'The Pitt’ Episodes 12 and 13: Dr. Robby’s Personal PittFest Crisis

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hello come back to the Prestige TV Podcast feed.

I'm Joanna Robinson.

I'm Rob Mahoney.

We're here today to talk to you about the pit.

We sure are, Joe.

Episodes 12 and 13 is what we're covering today. So episode 12 was a big one.

Episode 13 also a big one.

So if you have not listened, if you don't watch those episodes of television i really recommend oh yeah you you do that before you listen to us talk about it that would be my recommendation personally um and we have two more episodes to go after after this episode 13 and um we will if all goes according to plan rob and i will be recording a podcast per pit. Look at that.
Two pits, two pods.

Just, just... if all goes according to plan, Rob and I will be recording a podcast per pit.

Look at that.

Two pits,

two pods,

just,

just an embarrassment of medical riches.

We're also,

of course,

wrapping up white Lotus.

We've done all we can possibly ever do on severance.

That's all I've got.

My head is a deflated balloon at this point.

We squeeze the lumen lemon dry. It's all over over there.
And then what do we have on the horizon? Time will tell and we'll let you know. But right now, let's dig into the pit.
I want to start with a couple of emails we got from folks. um PrestigeTV

at Spotify.com

is where you can reach us because we don't have like a fun

pithy

welcome to Pit Fest sort of at gmail.com, uh, email for you guys. I feel good about that in retrospect.
You know what? Same, same. That we didn't do anything too cute.
About Pit Fest. I feel good about it.
Yeah. Okay.
so alexis wrote in to let us know um that in addition to her delight over you know the filipina uh nurses and and a lot of other things on the show i really like this line from her email she said watching the 17 year old girl try to get her abortion drew my 16 year old daughter to the show we're gonna talk a bit about sort of the impact that The Pit is having on the TV industry, Rob, but this like multi-generational, like, let's all watch The Pit together. There's something for everyone kind of aspect of four quadrant aspect of the show.
Oh, yeah. When you think about the show as a whole, how intentional does all that feel? or does it just feel like a natural byproduct of a kind of show that is giving us a broad slice of life kind of story? I think it is intentional, right? Like this is the product they're trying to create is a, as you say, very traditional four quadrant appealing piece of television history in a lot of ways, like recreating so much of what has been so successful across network TV history.
Yeah. That includes a setting that is accessible to anybody, real life situations that people can lock into and understand and explain and empathize with pretty easily.
And also a cast that's kind of a little bit across the age spectrum in particular, where it's not just the, you know, the teenagers who are coming in with abortion storylines or overdose storylines or, you know, problems at school that may or may not have led to mass shooting storylines. But I think you also just have the med students themselves, right? You have younger people who are students who are actively learning that I would think, as a teen, would be very easy to identify with, even if you've never been to med school yourself.

Seeing of the ages, we did get an email from listener Caitlin,

who wanted to touch on the relationship between Dr. Collins and Dr.
Robbie.

Dr. Collins, turn off her phone, is at home, has not come back to the ER yet.

We don't know if she will before the end of the season.

As instructed, we should say.

She's doing what she was told. She's doing what she was told.

She's doing what she was told.

But it was made canon in episode 11 that Dr. Collins and Dr.
Robbie had a romantic relationship.

Yes.

And Kayla was pointing out the fact that, like, Collins as a resident and Robbie as her attending, she was like, I'm not sure I feel great about. She was like, what if it were Santos and Robbie or something like that? And for me, there's the power differential, but there's also the age differential.
And I will just say that the actress who plays Dr. Collins is 40 years old.
And Noah Wiley is 53 years old. And so like in theory, a Dr.
Collins and a Dr a dr robbie got together 37 50 like the age gaps tend to like uh weird me out less the older we all get do you know what i mean yeah and uh i think a 37 year old uh person um i i feel less concerned about her life choices than i would anything that dr santos decides to do at the time of her life currently. That is true.
I mean, there's the age gap element of that. And then there's also sort of the power dynamic element of that.
And I would say on that front, this is television. And this happens quite often on TV.
In every medical. I mean, not just medical, any workplace situation at all, comedy, drama, whatever.
Bosses and supervisors and employees are constantly finding themselves in relationships. A lot of fraternization.
A lot of fraternization as the carousel of characters turns. And it's just like, oh, I guess this is the season where these two people end up together.
And this just happens to be where we're starting with the pit in a lot of ways. HR nightmares all around us okay um yeah and something caitlin said in her email she's like i wish we had gotten a backstory for collins where medicine is her second career in their relationship had existed outside the resident you know whatever but like it seems to me this has to have been a secondary career she's only like three years don't know.
It's possible with someone like Collins.

But also, I don't want like a justification

for their relationship to be neat and tidy necessarily.

I think it's totally fine for characters

to be doing things that we don't approve of

or being involved in professional or romantic circumstances

that are like making you look at them a little bit sideways,

even if they are otherwise interesting or redeemable characters. That's good good storytelling as far as i'm concerned drama baby um okay and then last but not least on the messy drama front we've got two i believe two doctors have weighed in on the langdon situation okay good and peter who did not drop his credentials but don't worry the next doctor did, just said briefly in an email, for what it's worth, there are many avenues for rehabilitating addicted docs that doesn't involve loss of license.
So that's something that I was saying is like, you know, Langdon's definitely going to lose his license, like blah, blah, blah. That is not the case.
I didn't know that personally. Personally, I thought if you stole medication from the hospital you don't work in hospitals anymore seems like a reasonable conclusion to draw joe i will say as far as we're trying to figure out like the game planning of what would langdon's path to recovery or back onto the show look like uh one of them is just like dr robbie kind of forgetting about it maybe after this it seems like maybe maybe i feel like i feel like we are rounding the corner towards langdon gets some kind of like moment in the sun by helping people during these traumatic circumstances we already have seen robbie kind of wrestle with the idea of how much he should push forward through official channels so quickly he's he has held the bag of pills in his hand and i don't know what your read on that was joe but my read was like he was thinking about flushing them yeah and did decided not to maybe to report them maybe to not at least to table the decision for later uh that bag of pills is still in his pocket and he's had a lot going on but i i'm kind of wondering if by the end of this he ends up just kind of like giving langdon a second chance in a way that honestly may just bite him directly in the ass later.
So this is the other piece of information. Dr.
John Crankshaw, MD, wrote into us. That is how his email was signed.
Says in PA, Pennsylvania, where Pittsburgh is, Dr. Robbie is mandated to report to the state medical board about dr langdon or dr robbie could face fines the exception to this would be if dr langdon enters an approved treatment center the treating provider or center is not mandated to report so um so is that a path forward if if langdon if does dr robbie not to report him if langdon agrees to go into some sort of rehab yes this is obviously not going to be resolved in the 24 hours or rather 15 hours that is this television show and that takes us sort of into this this big picture impact to the pit or roll out of the pit that I want to talk about before we get into um everything that happens in these two episodes which is a lot it's a lot there's a lot of blood yeah we are in the splash zone it's i i honestly would love to talk to whoever worked in like the costuming for this the wardrobe who had to splatter or smear blood all over these various pieces of clothing it's it's really artfully done um i saw the um you know martin mcdonough who does uh you know the very bloody irish uh plays among other things um i saw one of his plays i think it was lieutenant of inishmore at um at berkeley rep years ago and they had a gutter uh in the front of the stage for the blood and the stage was like slightly canted yeah so all the blood could like just roll down the stage into the gutter that's in the front of it um and then all of the actors had like i think five different sets of their costumes so they could just like rotate in the laundry out the like blood soaked versions um etc etc i thought that was amazing um okay but here in the pit okay so so let's say let's say, Dr.
Langdon's storyline doesn't get wrapped up with a neat and tidy bow at the end of the 15th hour of this shift.

