This story contains spoilers for The Pitt season two episode six, “12:00 PM.”
The Pitt faithful: rejoice, for our time is here. After a robust season premiere in January, the last five weeks have been rife with viewers wondering whether the HBO Max medical series—which took home major wins at the Emmys and Golden Globes for its debut season—was already, gasp, falling off. The episode that just released this Thursday night is a timely reminder that those talks are woefully premature.
First things first: the issue here is that due to the nature of its real-time storytelling, The Pitt is, by design, not a series built to start each season with a bang. The spine of the show lies in emergency room cases that develop and crescendo over the course of several “hours,” in the form of House-style medical mysteries as well as cases that take more dramatic, often heartbreaking turns. Most of the time, when an episode ends, it feels almost sudden and sometimes unceremonious; the last scene of an hour rarely puts a button on what we’ve just watched, the way the episode-closing moments of a more self-contained show often do.
But most of The Pitt’s audience came via word of mouth once season 1 was already halfway through airing, or well after it wrapped—which is to say, most people likely binged several episodes at a time, without having to engage with the show’s throwback embrace of weekly releases. Watching these early episodes and having to wait another seven days for the next development in whatever Dr. Mohan or Santos is up to can create the misguided feeling that “nothing is happening” even though we’re watching several arcs slowly but surely build steam.
One arc comes to a tragic close this week, and in so doing, unifies the wide-ranging cast for the season’s first truly great moment, and altogether thoroughly great hour. Pour one out for Louie—or, given that he drank himself to death, maybe don’t. The jovial alcoholic and perennial Pitt mainstay, who we met early in season 1, returned for the new season both as a signifier for the way that some things never change, and also as a facilitator for the ways in which Pitt 2.0 has evolved. In Whittaker's scenes with Louie, we can see how Whittaker has evolved and come into his own in the 18-month time jump between seasons. He’s also a living ghost for Langdon, who has just returned from exile after he was caught treating his own substance-abuse problem by pocketing Louie’s prescribed meds.
But as we saw at the end of last week’s installment, Louie is now an actual ghost. The cliffhanger is resolved fairly early, in keeping with The Pitt’s casual, matter-of-fact brutality. The cause is lost, there’s nothing more anyone can do. It’s a loss that hits everyone hard in their own ways, save the dipshit newbie. But like all good TV deaths, it galvanizes important moments between the characters. For five episodes, Dr. Robby has been mercilessly keeping Langdon on ice that now seems to finally be thawing. Langdon and Dana also get to commiserate, so we finally get some context on why Dana is back at the job she vowed to quit in season 1. And there’s a lovely scene where Dana teaches the newbie nurse how to clean and dress a body for viewing, complete with the small but pivotal details that make The Pitt so affecting, like the explanation of why it’s best to leave one hand above the sheet.
But that scene has nothing on the ending, in which the whole staff convenes for a debrief to send Louie off. It’s driven by an old photo of a woman that Langdon found with Louie’s things, which makes everyone realize that as much as they cared for Louie, no one knows his story. Except, inevitably, for Robby, who recalls an old night shift stint where Louie was especially talkative. The woman in the picture is Louie’s wife, who changed Louie’s opinion on wanting to have kids—only to die in a car crash shortly before giving birth. It’s a tragic retroactive backstory for a character who was essentially the emergency room’s court jester, and a feat of narrative writing that’s cemented by a bracing delivery from Noah Wyle, who also directed the hour. It’s hard not to get misty-eyed (and to not feel bad for Noah’s Best Actor competitors at next year’s Emmys.)
This is The Pitt at its best—a classic Wyle voice-caught-in-his-throat performance, thoughtful meditations on life and death, and arcs forging forward in the background. (What’s up with the cancer-stricken woman married to Oliver from The O.C., and what’s she about to do?) We’re just barely a third of the way through the season—I haven’t watched ahead yet, but if things are getting this real, this early, there’s no sophomore slump in sight for this great show.