The Pitt Season 2 Episode 2 Review: Again and Again and Again

This review contains spoilers for The Pitt season 2 episode 2.

The Pitt‘s greatest strengths carry the potential to become its biggest weaknesses one day. The show’s real-time format, spartan sound design, and jargon-heavy dialog have made it one of the most accurate and exciting medical dramas of all time. That dedication to realism, however, comes with some limitations.

There is almost certainly never going to be a Very Special Episode of The Pitt. Unless showrunner R. Scott Gemmill and company well and truly run out of gas by the time season 27 rolls around, we will never see a flashback to Dr. Robby’s pre-Covid days or the characters suddenly breaking into song and dance in a musical installment. The format is the format. But that doesn’t mean the show doesn’t have a trick or two up its white lab coat sleeve. Season 2 episode 2 “8:00 A.M.” reveals how The Pitt can get creative in establishing a theme within an episode despite its inflexible structure.

It turns out that the “Why did Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) freeze while looking at the baby?” cliffhanger wasn’t entirely what it seemed. While many naturally assumed the new attending spotted something troubling about the infant on the vital monitors, in reality she was retreating internally to consider something we are not privy to yet. In fact, Al-Hashimi’s thousand-yard stare acts as a sleight of hand for the real cliffhanger of episode 1: the introduction of elderly woman Evelyn Bostick (Jayne Taini) from a nearby retirement home. Though the confused and disoriented Evelyn arrives in the back of an ambulance, she is not a patient, at least not yet. Instead she’s there to meet her husband, 79-year-old Ethan Bostick.

Unbeknownst to her, however, Ethan died minutes earlier in the season 2 premiere and not for lack of the hospital staff’s trying. Having entered the hospital unconscious and with a POLT (Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment), Ethan is allowed to peacefully drift away into death in accordance with his written wishes. Whitaker (Gerran Howell), bless him, uses Mr. Bostick’s passing as a lesson on the fragility of life and the limitations of healthcare to his interns, Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) and Kwon (Irene Choi).

It’s a touching moment for both the healthcare providers and the audience as Whitaker asserts himself as Dr. Robby’s (Noah Wyle) most attentive and empathetic acolyte. But that’s all it is: a moment. Because the thing about moments is that there’s always another moment after them and then infinite more moments after those until the world ends… or at least until one’s brain loses the capacity to recognize fresh moments. Unfortunately, that’s the reality facing Mrs. Evelyn Bostick.

When Whitaker gently informs Evelyn that her husband has died, she responds with all the ache, revulsion, and denial that one would expect. “He died? Ethan? No. No. Are you sure? No, no, no, no, no. Ethan isn’t sick!” Whitaker leaves her to mourn privately but later returns upon her request only to discover that Mrs. Bostick doesn’t recall their conversation from roughly 15 minutes prior. Upon even hearing the name “Ethan,” Evelyn lights up with a girlish excitement and eagerly asks to see her lifelong love, only for Whitaker to have to deliver the grim news a second time. The poor woman’s subsequent reaction is so similar to her first that it very well could have been re-used from the first scene and no one would be the wiser.

The tragic saga of Evelyn Bostick – which culminates in a third moment featuring her still unable to understand her husband’s death despite being in the presence of his body – is heart shredding stuff. “This has been such a long day,” she sighs less than three hours after sunrise. It’s also fair and unpretentious. There’s no narrative trickery or creative flourish here (beyond a simple “rule of three”) to conjure up pathos. It’s simply another very bad hour in a very long day. And yet, even within The Pitt‘s stylistic limitations, it feels as though the show has constructed a meaningful thematic mood for the whole episode. The mood, of course, being “I can’t believe we have to keep doing this shit over and over again.”

The sterile hallways and restless churn of the Pitt appear to have a time-suspending effect on its occupants. Dr. Robby and friends could go their entire 15-hour shifts encountering the same traumas over and over, and never once knowing the hour unless they have to announce a patient’s time of death. It’s Groundhog Day with stethoscopes, which is fitting given that Pittsburgh counts Punxsutawney Phil as a neighbor.

Season 2 episode 2 is filled with instances of doctors and patients confronting the depressingly familiar for the umpteenth time. “You want to jump on this trauma with me?” Dr. Robby asks Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif). When she asks what the trauma is, he responds hopefully “It’s a surprise!” But it’s not really much of a surprise. It’s a gruesome but treatable open dislocation that Dr. Robby knows a creative way to fix. Dr. Al-Hashimi, new and unfamiliar with the rhythms of the Pitt, suggests they bring in ortho immediately. Robby, McKay, and Dr. King (Taylor Rearden) know better, with Robby saying “We’re gonna get this before ortho even answers the page.” And so they do! It’s Groundhog Day, after all.

Elsewhere in the hospital, regular patient Louie Cloverfield is so familiar with the procedure to drain fluid from his stomach due to his alcohol-related liver disease that he all but walks Ogilvie and Kwon through the motions. “That’s like a gallon and a half…” Kwon remarks in upon learning Louie was drained of six liters during his last visit. “Of high octane premium!” Louie responds. Meanwhile, Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) knows exactly what creepy crawly treats they’ll encounter under Mr. Digby’s moldering cast, even if it takes young nurse Emma (Laëtitia Hollard) by surprise.

Of course, The Pitt isn’t really a Groundhog Day-like purgatory, fun as it would be to see Robby begin each hour with a Sonny & Cher song. But that doesn’t mean that novel events are any more comfortable than the familiar ones. Al-Hashimi introduces the next step of her modern healthcare vision: an AI notes transcribing app that goes over with Robby about as well as an arm cast full of maggots. By the time Robby decides to push only ketamine and not rocuronium as well for a choking patient as Al-Hashimi prefers, the pair are officially Butting Heads.

Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) can’t quite figure out how to un-superglue a teenager’s eyelid. Dr. Javadi (Shabana Azeez) has to contend with a syphilitic nun. Mel is thrown to the ground by the patient who was rizzing her up, immediately entering him into the Doug Driscoll Hall of Shame of monsters who have laid hands on our precious Pitt babies. And then there’s the patient who double dosed an ED injection for his wedding anniversary and is now presenting with eight hours of hard time.

“Do you guys do this like every day?” nurse Emma asks Mel and Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) as they begin to drain a seemingly impossible amount of blood out of the man’s engorged member. “Only if we’re lucky,” Santos deadpans.

Due to its FCC-regulated broadcast origins, televised storytelling has long considered depictions of erect penises as taboo even in the streaming world. HBO appears to have found a couple of work arounds recently: one being presenting a hard-on as a medical case on a hospital show, the other being Tim Robinson. Funny and prurient as it may seem, poor Mr. Randall’s turgid condition represents The Pitt‘s commitment to realism. Plus, it allows Santos to work in the most called-for “that’s what she said” since the heyday of Michael Scott.

In sickness and in health, reality is always the real star on The Pitt. Sometimes it gives you the most breathtakingly tragic intersection of love, death, and memory you’ve ever seen. Other times, it gives you a dick joke. It’s all in an hour’s work, with 13 more to go.

New episodes of The Pitt season 2 premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.