Yeah, which it can't.

So those of us watching at home in the new TV model are like, when are we going to figure this out? When is season two coming?

Season two, the plan is for season two to debut, they've already picked it up, for it to debut January of next year. So just like TV shows of old.
Can we just say, God bless. Thank you.
Thank you, Max. Thank you, Pitt Gods.
Thank you, Noah Wiley. We need more regular TV in our lives.
Exactly. I've never been more glad to be back to an old school model.
So this is, so that's eight, eight months, which is not nothing between the end of the season and the new season. But if we're like, Hey, every January we get to go back to the pit, that's kind of excited.
So Joe Dalian, who's a, who's a writer. I love who writes about sort of ratings in the business of television.
Really well wrote this piece on Vulture that went up this morning called Max's big bet on the pit paid off where he interviews Casey Bloys, who's the head of programming at HBO about the, what they hope to accomplish with the pit, basically why 15 episodes. And Casey's like, I wanted something that felt like old school linear storytelling.

Linear storytelling being at 10 o'clock every Thursday night ER is on NBC.

That's linear storytelling, linear television versus it's on demand.

You watch it whenever, right?

So the episodes drop Thursdays at 9 Eastern.

They don't drop at midnight like a lot of streaming shows do. You know, this is a Mac show.
Every other Mac show has dropped at midnight. That's been the classic model.
Only Disney Plus has really been like deviating from that, making an appointment television. Like, yeah.
What did you want to say? An Apple, I guess. Do we know why? Other than like the changeover of the calendar date? It just seems so misguided to drop your episodes at midnight.
Casey gave an answer to Joe Dalian about that, where he's like, I asked them why. And they said something about yada, yada, yada, maximize the night, yada, yada, yada.
And he's like, and it all did not make sense to me. He's like, so that's why we're doing it this way.
This is some Y2K bullshit. Like the numbers roll over and therefore we must publish them.
I just don't buy it. but yeah so he's like i wanted 15 episodes it felt like too big of a swing swing to do 22 episodes for our first attempt at this but we wanted to make it definitely longer than even your 12 you know hba used to do 12 then they shrunk it to 10 now they do 8 or 6 or whatever he's like let's bring it beef it up to 15 drop it week to week drop it at like in prime time and the results have been smash all the success in terms of reviews in terms of uh you know emmy consideration in terms of uh you know us hearing from our listeners about it.
oh yeah in terms of i would say the word of mouth build build build which is what you want in a show and then i'm going to talk about the storytelling impact in a second but from like a business point of view when we talk about the binge model being flawed this is what we're talking about in terms of like word of mouth word of, especially around episode 12, which we're here to talk about today. The mass casualty event comes to the pit.
And so everyone's like, oh, episode 12, you've seen episode 12, you got to watch it. And then we have 12, 13, 14, 15, several more episodes if someone's like, okay, I got to binge and watch up to 12.
I feel like what happened recently with Paradise, the show I didn't watch, but reportedly episode seven of Paradise was like wild and crazy and you had to watch it, right? But I don't think there was like enough time after that for people to then all like catch up with Paradise and then be watching it together week to week. That's what I think has happened with The Pit is that like people have been catching on slowly.
It's been building and building. And then the reputation of episode 12 last week's episode has pushed it even further in front of people's faces.
And now even more people are going to be watching week to week for the last few episodes of the season. Rob Mahoney, what do you want to say about this? I'm just impressed with the confidence in the model and in the product that they knew not only

what show they had and that this was something that was going to appeal to people in a very

traditional sense. But as you're saying, putting as something as heavy hitting as episode 12

in episode 12 and not in episode four or five or like a two part premiere or something like that,

like they are trusting the process of building up these characters helping us identify with them and then they get this great rug pull moment of oh this isn't an er anymore this is a complete mash unit situation we are tossing blood bags like water balloons everyone who was now an underling or a student is now having to function on their own

by instinct, by feel. It turns episode 12 into just like an amazing episode of television, first of all.
But I think structurally, as you're alluding to, putting it at that point in the season is so smart and so calculated. And it's something that I feel like we're missing.
Like so often we're talking about the pacing within seasons for respective shows and why things are happening at different times versus not yeah it feels really good to feel the sure hand of a product that we're familiar with admittedly and thus there's always gonna be like a nostalgia baked into a medical drama like this yeah i also feel like they know what they're doing in terms of the arc of the season that this is happening at a certain cadence for a reason and it's delivering on everything that trying to deliver on. Yeah.
And it becomes to your point, like just kind of a different show entirely as we are sort of in this, even more of an emergency emergency situation for the rest of the season, theoretically. And I think that a couple more things I want to mention is on sort of like the business of television front, not to step too much on the watches corner because they're the best at this.
But like this is a fairly cheap show to make. It's like five million dollars an episode.
That's not nothing. But we're in one location.
Logistically, that makes it hard. I was thinking a lot of actually about our adolescence coverage when thinking about these episodes because we're not even in individual like rooms in the yard we're in the hallway and and for much of the episode it's like 360 you can kind of see all you know so you can see what Langdon is doing across the room while Robbie is doing this over here you can see what Dr.
Abbott is doing over here. So they have to constantly,

in the background, be working on their own emergency. So it's the heavy technical lift of that sort of one-er situation where you just have to...
It's theater. You just have to be going and going and going constantly in order to give us this lived-in 360 experience of this emergency event.
It's probably also the reason why the cast is the way it is, which is a lot of

greed. in order to give us this lived in 360 experience of this emergency event.
It's probably also the reason why the cast is the way it is, which is a lot of greener actors or actors who have never had roles quite this big before. It's harder to get Patrick Dempsey in the background of every scene in the back of an ER, but it's like when you have a cast who's this game and is looking for their breakout and is looking for their moment, not only is that just on a technical level, more affordable for a show like The Pit to

have all those people on set all the time in the backgrounds of these shots.

