One of the most harrowing things about The Pitt is that you can never tell when our hero doctors are going to pull off a miracle save and when nature will simply take its course. I went into this episode naively confident that Robby and Langdon would whip out some impressive tricks to save their old friend Louie. But less than four minutes in, they’ve already realized there’s nothing they can do. He’s suffering a pulmonary hemorrhage from liver failure, and there’s no cure. All that’s left is to call the time of death, clean him up, and allow the hospital staff to pay their respects to their longtime patient. They didn’t fail, exactly. But they didn’t win either. And that’s a tough way to start the sixth hour of their shift.
It’s a loss that reverberates across the ER, but “12:00 P.M.” makes the welcome choice to explore it primarily from the point of view of the show’s nurses. In many ways, Dana, Perlah, Princess, Donnie, Emma, Jesse, and Kim are the backbone of PTMC. As Whitaker advises his med students, “Always listen to the nurses. They run the ER; we just try and stay out of their way.” It’s wisdom he got from Robby last season, but despite the lip-service, The Pitt has largely treated its nurses like supporting players—often having its doctors perform the kind of small patient care tasks that nurses would absolutely be the ones to do in a real hospital. Here, however, the nursing staff finally get to take center stage.
That focus, plus the bookending scenes of Louie’s death, is exactly what I mean when I say that The Pitt is capable of being a frantic, serialized, slice-of-life show that still delivers on an episodic level. “12:00 P.M.” is full of the sort of unfinished, ongoing threads that define a season of The Pitt, but it also has its own self-contained arc and strong thematic through-line. The staff of the Pitt may not spend their lunch hour actually eating lunch. But that’s just because they’re too busy delivering one of the most moving episodes of the season.
That feels like the right tone for an episode about nurses, who—at least at their best—provide a level of empathetic, patient-focused care that doctors can’t (or don’t) make time for. When Santos realizes her deaf patient no longer has an interpreter, she experiences it as a frustration for herself. Princess, however, stops to think about how isolating and frustrating the experience must be for the patient. And she tries to bridge the gap as much as she can with her own ASL skills.
Again and again, we see that level of human-centered caretaking from PTMC’s nursing staff. When hospice patient Roxie struggles to get off her bedpan, Princess comfortingly responds, “That’s what I’m here for!” Perlah is the one who remembers that Louie loved Rita Moreno and the one who spots when Santos needs an energy drink. And while Robby and Al-Hashimi argue about how best to treat their prisoner patient, Dana and Jesse are the ones who actually get to know Gus as a person.
Speaking of which: I love that the juxtaposition between Robby and Al-Hashimi continues to be less cut and dry than it initially seemed like it would be. You’d assume the woman obsessed with AI, efficiency, and rule following would be the one pushing to discharge her prisoner patient as soon as possible. But, instead, she’s the one advocating for bending the rules and admitting Gus in order to give him a chance to start healing in a way he won’t in prison. Robby, meanwhile, is just trying to get him out the door as soon as possible.
Robby claims it’s about resource management: Gus has a place to go, and they need his bed for someone else. But that’s also a whole lot of denial about the reality of the prison-industrial complex. The empathy he has for unhoused patients clearly doesn’t extend to incarcerated ones, and there’s a lot to unpack in his snarky comment that a safety net hospital’s role isn’t about social justice—especially from the man who literally took it upon himself to try to help a mom with her troubled son rather than call the police last season.
Tellingly, it’s Dana who actually makes the final call—messing with Gus’ pulse ox in a way that gets him admitted for more rest and recovery. Indeed, “12:00 P.M.” makes a point to emphasize that nurses aren’t just empathy machines. They have tangible medical knowledge too, often more so than the doctors they work with. When Donnie is bumped up from triage to the main ER, he’s the suture expert who teaches Joy and Ogilvie how to close a gaping wound. Meanwhile, Kim rattles off what’s needed for a Fluorescein injection faster than Whitaker can.
The Pitt doesn’t glamorize the difficulty of being a nurse. Langdon asks Dana whether she pressed charges against the guy who punched her in the face (she didn’t), and Dana goes full mama-bear mode when a patient grabs Emma—not to mention full Cesar Chavez when the hospital administrators try to placate their overworked staff with Fourth Of July-themed donuts. But this hour also sees the crucial purpose in what nurses do too—not just in taking care of their patients, but in looking out for each other. (Dana’s the first to see when a grieving Perlah needs a break.)
That the episode manages to tie all those themes back to Louie’s death is what makes it so special. It’s a welcome bit of tension-breaking comedy when Louie’s emergency contact turns out to be the hospital itself. But it also speaks to the role the staff played in his life. Robby reveals that Louie was once living the dream in Pittsburgh until his pregnant wife was killed in a car accident. After that, he fell into a half existence as a happy drunk and the hospital staff became the closest thing he had to family. Dana and Emma clean and prep his body in case anyone comes to see him—but, in the end, it’s the hospital staff who are his true loving visitors.
Indeed, the moment Emma grabs the hand that she and Dana left out for Louie’s family absolutely destroyed me. Fittingly, our newest member of the PTMC nursing staff gets her own moving little arc this episode too. The reveal that she’s scared of Dana is pretty funny, and the idea that she’s not entirely sure if she’s cut out for this intense line of work tracks. But it feels like something clicks for her at Louie’s impromptu memorial service. She starts to see her co-workers not just as superiors barking orders but as people doing their best to—as Al-Hashimi puts it—never stop trying to improve a broken system. It’s a battle all of the doctors are fighting, but it’s one the nurses understand better than most.
Stray observations
- • While Noah Wyle has written several episodes of The Pitt before, this is his first directorial effort, and it feels like he really brings out something special from the cast.
- • Speaking of nurses: Whatever happened to Mateo, the hunky nurse that Javadi had a crush on last season? I know the real-life answer is that the actor had scheduling conflicts with another project he’s filming, but it’s odd that his name hasn’t come up at all this season yet.
- • It’s brutal to watch Ogilvie break the news of Louie’s death so flippantly. In a world where most of the show’s doctors are saints, it’s nice that The Pitt acknowledges that asshole doctors exist too.
- • They’re really pushing the whole motorcycle angle, huh? This week Robby gets to chat it up with a stunt performer who at least was wearing a helmet when his six-man motorcycle pyramid collapsed at a Fourth Of July parade.
- • As many of you guessed from an exchange about toothbrushes earlier in the season, Santos and surgeon Yolanda Garcia are hooking up! Santos invites her over while Whitaker is off with his farm widow, although Garcia kind of blows her off.
- • I was also wondering how Langdon’s marriage was doing through all the stress, but it turns out he and Abby are still going strong. On the other hand, it’s quite sad that he didn’t hear from any of his co-workers while he was in rehab.
- • I thought the tased-student storyline was going to be one of the big drivers of the season, but Jackson and his sister have been stuck in a repetitive, anticlimactic space for the past couple of episodes. Even the reveal that Jackson has been suffering from auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions doesn’t really kick their plot into high gear.
- • We also get an upsetting update that our septic waitress is getting an above-the-knee amputation in surgery. Meanwhile, Roxie has an emotional breakdown and asks to stay in the hospital. But, hey, at least Baby Jane Doe is doing well!
- • Gnarliest moment of the week: The motorcyclist’s sliced knee is brutal, but I’m giving it to that hot dog barf moment. The true Fourth Of July related cases are officially here!
Caroline Siede is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
