“It’s like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.” Yes, the night shift has finally arrived to relieve our beleaguered day-shift team, but no one can go home quite yet — although the system is finally back online, there are patients to hand off and handwritten notes to be scanned into the digital charts.
The stress of the day is taking its toll now that the clock has hit 7 p.m. — and not just on Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), who’s still sparring with Dana (Katherine LaNasa). They’re at each other’s throats — “You’re not my mother,” he snaps at her when she tells him to “take a walk” after he loses his temper yet again. To be fair, yet another problem has landed on his already overburdened plate: He finally gets the results of his buddy Duke’s CT scan, and learns his motorcycle mate has an aortic aneurysm: “He’s a ticking time bomb.”
Dr. Mohan’s (Supriya Ganesh) diabetic patient Orlando returns — but now he’s unconscious, having fallen from a roof. She’s furious with herself for letting him leave in the first place: “I did everything I could to get him to stay,” she tells Dr. Robby.
Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) is second-guessing himself after he suggested intubating an asthmatic patient — and missed a collapsed lung. Leave it to Dr. King (Taylor Dearden), still licking her wounds after that deposition, to make him feel better. “We don’t get everything right the first time,” she consoles him.
And Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) is hiding in the ambulance bay after learning that his patient died, still covered in his blood-soaked gown. It falls to Dr. Whitaker (Gerran Howell) to talk him down from switching specialties entirely. “I don’t know if I can take another day like today,” says Ogilvie. Replies Whitaker: “I like being here for people on the worst days of their lives.”
But something’s up with Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi): She “zoned out” while treating the asthma patient and baby Jane Doe — and Dr. Robby noticed. And now he’s playing detective, asking questions of Dr. Mohan — did she witness any odd behavior when they worked together at the VA? He finally confronts Dr. Al-Hashimi — “It seemed like you were hesitating,” he suggests, but she brushes him off. “I was just thinking.”
But he’s not convinced, and the episode ends with another Robby/Dana standoff, as he spirals about the state of the ER without him. “We’ll manage until you come back,” she tells him — to which he replies: “What if I don’t come back?”
For ER fans, the episode also had a special reunion: Mary McCormack, who played Debbie on the long-running NBC medical drama, shows up in The Pitt’s ED as chief of neurosurgery Dr. Linda Conley, summoned to help with Orlando’s case. “She’s kind of a legend,” Dr. Robby tells Dr. Javadi — who at first declines Dr. Conley’s offer to assist with the complicated procedure, and then is pushed by Dr. Robby to accept the offer from the surgeon, who lets her take control.
“I’m not that bright, so I like to play bright on TV,” McCormack jokes to Gold Derby. “We often see the cowboy surgeon, and I think a lot of surgeons are that, but not all. So I thought it was such a fresh take for a surgeon on TV.” (See our full interview with McCormack.)
Noah Wyle’s wife, Sara Wyle, as patient Ashley DavisWarrick Page/HBO Max
As always, The Pitt has something to say about the state of health care, and one of this week’s messages comes in the form of Dr. Robby’s real-life wife, Sara Wyle, who plays patient Ashley Davis. She arrives in the ER a very particular shade of orange — is it a spray tan or is it jaundice? — and complaining of nausea. Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) is on the case trying to figure out what’s causing her liver to fail, along with new night shift intern Dr. Tamarian — and health nut Ashley (“food is the best medicine”) insists she isn’t drinking or taking vitamins or supplements. Finally they enlist the help of Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) — who’s “good with the weird stuff,” as Dr. McKay puts it— who finally gets Ashley to admit she’s been taking megadoses of turmeric. “Just think what’s the stupidest thing this person could have done and assume they did it,” says Dr. Santos of her strategy. “Our job security depends on all of these big f–king idiots.”
Even after her experience on the set, Sara Wyle says she hasn’t sworn turmeric off entirely. “It’s delicious and it’s amazing in food,” Sara Wyle tells Gold Derby. “And there’s a lot of people who use it like a tea, but when you do five times the regular amount, that’s where you run into trouble.”
An actress who’s appeared in Nip/Tuck and Californication, Sara says she has been looking for the right opportunity to make her debut on The Pitt. “There have been so many episodes and many things that have come about beforehand, and nothing was right,” she says. “But this one came up, and they brought it to my agent, and it was luck of the draw. I mean, I do know a few people in the show, but I still had to audition,” she adds with a laugh.
Though she wasn’t covered in blood and gore, Sara says she was happy that her role did have a message to it. “I liked that there was no immediate emergency — they were not trying to resuscitate me or intubate me or keep me alive, but definitely something to take seriously, because you can go into liver failure,” she says. “We’re living in this overwhelming information age, where people can kind of overdo it in their own self-diagnosis or in their own process of trying to be so healthy. What The Pitt does is bring things to light, to share stories with the greater world. We talk about this with our daughter all the time. If you ate carrots all day long, you’d be sick. If you ate donuts all day long, you’d be sick. There’s got to be a level of moderation in your diet, in your life in general. That’s our overall goal.”
Sara had been on the set before, but in her capacity as Noah’s wife. Returning as a guest star, she got a fresh perspective on how the magic happens. Noah’s only advice was “go have fun,” she says. “He was really thrilled that I got to experience what he does every day. It’s such a team mentality that you go in and you’re joining a company of players, and everyone’s so lovely. So he was just thrilled I got to be able to experience as an actor, and not just as a visitor, his sandbox.”
Fiona Dourif tells Gold Derby she loved filming the scene with the boss’s wife. “I thought that Sara was perfect for it,” she says. “We see her every once in a while, but she’s always running errands. So it was a long time where I realized that she doesn’t always wear yoga pants. It was an ongoing joke with her.”
And though Sara as Ashley got treated by Dr. McKay (who she calls “a firecracker”) and Dr. Santos (“I want to be Isa Briones when I grow up”) she has no regrets about not getting hands-on care from Dr. Robby himself, given that he was otherwise occupied. “I didn’t get to get treated by hunky Dr. Robby, but I get treated by Dr. Robby every day,” she says with a laugh.
And what’s her prediction for Robby’s looming sabbatical: Will he or won’t he? “I hope he does go on a sabbatical,” she says. “He needs a break.”