But I think it just makes the whole thing a little more logistically feasible.

And so it's like it's huge life or death stakes.

Obviously, that's literally what we're talking about here.

And this is what Casey was talking about in his interview with Joe on Vulture.

But like, but you don't have to pay to render CGI dragons or not yet. Fingers crossed for season two.

We don't know who the killer is at Pit Fest. It could have been a dragon.

It could have been Malees or something like that. But I think that like, yeah, you're just you have your one set, essentially, more or less.
You've got these scrubs like that's that's your costume for for the most part and um and you go from there and so you just got to pay for like gallons of fake blood yeah and and we go from there so all of that's to say all of that logistically because that makes it a lower and easier investment for hbo for max to be like this this show cost us so much less than, you know, Dune Prophecy or The Penguin or all these other big IP shows that we're trying to do. And it's giving us that long-term investment of viewers and that long-term investment is what is paying off so beautifully in story.
We've been talking about this all season, but like this is what long form storytelling does best. This is what a 20, when you watch, again, I know I sound like so elderly when I'm like, this is how we used to watch television.
But when from September to May, thereabouts, you spent almost every week with your favorite cast of characters week in week out and then you only take a couple months off and then you're back with them all year yeah you have a different level of investment than you do in characters that you spend eight weeks with or one binge drop weekend with and then you got to wait three years for the stranger things kids to become 30 year old you know like it's just a different level of emotional investment and so if we come back to the pit in january of next year having not forgotten for the most part i'm sure we're gonna need some previously on but you're not gonna only need like 90 lore videos you're not gonna need house of r to have done all the reading for you and stuff like that you don't have a heavy lift are you sure not for the pit for everything else yes mal and joe go to medical school is a series i would follow up on i just want you to know that i mean i think that we reached a tipping point a while ago but in the streaming era where it was the marketplace was so flooded there was a like discretion is the better part of valor element where it was like we can't dominate a monocultural cultural discussion anymore so let's pick a date try to steer clear of the game of thrones or or whatever like the big things on the calendar are yeah find our pocket and binge drop it and hope that it finds its audience yeah i think i think it tipped into that maybe a little too quickly in some respects. And there were too few products and too few networks and streamers willing to fight for a corner and fight for a month and say, you know what? We think this can be a hit and we're going to roll it out week by week and prove it.
And it takes, honestly, probably something a little closer to HBO or Max to pull that off. Not every network can stake its claim in quite that way but yeah when you have a track record both in terms of the production side and the network side and also in terms of the talent both in front of and behind the camera all of a sudden the pieces start coming together for you to say like it or not in terms of like how uh like in vogue a medical drama pitch would be in 2024 and 2025 we we think this can work.
And I mean, fuck if it doesn't work, Joe. Like this is a super watchable show.
Basically, no matter what the case of cases of the week are or who's kind of featured in that episode. Because you care about the people who are there.
And so last but not least, I will say that I had lunch with a friend of mine who's a TV writer and he was, he's talking about like how much the pit has impacted the way in which people are pitching shows or looking for shows right now. And HBO Max specifically are looking for, and Casey talks about, people have talked about this.
They're looking for, and we joked about this earlier, but they are looking for their legal drama and their family drama. And, you know, they they're like we're gonna bring linear storytelling high prestige high level linear storytelling to max not to hbo necessarily like hbo sunday night is its own thing but like max thursday nights might become a thing because what casey said is he's like we're gonna stop we're gonna start dropping hacks at 9 p.m eastern on thursday instead of midnight we're gonna start you know like the various max shows that they have the sex in the city reboot which i will never you could not pay me to watch will also be doing you know what i mean it's like that's something that they're embracing and it's something that i'm quite excited about um i i can't believe i'm saying this this is the most this is the closest i've ever come to someone clearly articulating to me what the difference between hbo and max are yeah that is that is a coherent vision for how max could not quite be hbo but be its own distinct enterprise casey said literally that he's like honestly up until now i could not tell you what a max show is and he's like now i feel like i can point to the pit and say this is a max show show, you know? So, okay.
So, let's talk about- Well, so when Dana quits as charge nurse, does she become a paralegal? Does she go work in the public school system? Let's go home with Dana. I want Dana's whole, like, the whole clan.
I'm sure it's a massive- Domestic drama of the Evanses. Yeah.
I mean, sign me up. Exactly.
Parenthood, but make it the Evanses. OK, that's a pitch.

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The Emmy Award winning series Hacks returns this April. The new season follows Debra Vance making a move from her Vegas residency to Hollywood showbiz.
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Don't forget to check out the official Hacks podcast on Spotify. Let's talk about the new cast members that we got as, as the night shift comes in to help, uh, with the mass casualty here.
Um, just when I learned everyone's name, we have new people to meet. Um, let's start with, we get the return of Sean Hattesey as Dr.
Jack Abbott. Yes.
Um, couple of things to note when he walks in he walks in and robbie has this huge sense of relief of i don't have to be the only one in charge anymore right like he turns around gives him a hug he's like i'm so glad you're here brother like thank you so much like that you're here two things we gotta know about dr jack abbott right from the jump here. He's got an army combat backpack on his back.

And he said, I heard about the Pit Fest shooting on the police scanner. So Dr.
Jack Abbott is the guy who goes home from a shift at the ER that sent him to the edge of the roof of the hospital

to a quiet, peaceful time listening to the police scanner.

