{"id":412558,"date":"2026-01-16T06:35:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T06:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/412558\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T06:35:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T06:35:07","slug":"season-2-episode-2-800-a-m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/412558\/","title":{"rendered":"season 2, episode 2, “8:00 A.M.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The trauma of the Pittfest shooting looms so large over my memory of the first season of The Pitt that I\u2019d forgotten how funny the show can be too. But, thankfully, this second episode of season two<\/a> puts the show\u2019s sense of humor front and center in another amiably low-key hour. There are still moments of drama here\u2014like an Alzheimer\u2019s patient who can\u2019t retain the fact that her husband has died\u2014and plenty of gnarly medical procedures to make you squirm. But there are also penis sight gags and hyper-competitive med students and breakfast broccoli jokes and superglued eye lashes and roguish liquor-store robbers and nuns with gonorrhea!\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most importantly for me personally, there\u2019s also our first extended screen time for Langdon and Mel\u2014who emerged as my favorite relationship of season one, if not just one of my favorite TV relationships of the decade. While the performances on The Pitt are pretty uniformly great, Patrick Ball and Taylor Dearden are the best at bringing an unexpected sense of specificity to characters who could otherwise feel a bit generically archetypal. And that shared approach as actors translates to tremendous onscreen chemistry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t say I\u2019m a Mel and Langdon \u2018shipper (as so many are), but that\u2019s not not part of their appeal. Mostly, however, it\u2019s a sense of mutual trust and respect wrapped up in the idea of being truly seen and understood. It\u2019s a mentorship, but it\u2019s also something more personal and reciprocal than that\u2014a rare kind of kinship between two different people who just innately seem to \u201cget\u201d each other. (I\u2019d actually describe the relationship between Noah Wyle\u2019s Robby and Shawn Hatosy\u2019s Jack Abbot in the same way.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Everything from Langdon\u2019s deadpan burr-hole joke to Mel catching herself for falling for it to Langdon telling Dana they have inside jokes about scurvy is perfect. And Langdon\u2019s commitment to making amends plays really well against someone like Mel, who believes in him so fully but also does deserve the apology. That he remembers what she taught him about autistic patients getting overwhelmed by the noise and lights in the ER and needing quiet, dark rooms is the icing on the cake to their reunion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The other big theme this week is about \u201cfollowing your gut\u201d\u2014the phrase that Robby lives by and Al-Hashimi can\u2019t abide. That\u2019s probably why Robby has been part of four lawsuits and Al-Hashimi has never been involved in even one. It\u2019s an obvious point of division between our protagonist and his new foil. But the idea of gut instinct is also at play for McKay and Santos. Last season, Santos seemed to figure out Langdon\u2019s drug habit almost improbably fast, and it\u2019ll be interesting to see if her worst-case-scenario gut instinct may steer her wrong with her abuse concerns for her nine-year-old patient this time around. On the other hand, McKay never got closure about her instinct that one of her patients was being sex trafficked last season. And solving the mystery of Mr. Williams could give her gut a sense of redemption now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Following my gut, however, I have to admit there are a few elements of this episode that just didn\u2019t quite track for me. I\u2019m a little confused by the logistics of the \u201cAlzheimer\u2019s widow,\u201d whose husband died after he was brought in from an assisted living facility with a \u201cPOLST Order.\u201d This feels like it\u2019s supposed to be the story of what happens when the at-home caretaker of someone with Alzheimer\u2019s dies. But if the husband was at an assisted living facility himself, he couldn\u2019t have been the one at home taking care of her. And if she was living at the facility with him, why is she now being treated like a patient with nowhere else to go?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Similarly, I was a little baffled by McKay\u2019s confusion over Robby and Nurse Noelle Hastings (Meta Golding) obviously flirting with each other, which she for some reason misinterprets as them talking in code about transferring her patient for insurance reasons. Maybe she\u2019s just supposed to be so engrossed in her work she\u2019s lost perspective on everything else. But her confusion made me more confused, which is a weird way to introduce a new romance to the show\u2014especially when Robby cites it as an example of how McKay\u2019s empathy makes her good at picking up on stuff. (Noelle literally enters the scene saying, \u201cBelay that order, sailor!\u201d She might as well have done a wolf whistle!)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve also got The Pitt firmly wading into the world of AI, which, unfortunately, feels more stressful than watching that open shoulder dislocation. While I had assumed that Al-Hashimi\u2019s love of AI was about analyzing patient imaging or something, it turns out she\u2019s literally just hawking an app that records patient consultations and transcribes notes so doctors can spend less time charting. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s a real app, but the whole thing has the weird feeling of an ad, right down to the caveat about how \u201cgenerative AI is 98-percent accurate at present\u2014you must always carefully proofread and correct the minor errors.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, Al-Hashimi\u2019s perspective isn\u2019t necessarily the perspective of the show. And I suspect we\u2019re getting her tech-heavy POV in order to challenge it later in the season. But, right now, the whole thing feels like an attempt to be topical in a way that doesn\u2019t suit the show\u2019s more lived-in style. Then again, if Al-Hashimi\u2019s problem is that she\u2019s never learned how to follow her gut because she\u2019s too busy worrying about how not to be sued, perhaps her odd, robotic sales pitch is just supposed to reflect that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Either way, it\u2019s hard to be too mad at an episode that nails an erect penis reveal with perfect comedic timing. Working in an ER is serious business, but it\u2019s also a place where the embarrassing foibles of being human come, well, rising to the surface. Dana suggests peds is the hospital department that will make you \u201ccuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.\u201d But considering that comes just before she admits \u201cpunchy\u2019s my new baseline,\u201d maybe that\u2019s not exactly true. How could a place so eclectic and weird and sometimes flat-out ridiculous ever be codified into an algorithm? Al-Hashimi remains adamant that she can streamline the department with high-tech solutions, but in a high-octane, unpredictable world that might not be so simple.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Stray observations\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2022 I\u2019m glad this episode clarified that Whitaker has graduated from a fourth-year med student to an intern because I was getting a little concerned about how much he was doing on his own.\u00a0
\n\u2022 Social worker Dylan Easton is covering for last season\u2019s social worker Kiara this day\/season, which brings a new energy to that element of the show.\u00a0
\n\u2022 I love how good Robby is with babies!
\n\u2022 Last season ended with Santos inviting a homeless Whitaker to move into her apartment, and it feels like we should have more clarity on if that happened and how long they lived together.\u00a0
\n\u2022 The \u201clive\u201d camera feed of McKay grabbing that piece of broccoli was a great effect.\u00a0\u00a0
\n\u2022 The police officer asking Mel for a statement and then immediately telling her she might have to testify in court kind of felt like a leap. But I like the idea that after a season where Mel thrived in ER chaos, we now get to see exactly what kinds of things actually stress her out.\u00a0
\n\u2022 So what do we think is up with Al-Hashimi and the baby? It\u2019s such an abstract mystery, I don\u2019t even know how to theorize about it.\u00a0
\n\u2022 Gnarliest moment of the week: I thought I was prepared for the inevitable \u201cmaggots in the cast\u201d reveal. But can anyone ever truly be ready for the \u201cmaggots in the cast\u201d reveal?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Caroline Siede is a contributor to The A.V. Club.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The trauma of the Pittfest shooting looms so large over my memory of the first season of The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-412558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}