Still overworked, but now understaffed, The Pitt’s trauma team carries on while they deflect frantic phone calls from their dismissed senior resident. Dana Evans, now with a shiner, is the only staffer Robby specifically tells. “Langdon is gone,” he says. “I need you to run a pharmacy audit, and list all the patients he’s treated and all the medications he’s prescribed.” But while the rawness of gossip like Langdon’s forced exit ensures it will spread like a disease, from her perspective, Dr. Santos worries. About protocol and medical ethics, sure. But also: will the intern be labeled a snitch on her very first day in the ED? When she tries to backtrack on their conversations, a stunned Dr. Garcia stops her. “Dismissed?” she says of Langdon. “Stop. I don’t want any part of this.” Her usual sarcasm totally absent, Garcia levels Santos with a glare. “You’re trouble.” 

Robby having to kick out a doctor he was recommending for fellowships six hours ago obviously has him frazzled. It even triggers another episode of his latent COVID stress. But down a senior resident, he’s even more busy. While the attending is part of a team conducting an emergency delivery of a baby, he’s growing an extra set of hands and eyes as he monitors the “hemorrhagic shock from varices” action occurring in the next trauma bay. Theresa is showing him her missing son David’s extremely concerning new Instagram post – “they mocked me and forced me into an existence of loneliness and pain” – and he’s also hyper-cognizant of Dr. Collins as she takes point on delivery of the newborn and stabilization of the mom’s condition. (And the dads – it’s a surrogate situation. And also, The Pitt is not shy about getting its cameras right down in there.) With the knowledge that she herself miscarried, and seeing the emotion in her face as she powers through the end of this shift of shifts, Robby makes a mental note to find Collins while she takes a break in the ambulance bay.

But he’s still being pulled in every direction at once, so Robby also takes the time to tell Theresa that as a physician he will back her petition to the state of Pennsylvania. To find David the help it sounds like he desperately needs. “David lost his father. That would affect anyone. But we are failing young men, because we don’t teach them how to express their emotions. ‘Man up,’ we say, and then they get their lessons in manhood from toxic podcasts.” 

When Robby finds Collins outside, he offers her comfort. But he isn’t quite prepared for what she says next. In not so many words, Heather tells Robby she became pregnant “a few years ago,” but it wasn’t the right time for her to become a mother. As we know, they dated a few years ago. It’s a beat of wonderment, of what might have been. And with more than a few notes of regret. But her well-being in this moment is what matters the most. “He would want you to forgive yourself,” Robby says, leaving the referenced partner unnamed. The many layers of their professional and personal connection are evident even when shot from behind. Add Tracy Ifeachor and Noah Wyle to the list of awards deservers for this relentlessly affecting medical drama. 

Motherhood, fatherhood, parenting. The joy and pain of having it, of missing it, of fucking it up, or of constantly worrying that’s exactly what you might do. McKay feels it as she continues to argue with her ex Chad over his inattentiveness toward their son. She feels it more when Chad’s 25-year-old live-in girlfriend arrives at the Pitt in a “Bonus Mom” T-shirt. (McKay: “If you really care about what’s best for Harrison, you will back the fuck off.”) And Mohan feels it, too. She highlights to Whitaker how a new patient saying he’s in too much pain to walk his daughter down the aisle is really just cover for a hoped for opioids handout. There are some hard words as they try to make the man see how the addiction he won’t admit could kill the familial pride he feels in his heart.

Still thinking about Langdon, and increasingly on his last nerve, Robby later scolds Dr. Mohan for treating the same patient without consulting with him first. “Is anybody honest about anything anymore? Or are we all just bullshitting our way through life?” While their hard work at the hospital continues, the line in Chairs of people waiting for treatment does not end, and neither do the raw feelings. Society these days, it’s like the Band-Aid covering its open wound just keeps getting ripped right off. 

“The world’s changed,” a thoughtful Dana tells Robby as she stands and smokes in the same spot where Doug Driscoll hit her. People are meaner now, angrier. But medical professionals remain the same – and remain understaffed – as they work the front lines doing what they have always done. Just trying to help. And for that they become targets for what Dana refers to with droll cynicism as “war wounds from a patient.” She was born at Pittsburgh Trauma. She interned there in high school. Put in 33 years on the job. There is nothing this wise, always prepared charge nurse has not seen. But the look in her eyes gets serious when she tells Robby the punch might have hastened her last hurrah. Would Dana really leave?

We’ll have to see. While they’re talking, their phones suddenly light up. Multiple GSW’s en route to the Pitt’s emergency department. There is an active shooter at Pitt Fest, the same music festival full of young people like Jake, Robby’s stepson, who minutes ago called him from the grounds. 

And Theresa’s angry son David is still missing.   

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.