We all need white noise to sleep, Joe. You know, you need something to just drown out the anxieties of our existence.
And what better way coming off of a night shift in the ER than listening to the police scanner? Throughout, you know, you already cited his great line where he's like, this is now a MASH unit. MASH for the infants out there was another very great movie and a very popular medical uh tv show uh about army army doctors but like the moments that we get with dr abbott of him saying like this is this is combat field medicine let me show you how to do this procedure this is what we did in the field i could do this at this at night.
I could do this with bombs raining down overhead. This is something I can do.
Is an interesting element to add into our already sort of, you know, emergency ready doctors. I would say it's also like, I mean, Robbie is put in these positions too, but Abbott in particular so clearly knows his medicine inside and out that he can attack it laterally.
And he's starting to really do like the creative problem solving of a group that's so short on supplies, so short on time, just like does not have the ability to go through the traditional checks and balances that go through any kind of medicine, any kind of treatment. And so it's like, yeah, we have to use this tube as this other tube.
We have to just like cut a hole in the side of this guy's neck. And all of a sudden, that's what we're operating out of.
he's such a great avatar for that sort of idea that like macgyvering that's happening all throughout 12 and 13 let's let's let's take it before we go to your uh your favorite character of mine dr john john shen let's go let's go to this sort of like mash unit um rundown do you have a favorite like mash unit problem solving macgyver as you put it? And was it the use of the IO drill to relieve cranial pressure? Well, I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to shoehorn in another recurring bit that we have here on on the on these pit pods, Joe, which is I'm on constant gnarly watch every one of these episodes. What is the gnarliest shit that's happening happening there is a whole subcategory of drill io drill based gnarliness i would say starting off with like drilling directly into a bone to do a marrow transfusion which did not look or feel or sound great to me uh also whitaker straight up drilling into a clown's arm while he was awake not quite getting the brief that this is something you should only do to unconscious people.
But yeah, drilling straight into a skull to relieve pressure while good thinking, quick on your feet, probably saved that person's life. Did not did not love it.
In case anyone is like wondering at home, wondering because you get you get the gist of what the IO drill is we see it used it's the io drill is the star of episodes 12 and 13 we're dismantling ankle monitors what can't the io drill do right i think i need one but but and i i was just curious what an i like what so io refers to uh intraoseous access a method of establishing vascular access by injecting fluids and medications directly into bone marrow, bypassing the veins when intravenous access is difficult or impossible. So in this case, it's not necessarily difficult or impossible.
It's just faster to jam the nutrients straight into the bone marrow rather than try to start an IV. Incredible shit from the io drill um it's real fast uh wait before we move past the drilling let me get your take on the gnarliest thing that we saw in these episodes we have all those candidates also cutting the side of a dude's peck open with scissors to insert a tube um blood catheter inserted directly into a guy's dick honestly Honestly, got me more than i thought i would which is dana just wiping down equipment because there's not enough of it for reinsertion and reuse with whatever sanitary wipes are available yeah and also two words that you simply never want to hear together eviscerated bowel what would you say is the gnarliest of any of these moments in 12 and 13 honestly it should not be the answer but it was dana wiping down the equipment there's something about it there was just something yeah yeah ganar watch the other thing i want to say under the sort of like mashing and umbrella is like shout out victoria's time to shine in front of her mom and in front of mateo mateo was was like really enjoying how good, how creative Victoria was with her MacGyvering here.
No, this is genius is what he says about Victoria. And you love to see it.
And this is like such a great little, like whatever happens with Mateo and Victoria. Like I love that Mateo, Victoria and her mom, that those storylines are all like the need to shine in front of two important people at once.
And not just like to shine in front of Mateo, who you have a little crush on. Oh, a big crush on.
A big crush on. Asking out on day one crush on.
She's down so bad. So to shine in front of Mateo and then to have Mateo like reflect your shine back at you in front of your mom yeah everything's coming up victoria i love that for her i gotta say to her mom not up for snuff here you know she's not er ready at all everyone else is rolling with the punches she's out here trying to do like hands-on teaching moments in the middle of a mass trauma event and then just like it was yeah so fussed so fussed by all the unconventional methods that are happening in front of her.
On the mass unit front, so Victoria's shining because of her creativity, her innovations. Santos because of her brashness, right? She does this move in episode 13 that Abbott is like, don't ever do, she's never done that on your own, but that pretty badass but also that was a good job yeah i love that and i love that like his whispered delivery of that was like really really good um but i love so santos and her sort of even even in the midst of all this santos uh saying that sounds boring i want to do it like I'm gonna look for a different case and then also her bedside manner which is spotty

at best being extremely tested inside of a situation like this. Any Santos highlights that you want to point out here? I think just that she does, she's so clearly good at her job and she has good intuition.
It's just a matter of like getting a little bit too much over her skis at certain points and as you say her bedside manner is just not on the level of like mel for example like her her treatment in particular of this woman who's clearly in shock yeah and santo's just like i don't know what to do with you i'm gonna move on to the next person who's uh i can stick a tube into look i'm not saying it's not effective under these circumstances there's lots of people who need tubing um but you would hope that that's kind of like part of her journey ultimately right like whitaker has really been working on his over the course of this season like communication with patients trying to reassure them trying to kind of get level with them in an emotional way uh these circumstances are not quite built for that they're built for efficiency of communication of ease of like trying to get the right people to the right place so they don't die. And I think Santos is okay at that up until the point where she has to do emotional triage.
What she is well-suited for is chasing down a quote-unquote reporter. We'll talk about that more in a second.
Come on. Come on.
This is just... That's not a reporter, by the way.
That's not a... No.
Okay. That's like a Jake Gyllenhaal and Nightcrawler reporter.
I literally wrote Nightcrawler in my notes. A hundred percent.
I wrote Nightcrawler. OK.
Last but not least on the MASH unit front. And then we'll go back to our favorite Dr.
John Shen. How Mohan is handling slow-mo Mohan Samira.
How Samira is handling this new normal. It feels like she's just like enervated and and and ready for it she's going definitely um she's not like held up and you know something we've been observing in her all season is not just this like is her i mean her bedside manner top notch but to your point we don't have time for the long convos certainly right now her instincts pretty pretty solid as well her thinking outside the box pretty solid um but being able to execute that under this amount of pressure and and how little time they have yeah to diagnose to triage to move on i thought this was like a really interesting it was really like on my third watch through these episodes i was like really trying to track her and her journey through this moment.
I thought it was really interesting.

