You Oughta Know

This past week saw the airing of the second season finale for The Pitt, and it was, well… an episode. It really didn’t feel like a finale in the proper sense, but then The Pitt isn’t like a medical drama in a normal sense, either. Sure, it has a large ensemble cast, interesting medical cases, and plenty of character drama, but The Pitt, due to its fifteen hours, near real-time structure, doesn’t have easy start and end points for its stories. It takes a slice of life for these characters in this fifteen minute chunk at a Pittsburgh Emergency Department, and when those fifteen hours are up we’re done with those characters, whether their stories are done being told or not.

That’s part of what makes this second season finale not feel like a finale. Yes, the shift for most of the characters is over (although the night shift was already cycling in and we were learning their characters as the season came to an end, so even in that respect the show doesn’t really give us a conclusion). Characters might move on, they might not, but we won’t really know what’s going on for most of these people until we get to check back in with them again in season three (which is already in production). But as far as wrapping anything up, this second season finale really doesn’t do that.

The biggest thread left hanging open is what will happen to Dr. Robbie (Noah Wyle). The head of the day shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center's emergency room, Robbie has been going through it this past year, and it’s been taking a very obvious toll on him. The stress of his job, with constant life or death decisions that weigh on his head every day, has driven him to the emotional brink. He’s scheduled for a three month sabbatical where he plans to hop on his motorcycle and drive across the country, seeing what comes, but many in the department think he’s never coming back. He rides around without a helmet on, and people clearly think he’s on the brink of suicide.

His story is left an open question this season because, even without spoiling anything, how to you tie up a story about suicide in fifteen hours of a single day? That’s a long term recovery story which The Pitt is ill-equipped to tell, at least not in a form where we can see the whole evolution over a single season. Taking the story on here is brave for the show, and I appreciate what they do here by giving us this slice of Robbie’s life (with the expectation we’ll see him on the next step of his journey in the third season), but anyone wanting catharsis and a final knowledge that he will be okay has to realize going in that The Pitt can’t tell that kind of story and, also, that there’s a multi-season plan in place for the show that does include Robbie. It has to play things differently.

That’s a good and a bad thing this season, not just for Robbie but also for the show in general, and it can make it a frustrating watch at times. If you’re interested in long, character driven storytelling it’s hard to get that here, especially if you want any kind of conclusion for the characters. Clearly the first season was able to tell that kind of story because it was designed as a one-off season with the possibility it wouldn’t get picked up for future episodes. The kind of long-form character storytelling that this second season is engaging in wasn’t really part of the first season. It’s good to see the show pushing the characters, but it also means there are going to be more threads left hanging than we had before.

Sometimes this is good. In the case of Langdon (Patrick Bell), who was caught stealing drugs from the hospital in the first season and who is now back, after most of a year away while he went through recovery, we get the sense of his journey, of where he’s been and where he’s going. His arc is evolving but we see a throughline so his story, unlike Robbie’s, feels complete in a way. It’s natural character progression and the show is handling it very well.

But then we have a character like Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), who seems to be at a crossroads this season. She was supposed to move back to New Jersey to be with her mother, but her mother went and suddenly got married before selling off her home and other possessions so she could live on a cruise ship with her new beau. This leaves Samira in limbo, unsure of where her life will go or what she’s even going to do. The season ends for her on a question mark and, with Ganesh leaving the series after two seasons, we’re never going to get answers for her character. She will forever be unfinished for us (unless, seasons later, her character comes back, of course).

This speaks to an inherent flaw of the format, from a certain perspective. While the fifteen hour slice of life does give a solid flow to the day, letting us move from case to case and watch them all (more or less) from beginning to end, it also means that we just get this one day, each time, and we’re stuck (for the most part) in the Emergency Department, never leaving the hospital grounds. If a character goes home, or gets dragged off elsewhere for a meeting or deposition or whatever, they exit our focal view and we have no clue what’s going on with them. If a character vanishes for a couple of hours, that’s two weeks of storytelling we don’t see for them. If they exit their job at the emergency department, functionally they’re gone for good in our eyes.

Compare this to the series premiere of ER (which we looked at just a little while ago). There, Mark Greene gets a job offer from a private, concierge medical office. We go with him to that meeting and learn what the new job could entail. If that kind of story were done on The Pitt, the character would walk out the doors of the department and disappear for a couple of episodes until they came back and told us what happened. Not that I expect this show to do that kind of thing, but there is a parallel we can look at: Robbie’s motorcycle ride.

This season ends with Robbie just about to hop on his bike and go off towards who knows where. We don’t know what’s going to happen on that ride and, unless the series does some kind of episode based just around his journey (which is unlikely) or they do a TV movie that slots between seasons (also unlikely), we’ll only learn what happens on that motorcycle ride if Robbie or the other characters discuss it. We’re going to be told about it, not shown what happens, and that does leave us with a bit of a gap in the character’s story that we don’t get to experience first hand. The format of the show, in other words, does have its limitations.

At the same time, though, the show is very engaging with its medical cases. We get a lot of really cool procedures (that are, at times, very hard to watch), which many medical professionals have called surprisingly realistic. Hell, the season ends with a c-section birth that is so detailed many have said it could act as a primer for doing the actual procedure. That’s impressive, and it tickled my wife to no end as she has some medical training and really enjoys seeing these kinds of things (while I usually end up looking away when it gets too real). The show is willing to go places other, broadcast, medical dramas aren’t, and that’s still a credit to the series.

In the end I feel like the show was a little more uneven this season, in large part due to its storytelling format. The fifteen hour cycle is thrilling beat-to-beat as it lets you get involved with the characters at a deeper level as they go about their day. But at the same time it does often sell the characters a little short. We catch a slice of their life, but if they don’t have an engaging story that day, or have to go off and do other things part way into the season, we lose sight of them. Plus, not everyone gets a conclusion for their season arc, and it can leave viewers hanging.

It does make me want more, and I’m absolutely still enjoying this show. I just wish we could get slightly neater conclusions, a point in the direction for where characters are going, especially for those characters we’re unlikely to see again. I know we’ll catch up with Robbie, Langdon, and many others in the third season, as they’re all still signed on, and we’ll find out what’s happened in the months between days then… but it feels unsatisfying now when, desperately, we as viewers want more. The wait will be long, and then we’ll only get fifteen hours with the characters to see where they’ve been and where they’re going.

I guess it says one very strong thing about The Pitt: it leaves you wanting more. It just toys with you at times while it does it.