“Baran, is this you?”
With those words, Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) finally gets the answer to the mystery he’s been trying to solve all shift: why Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) has seemed to zone out at times. She asks him to review case — “After working with you, I’ve come to respect your opinion,” she tells him — but he quickly realizes as she talks him through the patient’s history of viral meningitis leading to seizure disorder, she’s talking about herself.
Cue credits.
We’ll have to wait until next week to find out how he’s going to handle her disclosure — but Robby’s already proven to be more than anxious about leaving the department in her hands.
And his downward spiraling day has not gotten any better:
— He snaps at Dr. Javadi (Shabana Azeez) when he spots her in one of the patient rooms, accusing her of making “one of her TikToks,” as he puts it, and risking patient privacy laws. “No more TikTok on the company clock,” he demands.
— His motorcycle gets run over by an ambulance pulling into the bay, and before it’s road-ready again, it needs some TLC from Duke (Jake Kober) — who is still processing his aortic aneurysm prognosis and deciding whether to go ahead with the procedure, much to Robby’s chagrin. “It’s a coin flip,” Duke says — to which Robby insists, “No coin flip.”
Jeff Kober and Noah WyleWarrick Page/HBO Max
— Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) is still trying to process her guilt after the diabetic patient Orlando left against her medical advice and returned with a massive head injury, but Robby doesn’t have any sympahty. “That was his mistake — not picking a higher spot to jump from,” he snaps.
— And he publicly calls out the other ambulance drivers who performed a sloppy EKG on a large-breasted woman. “Bad data is s–t data,” he tells them in front of the entire staff. “Women are misdiagnosed all the time. Show of hands: Death with dignity or life with brief nudity?” The paramedics aren’t happy about being called out so publicly, though the women in the ED cheer. “I seem to have lost my filter,” Robby admits.
Wyle’s Dr. Robby rips the paramedicsWarrick Page/HBO Max
Inside the ED, his colleagues are starting to worry. Dr. Caleb Jefferson (Christopher Thornton), the hospital’s attending psychiatrist, chastises him for the insensitive comment about Orlando. “Keep my number handy, just in case.” And Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif), who called him out for last week for “a weird vibe,” steps up again and intervenes on Javadi’s behalf: “Once more I feel compelled to offer some unasked for and probably unwanted advice,” she tells him.
But the one person he opens up to is not a colleague, but Duke, in a pretty revealing heart-to-heart: “I don’t know if I want to be here anymore,” says Robby. “I don’t know if I want to be anywhere anymore.”
Responds Duke, “That’s not riding, that’s running. That’s your final lesson for these kids?”
Wyle, who wrote this week’s episode and also serves as an executive producer on the show, said in The Pitt‘s post-show podcast that scene was a pivotal one. “Duke was a significant character because we don’t really have a frame of reference for anybody outside the hospital that has a relationship with Robby,” he says. “So to bring in somebody that is not medical, that he knows in civilian life that he’s been working on this motorcycle with and maybe showed a little bit of that interior life that he wouldn’t show his coworkers, was a significant point of view to bring in.”
Noah WyleWarrick Page/HBO Max
That emotional scene — a callback to Robby’s breakdown in season 1 — was a difficult one to perform, but one that Wyle says he’s drawn to as an actor. “I was working in a job in Chicago, and I had a day where I had to be extremely emotional, and it was one of those days that would normally throw an actor or you’d get sort of insecure or full of anxiety about,” he says. “And I remember I went to work and all these actors kept saying, like, ‘How you feel, man? You think you’re gonna get there today?’ Or, ‘Man, I’m glad I’m not you today.’ And I just remember thinking, ‘This is the greatest day of my life. I’m gonna go in there and do great work today. This is what I live for. This is what I’ve trained for. The clock is ticking down. We’re down by two. I want the ball.’ This is one of those moments that allow you to feel like you are a marquee player under the gun at the time when you need to deliver. So I live for those moments. To me, they’re the most fun.”