She gets a big call up. Like she's on the red team with Robbie and Abbott for the most critical

patient. So it's like a great sign of affirmation in terms of Robbie's belief in her.
I would say

if you're looking at who's kind of getting the nod in the moment of emergency, Mohan being on

the red team is a huge one. I thought Javadi being basically like on the shorthanded team with Dr.
Bangs was kind of a sign of confidence in her abilities and knowledge. And then, of course, Mel without Langdon, without Collins being on the floor at that point in time, having to lead a team all by herself.
Really, really getting her moment in the pros. When Whitaker drills the cloud and she's like, OK, team meeting.
OK, I want to rewind when you asked me the best Santos moments. Her saying you're allowed to do that to a mime because they can't scream.
A plus. A plus for Santos.
Look, we got to keep ourselves sane out on the floor, even in these trying times. Yeah.
All right. Let's go back to the long promise, Dr.
John Chen, because of all the scenes that I will long remember from these two episodes Robbie trying to give Dr. John Chen the night shift attending doctor the debrief on how to handle triage in the ambulance bay while John continues to sip on an iced coffee will stay with me for a long time the fact that Robbie didn't slap the iced coffee out of his hand there's like one great shot where the camera's just like moving away from them and you just see like Robbie just like looking at oh the coffee having a moment fuck you um but in the way that John's like oh yeah I wasn't in that faculty meeting i was a resident three months ago you know just sort of like whatever and then asking for christmas off and stuff like that that's good that's good negotiation by the way dr john shen absolute like scene stealer rock star and perfectly paired uh with senior resident Parker Ellis who comes in to man the ambulance.
I loved this team. I loved coming back to them.
And I love how well they explained to us the rundown of the slap bracelets and the, I mean, like, this is how it works. But also, it was an easy way for us to understand and track what was going on.
John Shen, I just just a wonderful addition to the show. I love that we're getting kind of the fresh blood and some new characters this late that recontextualize a lot of different things.
But Dr. Shen in particular, as you say, iced coffee enthusiasts, Duncan by my eye, clearly a Duncan man.
A hundred percent Duncan moment. Yes.
Maybe a dissociative lunatic at the end of the day, just or healthy work-life balance one of the two you be the judge well i think more than anything he's like he's some he's a character on an arc he's like never experienced this before so we're gonna see him you know we've we've heard him say a couple times like like it has surely there has to be an end to this or like you know robbie being like yeah this is we're about halfway done about halfway done. He's like, what are you talking about? So, you know, like he's someone who's going to be a different kind of guy, I think, on the other side of this.
Great stuff. And then Dr.
Emery Walsh, who is their sort of like surgical floor liaison who comes in and she's the one who like calls in on Leah, essentially, and stuff like that. So like that's that's that's a new member of the team.
Different colored scrubs, always helpful. Bright orange vests, always helpful to understand who's in charge, where.
One of my favorite moments actually was, you know, and obviously we'll get to Jake and Leah. But one of my favorite moments is when Dana gives her vest to Princess so that she can like be with Robbie while he's helping Leah she's like well I can't I can't do this job and be here for Robbie at the same time so you know princess take the wheel she's like I've often thought that throughout this season just give princess control of literally everything on this floor and we might be doing all right what are you already like i'll mention a few things but i want to talk for a moment about langdon's return sure what do what did you observe about that what did you most want to say about that i mean his to borrow from his probably worst line of the entire season the man has skills and i say that with a z he's undeniable in terms of his impact out there and i think his ability to work on the fly in the same context that abbott and robbie are right to to improvise to do things that clearly the med students and some of the other residents just like are not quite ready to do maybe because he's willing to take risks that others aren't but i think he has a sense of the moment that robbie zeroes in on which is like you reach a certain point where there's the risk of like these people will not survive by the time we can get them to the or unless we start doing dramatic things whether that's donating blood as we operate on them whether that's you know try some more like uh experimental methods of treatment in these cases and i think his presence is very welcome in that way just in terms of treating the people who are coming.
But also you can see like the relief in Mel when she sees him, which I admit, like I am charmed by that, even if Santos herself isn't so glad to see him. And so I really do feel like we are building towards some kind of reinstatement.
I don't know if it's post-treatment or not. I really hope it is for the sake of everyone who's in this ER, but it feels like Lang is not about to leave this show it was an interesting combination because you've got like when robbie first spots him and i like gasped i was like oh my god langdon's back oh no yeah exactly langdon jump scare when santos has to first register that he's there and and their first interaction too where he comes in like maybe i would say neutral to slash intense and noticeably sort of like backs off and compliments her and gets the hell out uh yeah understandably but yeah to your point like mel being so you're back right like so excited to see him and then when he helps them and he's like could catch you too yeah he's like a good teacher supportive good teacher, supportive.
And that's why he's such an interesting character. He's like all these things.
He's something. He's one thing to Mel.
He's another thing to Santos. He's, you know, to what you said earlier about you don't need the Collins and Robbie romance to be clean.
You don't need, we don't need these characters to be one thing or the other. Isn't it so much more interesting when they're all different kinds of things different people because that's what humans are you know and in particular to set it up in this way where as we've alluded to many times if something makes mel happy it generally makes us happy and we like seeing that character you know succeed and rewarded and put in good positions and the fact that she likes this person who we all know as viewers of the show what he's done and the risk that he's put like he's put people's lives at risk for who knows how long by by manner of like operating in this way and living his life in that way and then santos as we discussed in the last pod who we have like personal issues with and can be a grating personality not just because of her bedside manner but like she's even calling javadi crash in this episode she's even kind of portively she's like hanging the hang in their crash i don't know hang in their crash sounds counts as supportively i think she also gets a huckleberry off too like she she she's rolling out the nicknames you know she is who she is and that's that's a flawed person too who who wants something who is striving who is clearly very smart who also can come off as being a little bit much sometimes um i love your point of like if mel cares about something we care about something some uh a pal pointed out to me that he thinks mel sounds a lot like um willow on buffy as i say this is the willow rule right yeah when willow cries we cry like that's yeah that's the willow rule and i would apply I would apply it to Mel King.
I did like that Langdon got at least two rebukes other than like Robbie being like, get the fuck out of here. These are healing hands.
Too bad they're so tiny. This is good.
Great. And also, you know, Victoria's mom being like, don't, like, are you spreading gossip essentially? Right.
When he's like that, it could be the shooter. She's like, what the fuck? Like, what are you? The shooter could be coming this way.
She's like, why are you spreading gossip and panic when we don't need that right now? All of that, too. All of the like, the shooter might be coming this way gossip that's kind of channeling through the ER makes me feel even more confident that we have not seen the shooter yet and we have not met the shooter yet and that everything that's kind of culminating in david coming back at the end of 13 is not it so let's talk about the press and the cops and david that's the next thing i want to talk about perfectly the press and quote scare quotes we do have one actual reporter at the ambulance bay and they're like you can't go elsewhere um but this dude who comes in and they're like it's probably the press this dude who put on this bloody sweatshirt and is pretending uh and is filming things on his cell phone i just want to say i'm i'm indignant as someone who is i wouldn't say currently a reputable journalist but was once a journalist you are a reporter still you've reported things in this podcast based on source conversations you had uh rob is a is a reputable nba journalist uh we don't do this shit this is not what the media does if you want to say like i don't know paparazzi to a certain degree but like yeah night there's nightcrawler shit so but i'm glad he slipped in that that puddle of blood that was great um and he's going to be here for a while soft restrained six hours of observation he's making it to the finale strapped to that bed good job um okay then we've got the cop officer stefano who gets shot yeah and the swat team comes in essentially because they want to like watch to make sure he's okay right i would suggest they have more important things to do but okay as would i also you're actively crowding an area of high traffic and a lot of people flying around trying to get supplies and treatment to everyone in the room maybe maybe go step outside uh that cop gets saved with abbott's field kit and then we've got david who shows up to pick his mom and is tackled and put in a room and you're you're standing strong on it wasn't david corner it feels like a head fake to me it feels like we're being told the shooter will return we see see David.
Dr. Banks is flagging real early.

