel in high pressure situations.
I expected the dynamic between him and Dr. Al to be hostile with the line about her being Gloria’s hire, but they found common ground very quickly. Dr. Al also spent time in the Middle East with Doctors Without Borders, specifically at a maternity ward in Kabul. Google tells me that it was the site of a terrorist attack on May 12, 2020, which I assume is what she was referring to when she mentioned a tragedy.
Dr. Al freezing back in the first episode hasn’t really been addressed at all, but we had a similar moment again. Not quite as bad, but she was clearly disassociating. The urgent phone call to the Pittsburgh Neuroscience Group makes me wonder if she doesn’t have some kind of traumatic brain injury that is getting worse. Something to keep an eye on as the day gets even more stressful.
And it’s about to get a lot more stressful.
If you saw any of the trailers for this season, then you knew why Westbridge was shut down and you knew that it would eventually hit the Pitt. The only question was the timing. We are halfway through, and we are now officially analog.
A cyberattack is one of those things that sound over dramatic while still being a genuine threat that hospitals do actually need to deal with. The University of Mississippi Medical Center was hit by a ransomware attack last week, and they’re still not fully back yet. These are events that take weeks, if not months, to recover from.
Which is to say that this is going to persist for the rest of the shift. I can only imagine the chaos that is to come. There’s going to be a lot of scrambling and communication difficulties, and I’m sure that next episode in particular is going to raise my blood pressure one way or another.
I was fully prepared for Whitaker to not get the picture, so the confirmation that he did settled my nerves. A little. I know that, objectively, hospitals operated without computers or other modern technology for a very long time, but they were set up to do that. They didn’t have literally a thirty second warning before it all came crashing down mid-shift. Seriously, no one could have let the ER know before then? That’s some pretty critical information. I can only assume that there aren’t any critical medical devices linked to the network? Right? … Hopefully?
Random Thoughts
Becca is definitely going to end up in the hospital with appendixitis, isn’t she?
Mohan is still arguing with her mom over the phone. I still don’t really know where that storyline is going.
Loved Robby doing a double take when he walked by and saw Mohan and Abbot.
Santos is the only person Langdon has left on his apology tour. That has to happen soon, right?
Dr. Ellis is pulling a double shift. Looks like she’ll be a part of the season moving forward too. I have slightly mixed feelings on this. I like her a lot, but screentime is already at such a premium this season. Her and Abbot just mean that there are two more characters to juggle.
Javadi’s dad is very different from her mom. And of course, there’s a contrast between the ER and dermatology. They can go and actually barbecue on the 4th of July instead of dealing with a cyberattack.
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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.
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