Editor’s Note: This story contains spoilers for the 12th episode of season 2 of “The Pitt.”
The day shift on “The Pitt” may be wrapping up, but no one seems able to leave.
“I can feel it in the air here,” says Duke Ekins (Jeff Kober), Dr. Robby’s old friend and motorcycle mechanic, who’s stuck in line for a CT scan. “This place is like quicksand.”
“6:00 P.M.” picks up swiftly where last week’s episode left off, with the staff responding to a “Code Hula Hoop,” a patient assaulting nurse Emma Nolan. Dana disarms the attacker with a shot of sedative she just happened to have in her pocket, also leaving him with a bloody nose and a likely concussion.
“He slipped,” Dana insists to Robby.
Dana’s elision of the incident, and her refusal to acknowledge any connection to her own traumatic assault last season, is enough to let the simmering tension between her and Robby boil over. It’s an ugly head-to-head that plays out throughout the hour, where each friend tells the other, “You are not yourself today.”
Much of “6:00 P.M.” is defined by what characters are willing to face — and even speak aloud.
Dana finally confronts Robby about his issues with Dr. Langdon, and gives voice to Robby’s suicidal ideation ahead of his motorcycle sabbatical (or “grand ego death spirit quest,” as Dr. Santos puts it).
“Sometimes it’s like you’re just tempting death because you don’t give a (expletive) anymore,” Dana says.
Among the patients, elderly couple Frida and Ed Cohen (Dan Florek, best known as legendary police captain Donald Cragen on “Law & Order: SVU”) come to the ER after Ed has accidentally struck his wife with their car, fracturing her hip. Their daughter confides in Drs. Mohan and King that, despite their worsening mobility issues, her parents refuse to move out of their Squirrel Hill home into assisted living. A medication adjustment and referral to home health services lets the couple preserve their independence and save face.
Dante Casella (Shane Nelson) suffers a deep scalp laceration in a fireworks explosion (degloving is back), but says he’ll keep selling fireworks because “gunpowder’s in (his) blood.”
“Ain’t no fighting it,” he says.
“Amor fati,” replies Robby with a sigh.
The first season of “The Pitt” found Robby quoting Albert Camus, telling medical students that when it comes to the endless chaos of the ER, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
But for our stalwart doctors, that sensibility has fallen away. Dr. Al-Hashimi sees it, telling Robby, “I’m very concerned by what I’ve witnessed today with some of the staff.”
“I wish I could cry again, you know?” Dr. McKay says to Langdon after finding a blanket Roxie Hamler’s surviving family left.
“We get pretty good at shutting down our feelings,” Langdon offers. Perhaps by virtue of his time away, it seems Langdon’s moved closer to loving his fate — he lights up seeing a pair of colonial re-enactors from the Fort Pitt Museum being treated for a musket mishap. But the possibility of a relapse looms.
Santos pockets a scalpel, a reference to an earlier bathroom reveal that she has a history of cutting and self-harm.
In another retread, the episode ends with Orlando Diaz, a diabetic patient from the morning, returning after taking a fall. The “final sprint,” as Dana calls the shift’s last hour, seems to have no clear end, with many of our characters stuck in the same place they began.