Do we know where David is as soon as the shooting goes down?

Told you.

Like she's just ready for her victory lap.

I think what might happen if I had to guess, we've seen Whitaker start to ask patients if they saw who shot them.

Yes.

And he does it a couple of different times with a couple of different patients.

I wonder if he's going to start hearing from them a very different description from David or something that might be able to clarify that it was not him. Yeah.
I'm thinking that's how things might kind of unfold from here. But ultimately, us being shown exactly one suspect all season as to who could do this and people questioning it all season, whether he's capable of violence, makes me think that it will not be him.
I think it's interesting to think about,

because I was talking to a friend of mine

who, a different person who writes for television.

He was like-

Oh, another reporting source.

I knew as soon as Robbie let him go,

essentially,

that David was going to wind up doing something terrible really i don't know the answer but i'm just sort of like am i more interested if dr robbie's wrong or am i more interested in if dr mckay's wrong yeah uh aka dr bangs or some combination of the two i mean just because david didn't do this doesn't mean he's not capable of doing something so dr mckay doesn't have to be like that's the thing totally wrong i don't think she's wrong regardless this was a flaggable concernable course of events that needed to be addressed we've seen adolescents we have indeed seen adolescents we have seen adolescents i would say i would say on the robbie front just from a character standpoint do do we think that that character can handle, after everything we see in 13, also being implicitly responsible for a mass shooting event that led to his adopted kind of stepson kind of girlfriend's death, among many, many other deaths and wounds? I just don't think they're going to put Robbie through that much. But I don't think I can handle the pitch that the ringing in his ears would have to get to uh in order to convey that kind of drama yeah no uh all right let's talk about uh well i i before we get into sort of like the last couple segments i want to talk about i did want to shout out um kiara and lupe who are running uh in the cafeteria running the identification aspect dealing with the grieving loved ones.
I thought that was like, again, everything we've heard from people who work in the medical field say that the pit has gotten everything right. So I don't think that they are, you know, making up the idea that you can like scan a QR code and submit photos of your loved one in a mass casualty event.
I am sure this is actually how it runs.

But what it gives us in terms of like Kiara, who we've been Kiara and Lupe, who we've been watching all season and Lupe, especially, who's had to be like such a hardliner. her empathy face yeah as they walk into the cafeteria in the first place to make

and then like as they are taking photos of a body for identification you know to show the woman whose husband and brother were at pit fest and stuff like that like that angle is I just think it's so well done and it doesn't overwhelm the story the adrenaline of it's a different it's a different tempo yeah uh and it doesn't but it's like perfectly in balance in harmony with the sort of relentless uh frenetic energy of the er you know i think especially in sort of the way that part of the story is parceled out which i would say is more heavy it's heavier in 13 than it is in. 12 is very much adrenaline rush to the point where even the doctors and nurses are joking around sometimes,

like they're kind of eager and into it and are kind of jolted by the experience of being involved

in something important and urgent and are just like flying around the ER. 13 is where everyone

starts breaking down. And it's where the hospital is basically overrun with patients more than they

could ever conceivably treat. It's where Kiara has to start identifying these victims and telling

Thank you. And it's where the hospital is basically overrun with patients more than they could ever conceivably treat.
It's where Chiara has to start identifying these victims and telling their families. And overall, I think it's kind of a nice parallel to the sort of medicine and practicing we see on the ER floor, which is so much so technical, right? It's like, how do you stop this bleeding? How do you get this person conscious? How do you get this person stable? It's all kind of like by the book medicine applied in new and inventive ways.
So much of Chiara's work, even on a normal day, is emotional labor, right? Like that is her job. And she's having to ratchet that up to where she is in the same way that the doctors are dealing with the most intense and traumatic situations and patients constantly for hours on end.
She's having to do her version of that same thing. And I think using that as sort of a counterpoint and also showing us the way this is wearing down, not just the doctors, but the people who are sitting there waiting for hours to find out, like, did my husband, did my brother, did my child make it through this alive? It's an excruciating thing to have to do.
On the, like, sort of family connection front, we've been talking all season about sort of how do you bring the personal life of these doctors into the story when we're in the workplace and in one shift, a shift plus some overtime. um and you know we've been getting it here and there and so like chief among the people i mean and counting not counting langdon's old deal but the two people who have their personal lives sort

of interact there and so like chief among the people i mean and counting not counting langdon's old deal but the two people who have their personal lives sort of interacting most with their work here are dr bangs herself mckay and uh robbie of course so the harrison and chad piece the fact that harrison's in the in the doctor's lounge yeah and chad just like crutches his way onto the floor.. Just the fucking worst.
Just chatting it up. Every time he's on screen.
This guy. Chad chatting it up.
One thing I loved, I mean, we already knew that he still carried a torch for her because of his whole like mumbled Mateo moment or whatever. But when he like stops to watch her.
Yeah. And his like competency kink like comes through and he's just like man she's

a really good at her job that's so hot um i thought was i thought was really good and then

yeah like chad's the worst um but but you know i think like him being in there with harrison he's

like let's watch a movie together like you know i'll stay here with you um you don't want to i'm

