Warning: This review contains full spoilers for The Pitt Season 2, Episode 5!
We’re now five episodes and a third of the way into The Pitt Season 2. Most other shows these days would have rounded the halfway mark by now, but that’s the joy of watching something that hearkens back to the pre-streaming era of television. There’s still plenty of room left on this runway. Even so, the tone of the series is definitely intensifying as the situation at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grows more dire, resulting in what is easily the strongest chapter of Season 2 to date.
Episode 5 is great about addressing some of the niggling problems with previous installments, most notably when it comes to the relative lack of focus on Patrick Ball’s Dr. Langdon. As I’ve said before, if this season were to have a main focal character, it should be Langdon, but he’s been purposely relegated to the sidelines by his old mentor. But now Langdon is back in the thick of things, and we start to see the simmering tension between him and Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby start to boil over.
It’s great watching that mostly silent feud play out in Episode 5, as Robby does everything within his power not to talk to Langdon or be in the same room with him. You can easily sympathize with both men. Robby’s angry dismissal of Langdon was one of the standout scenes of Season 1, and it’s easy to recall the sheer pain and disbelief he felt in that moment. But at the same time, Langdon has paid his dues, and you can understand his frustration at being flatly rejected by a thoroughly unsympathetic Robby.
That all comes to a head in the final moments of Episode 5, as Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.) fittingly becomes the catalyst that forces both men to work together. There’s been the sense all along that the affable Louie’s long string of luck is about to run out, and that finally happens here. Not a bad cliffhanger on which to end the week.
Elsewhere in the ER, Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) is really the star of the show in Episode 5, as the series takes a slightly more humorous approach to her particular plight. The running gag of Santos getting one or two sentences deeper into her dictation, only to be interrupted again by Whitaker (Gerran Howell) or Ogilvie (James Howell), never gets old. But it’s also nice seeing her on the backfoot so much this season, after Season 1 really played up her crusading, righteous doctor side. Paperwork is the bane of us all.
By the same token, it’s fun to watch the insufferable know-it-all Ogilvie continue to get his just desserts. Last week it was almost killing a patient with a reckless extraction; this week, it’s being forced to clean out an elderly woman’s impacted colon.
Ogilvie’s fellow student Joy (Irene Choi) also gets a nice little bit of added attention in this episode. Up until now, Joy has been a fairly one-note character. She’s the scowling, disaffected med student who (understandably) can barely tolerate being paired with Ogilvie. But we get a chance to see a different side of the character when she swoops in to offer a solution to the family shuddering under the burden of crushing medical debt. It’s a happy ending to a depressing subplot, and one that tells us a lot more about who Joy is and why she’s seemingly so detached from it all.
Finally, this episode makes some inroads with Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), a character who so far has been played a little more antagonistically than I’d like. She’s the newcomer disrupting the carefully oiled machine that is the ER, and we’ve been left to sympathize with Robby on that front. But the two characters share a strong scene together where Al-Hashimi rightfully berates Robby for treating her like an underling rather than a colleague. It’s subtle, but it helps turn the character in a more favorable direction. Hopefully, that trend continues in the coming episodes.
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