On the post-show podcast, Wyle singled out Kober’s performance, and says he loved working with him. “It’s not easy to come onto a show that’s already established and is running like a freight train,” he says. “The colors that he found and then the colors he brought out in me were just really, really fun to play. And he was not somebody that I would’ve thought of immediately for the part. We had, I had all sorts of other ideas, but man, I’m so glad we got him.”
Amielynn Abellera and Jeff KoberWarrick Page/HBO
Wyle opens up, too, about Robby’s shift-long (mis)treatment of Dr. Mohan, showing a distinct lack of empathy for her panic attack and accusing her of having “mommy issues.”
“Everybody wants context for why I’m so mean to Mohan,” he says. “It’s an interesting thing, this audience reaction to Robby, because as much as you want to put him on a pedestal and think that he’s a hero, he’s a very flawed individual. And when he shows those flaws, yes, they’re not pleasant to look at, nor are they pleasant for him to experience. But he’s deflecting, he’s projecting, and when he perceives weakness in others, it’s like holding a mirror up to himself, and he won’t allow it in himself, but he won’t allow it in anybody else.”
And yes, it definitely relates to Robby’s high standards that he sets for himself that he expects everyone around him to live up to, unfairly or not. “You can almost draw a line of correlation that’s directly proportional to as angry as he gets to another character is as angry as he’s being on himself,” he says. “Mohan is somebody he has enough professional respect for and thinks highly enough as a physician to not want to let her get off easy by being indulgent in what he thinks is non-professional behavior. So I think of it as being a really compassionate expression that comes out nasty and inappropriate.”
Noah Wyle and Supriya GaneshWarrick Page/HBO Max
The same could be said for his “fascinating” relationship with Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball), who he’s been studiously avoiding all shift. Wyle says there are nuances to that relationship, starting from the teacher feeling like he failed to the student. But it goes deeper, given what Langdon represents for the road to recovery. “He’s done the work that Robby’s not willing to do. He’s kryptonite to Robby. Robby can’t even look at him in the eye because he’s just gonna remind him of what he does not want to look at,” says Wyle. And then there’s the matter of the passing of the torch — that Robby needs Langdon to step up and be the expert in the room, instead of looking to Robby to be that expert. “That is Robby pushing him so far out of the nest violently to say, ‘I’m not gonna be here tomorrow. I may not be here ever again. It’s on you now. You’re the Robby now. So doctor the f–k up,'” he says.
(As for who wrote the line “Doctor the f–k up,” that one came from showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, reports Wyle.)
Katherine LaNasa, Noah Wyle, Patrick Ball, Sepideh MoafiWarrick Page/HBO Max
And then there’s the moment the show ends on, with Al-Hashimi’s reveal to Robby. “They’ve had this lovely cat and mouse with each other, this lovely sort of one upsmanship quality, trying to figure out how they’re gonna jurisdictionally operate around each other, how Robby’s gonna in good faith impart this ED that he loves to somebody who he’s not quite sure about her methodology,” he says. “And then over the course of the shift, I think almost silently they grow this professional respect for each other’s abilities.”
But the peace they’ve made, whether they like each other as a person or not, is thrown into question. “You take that rapprochement and that’s the energy going into this last scene where suddenly this mystery that we’ve watched her going through all shift long gets context and the context is significant,” he says. “We’ll redefine their relationship again after that.”
Wyle talked, too, about the impact the show has had on the healthcare industry, and how much that has meant to him, including his recent testimony before Congress. “I enjoy being of service. I enjoy feeling like I can be of use,” he says. “This has been a really gratifying year for me personally, so I feel even more engendered to be magnanimous and share my time and my resources and my platform.”
And he’s trying to make the most the success that has come with the show, even though he jokes that as Scott recently said, the one thing he doesn’t do well is relax — something he has in common with the character plays. “These things come around once every 30 years, so you want to enjoy them,” he says.