He's going to be a little bit. but you know i think like him being in there with harrison he's like let's watch a movie together like you know i'll stay here with you um you don't want to i mean he's not forcing him to go home with him he's like no you really want to go home with your mom okay like then i'm gonna stay here with you i'm not gonna take you out to the bathroom in the middle of all that though um and let us all listen together as mom's ankle monitor um distract the entire ER.
Why not? I think that's very, that's very gracious of you, Joe. A very generous read of Chad.
I'm always looking out for the Chads of the world, Rob. You know that about me.
I do know this about you. I would describe his presence in this episode as Dr.
Banks' second child, who she has to chide to get off the hospital floor to send into the room with harrison because that's basically where his emotional age is is please go please go wait in the staff room and watch the movie um harrison on the other other hand just a young budding cinephile right in front of us all he wants to do is watch movies and you know i would say under these circumstances fuck it let him watch whatever he wants it's Whatever he's going to watch is not scarier than whatever is happening out here.

Rob, what are you watching in the lounge with Harrison while everything happens outside in the ER?

I'm trying to think of what Harrison... My concern is that what Harrison wants to watch is like Five Nights at Freddy's,

which I don't particularly want to watch.

Not because it's scary, but because I would rather not.

A child's idea of a scary movie, I hope is better than that. I'm hoping Harrison is evolved.
You know, I'm hoping he's tapped into something truly dark and is ready to embrace something more horrible than that on screen, at least. Sounds like Nosferatu in the lounge to me.
That sounds wonderful. Great time.
Great time. I i hope chad on a small screen maybe not

eggers would never you know cast it on the wall okay then we get jake and leah of course and this is of course i mean we've been like we knew it was headed towards this the moment that jake goes to pit fest you know blah blah i i guess i always assumed that it would be jake who was injured and not leah

that it would be jake that he would have to try to save this is somehow worse um it's his ticket one thing that i on on rewatch that i thought was really brilliant was you know as we watch Robbie take too long go above and beyond

again we've got everyone glancing over and looking at him and knowing that he's taking too long um we've got abbott coming over and saying like hey buddy like come on and again it's it matters that abbott who is of equal stat like rob Robbie's the king of the ER, right? In these last hours. And it's important that Abbott, who's on equal standing with him and who knows him, is there.
It's important that Dana's there. But one thing I wanted to note, this is just like a little thing, but like on rewatch, the fact that we have the whole plot line where Mel needs to get some blood.
Yeah. And she's like, I'll donate.
And then we see Abbott donating. I will say when Mel donates, I know we've been we've been calling some of these pods pit stops.
I would describe Mel's blood donation as a straight up pit stop. Like she rolls in there.
Dana's like the mechanic crew. Needle her up.
Get the blood out. Change the tires.
the tires all right get back out there um oh she's when mel's like i donate all the time i'm like of course you do you perfect angel of course you do um but we you know in in 12 we watch we see the blood donation happen because blood is so scarce they do get another shipment in but the fact that robbie blows through four bags yeah on leah like we know the stakes of the blood bags because of that previous storyline and we're just like oh my god does the fourth bag of oneg that he's pumping in her like we don't we don't have those resources which is like you know abbott says that explicitly but it's still like it's sort of you know we're all med students watching the show learning learning what an io does and like learning that bags of onegg are not a limitless resource inside of this situation and stuff like that i thought that was really uh interesting i thought so too i mean i'm of two minds about i would say overall the robbie jake leah stuff because on the one hand it's very tv drama to bring his personal baggage into the hospital for jake and leah to be at pit fest to begin with right very tv drama thing to do counterpoint this is a tv drama this is this is what we're doing this is the enterprise we have laid out for ourselves yeah and and frankly i would say robbie as a character is such smart, compassionate doctor that just putting him through the paces of a mass casualty event is probably not going to be enough to really strip him down in the way that they want to strip him down. They want him to have this Dr.
Adamson recall breakdown moment. And in order to reach that, which in itself was a personal and professional collision, you're going to have to kind of recreate that fundamental tension in some way and so whether it's going to be jake or it's going to be leah i agree like i could have seen them go either way with that and this does feel terrible and ultimately him having to tell jake is one of the most excruciating scenes of the show he like robbie who we've seen be so caring with patients all season.
Exactly. Can't even bring himself to tell Jake that she's dead.
Like all he can do is like, I'm going to list out the things that I tried to do almost as clinically as if you were a med student yourself, because this is the only way I can reconcile and wrap my head around what just happened. The way that Noel Wiley's voice, like all season, especially for people who like knew him on ER, all season, the raspiness of Robbie's voice was just like a little bit of like grizzling age on Noah Wiley from the fresh face, you know, ingenue that he was on ER.
but there's this like he can like barely squeeze out he's like his throat is like

closing in and he could barely squeeze out the words to talk to jake about what happened with leah i completely agree with you in that like we have seen him have a version of this conversation so many times and he's so good at it so obviously this would be harder but like to have that comparison uh is so informative to us for robbie to recap the day yeah for robbie to recap the day and say talk about the people he didn't save the teen with the fentanyl overdose um mr spencer who died in front of his kids guy with a heart condition little girl who drowned trying to save her sister and he's like barely talk at that point what that does to us not only is it like an interesting thing for robbie to do to just sort of like run through the day but then it reminds us that like which we already knew because the premise of the show but this has been a day it's been a day it's been one day in this guy's life he's supposed to be home by now he's supposed to be off shift Right. And he's got so many of those days in his career.

