The Pitt<\/a> \u2013 or, more accurately, one of several secrets, but arguably the most important \u2013 is realism. Case in point: There\u2019s a burn in Episode 3, \u201c9:00 A.M.\u201d, that almost made me gag. But lifelike injury isn\u2019t the only form of realism, and it isn\u2019t the kind that powers this instalment, which is the point in Season 2 where you can comfortably say, \u201cOkay, now things are going to get really awful.\u201d Are we excited about that? I\u2019m not sure \u201cexcited\u201d is necessarily the right word, but this is why we tune in.<\/p>\nBut the realism I\u2019m talking about is this: PTMC feels like it exists in the real world. The Pitt feels like it\u2019s about real people. Sometimes that\u2019s just a consequence of how it\u2019s written and performed, but sometimes it\u2019s something deeper, a kind of overriding, nebulous feeling that the stories it\u2019s telling and the societal issues it\u2019s touching on are coming from a place of intimate experience. That takes a very literal form here, since Robby\u2019s latest patient, a woman named Yana Kovalenko, is a survivor of the Tree of Life shooting.<\/p>\n
On October 27, 2018, a man named Robert Bowers \u2013 who was sentenced to death in 2023 and remains on Death Row \u2013 shot and killed eleven congregants in Pittsburgh\u2019s Tree of Life Synagogue in a horrendous act of senseless antisemitism. That really happened. Yana, a fictional character, wasn\u2019t really there, but she speaks in the voice of those who were, who survived the first wave of the violence but have been living with the resulting tremors ever since. She has suffered serious burns after dropping a samovar on the ground, startled by the sudden sound of firecrackers. On that day in 2018, she was entering the synagogue when the shooting started. You don\u2019t need me to tell you how these two things are related.<\/p>\n
Yana doesn\u2019t just represent the long-lasting impact of these terrible tragedies, but also how people engage \u2013 or don\u2019t engage \u2013 with their faith in the aftermath. It\u2019s easy to feel disconnected from the idea of a higher power when things happen that are so heinous that it seems inconceivable a benevolent God would allow them to pass by without intervention. In the instances in which we\u2019ve seen Robby \u2013 a Jew \u2013 turn to God, it has been in desperation, almost disbelief. Yana recognises immediately from his surname that he\u2019s Jewish, but Robby can\u2019t really articulate his relationship with his faith. It\u2019s something that, I suspect, he\u2019s going to have cause to think about across the remainder of his shift.<\/p>\n
Why is this important? Well, aside from its obvious value as touching homage, and its more pragmatic function as a way to further characterise Robby, it also gets at something deeper about why The Pitt is an important, valuable show. It understands at its core that medicine is about compassion and connection. People can\u2019t be effectively treated without these things. Just look around in The Pitt Season 2, Episode 3. A man discovers he has a mass in his brain that might be a tumour; that might have ruined his relationship with his ex-wife, who remains his emergency contact, back in his life now, perhaps when it\u2019s too late for them to meaningfully share much more of it. A man is accused of child-abuse, counters that accusation by accusing his new girlfriend of the same, and then learns that his daughter is very sick and neither of them is an abuser after all. An addict, initially jovial and comfortable, turns suddenly desperate once he realizes that he needs that addiction to cope.<\/p>\n
These are all little tightropes of human experience, to be carefully navigated by people with flaws of their own but a surplus of empathy. People willing to help. People like the Muslims who rallied around the Jewish community rocked by the Tree of Life shooting, which Yana has never forgotten. It\u2019s never quite as easy as just figuring out what\u2019s wrong and sending someone on their way. Each little capsule case speaks to something bigger and more important; reveals more about the patients and the doctors who treat them, and the world they\u2019re both trying to navigate.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll leave you with something worrying. The Pitt isn\u2019t necessarily prone to mystery-box-style storytelling, dropping clues every episode about where things might be going. But I\u2019m finding it increasingly hard to believe that we\u2019re not supposed to be having some suspicions about Robby\u2019s upcoming sabbatical.<\/p>\n
We already know that Robby rides his motorcycle without a helmet \u2013 something he lies about in \u201c9:00 A.M.\u201d \u2013 and that he has flirted with suicidal ideation before, although admittedly only in a moment of pretty extreme stress. This episode includes a dead motorcyclist who wasn\u2019t wearing a helmet. When Robby mentions his upcoming sabbatical in front of Yana, she berates him about how stupid it is for a man his age to be riding such a dangerous vehicle.<\/p>\n
And where is Robby going? It was clarified earlier<\/a> that he\u2019s going on a three-month motorcycle trip to a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Alberta called, and I kid you not, \u201cHead-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.\u201d And we\u2019re supposed to not be concerned about this? In the coming wave of emergency casualties, it might be easy to forget. But I\u2019m going to be keeping my eyes on any more suggestions in this regard, all the same.<\/p>\nThis show\u2019s really good, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
RELATED:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Laetitia Hollard, Katherine Lanasa and Charles Edward Baker in The Pitt Season 2 | Image via WarnerMedia Summary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[5136,156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-247833","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-drama","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}