Yeah. And then we get the ringing in the ears.
Yep. He's in Peds, which is where, you know, Dr.
Adamson was. Sure is.
And then we get, and this is something we've like neglected to talk about in all of our pit coverage uh unless we did and i don't remember it but uh that's possible but um the the lack of music on the show we've talked about it briefly i think specifically with things like the honor walk and stuff like you're right right i remember now okay but for it to come in here at the end of this episode there's like a little bit of score underneath this breakdown. And then it feeds into this song, which is, I don't know if you Shazammed it.
I did not. It is an original song composed by the show's, the show's composer, Gavin Brivick, and an artist called Taji taji and it's called fail forward and they've been playing instrumental bits of instrumental versions of it over the credits in previous episodes yeah but this is like the first time they dropped it as like a song and he says they were going to release the full song um at the end of the season um but uh that's interesting to me because i i found that music over the closing credits it hasn't happened every episode but i have found it so evocative of like old school tv themes yeah um and so now to hear lyrics over it and for it to be like a song that i can now forever identify with a season of television or you know i mean that's, that's what theme songs are, but like, but the way it's been, it's not an opening credits jingle.
It's like a thing that's been building on this show. And in this moment of absolute crisis for Robbie in 13, this is when we get like the full version of it over the closing credits.
I thought that was pretty effective. They just know how to pick their this show yeah and that's that's something that's hard to fake and hard to kind of find your way into if you haven't made tv before i think that's that's one area in which the experience of everyone involved is paying off i'm trying to understand like okay so where do we go from here with robbie robbie's having his breakdown he's on the floor he's got to get up off the mat in some way i think there's a couple of ways that it could go joe i'm curious if you have any takes or feelings on this i think colin's coming back and talking to him is avenue one dana having a conversation with him is probably avenue two and abbott having a conversation with him is probably avenue three everyone else it's like if you're too junior i like on the one hand maybe the emotional payoff of one of the students offering him a return consolation i think could be a powerful thing i just think if you are a grizzled experienced doctor in the middle of a nervous breakdown like hearing from one of the kids is maybe not the thing you would be most receptive to but i i leave it i leave myself open to being surprised on that yeah i guess the question is for my question is how long is he down yeah like is he back up in the first few minutes under two episodes but like is he just like is he missing for an episode like where's where's robbie like we don't know is it a whole episode is it just a couple minutes i mean which will feel it's funny on rewatch of 13 my memory was my memory which we just established as shoddy but like my memory was that leah and jake come in at the top of the episode but they don't come in until like 16 minutes into the episode yeah um so that is you know but it just feels like it goes on forever and that's you know effective storytelling but yeah i'll be curious to know how long robbie stays down is it going to be an abbott or a dana um coming in and talking to him or does he get up on his own and not tell anyone and only we know yeah and i guess the cop guarding the door knows and Jake certainly knows like what happened there.

Actually, I want to throw a dark horse into the ring.

Please.

Where's Myrna?

What's she up to?

Where is Myrna?

She broke out of the handcuffs somehow.

Who knows what's going on with her at this moment?

Maybe what he needs at this exact moment in time is for a random woman who's sometimes around the hospital to inappropriately hit on him maybe that's what he needs that's what he needs yeah all right the last couple things i have are er flashbacks i just want to save till the very end so that anyone who hasn't seen er doesn't get spoiled by anything but anything else you want to mention rob before we go uh just that i am one such person but i'm walking straight into the spoiler i i think i think you have opened yourself up to this you've already explored dr john carter's um addiction plot line uh but i i did not catch i i have no idea what you're about to say i did not detect or catch any like serious er specific plot line vibe and so i i'm i am curious to hear from people who are watching this and to our er fans if what we're about to talk about is something that was so obvious to them or if it was something that maybe flew under the radar a little bit.

There's two. One is minor.
One is minor. You can stay for that one.
The other one's kind of major. You can leave for that one if you want to.
The first one, the minor one is, it was an iconic image in ER to have a nurse doing CPR on top of a person on top of a gurney riding into the room.

And I'm not saying we haven't necessarily seen it this season, but we have not seen it the way we saw Nurse Jessie doing CPR on top of the gurney going through the ER.

That was like just such a classic ER visual to me. And they don't do it like they don't do it on grays.
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it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, of the gurney going through the ER. That was like just such a classic ER visual to me.

And they don't do it like they don't do it on grays. Like it's not a it's an ER specific sort of image to me.
That could be anything, though. I'm not saying that that necessarily is the more pertinent one.
OK. And again, you can leave if you don't want really, really dusty old ER spoilers is the helicopter.

The duo that go up to get the helicopter and Robbie's like, stay back from the blades. And they go up there and she's like, I think we're supposed to stay back from the line.
There's a very famous moment in ER where Dr. Romano going to get some organs or whatever out of like gets his arm taken off by a helicopter what joe what they have to like fix him um so yeah i like i will never forget where i was when i saw dr romano get his uh arm taken off by the helicopter so maybe this is just expressing my naivety i've seen many movies where people have been cut in half de-armed uh every variation of injury as a result of a helicopter blade as a doctor in this moment where your job is like walking up and grabbing a cooler uh where is the upward motion that's leading you to get an arm chopped off by the blades there's like things happening okay okay it's not it's not just like a standard walk out and reach a little too high for the cooler and oops you lost an arm you know what i say this but as a man of a certain height the number of times in which i have stuck my arms in a ceiling fan is frankly embarrassing like it it happens with a truly disturbing frequency so who am i who am i to judge after i saw that um i have forever now when i watch any scene in a movie where someone gets into a helicopter and they usually do this like on succession they would do this you you duck down a duck that's that's rule number one is you gotta duck down so uh yeah i will also say inavadi and Whitaker's defense, I believe they're the two who are sent up to get the blood cooler.
Yeah. And they were given instructions about like, okay, you got to stay between 10 and two.
Is, is that, and they're confused by those instructions. I'm similarly confused.
Is that an arm orientation instruction? Yeah, probably. Now that I think about it, I had no idea when I was watching this episode, but now it's starting to make some sense.
Dr. Romano, you were an asshole, but you do not deserve to lose your arm like that.
And, you know, shout out to the ER fans for living that traumatic moment with me. We'll be back for more Pit.
I have one final for you joe before we before we fly off please do one of my favorite patients as we're as we're coursing off like dr ramada's arm did season nine of er god i hope not uh of the hundreds of patients who are going through the er in these episodes yeah we get this old hippie who has been grazed by a bullet and i think this is one of kind of i think the test for mel's yellow team as much as anything are these cases that come in that are seemingly quite simple a broken leg a grazing wound and all of a sudden these people are unconscious or dying or gushing blood and they have to figure out what all these other complications are what is the musical act that is bringing both jake and leah the wide assortment of people and our friend the old hippie who at his core is mostly just hurt by the darkness he was seen in humanity today like who is playing at pit fest yeah we've got the we've got the the guy with the bleach blonde hair who odied who was who was just like taking some percocet so for his knees so he could dance to dance at piffus so there's there's clear and like look it's not unusual for a music festival at a certain hour the edm acts come on over on these stages maybe it's like more rap oriented or rock oriented or whatever like this guy is seeing like fish or dead and company yeah and those are not as far as i know like music like that that kind of like noodling guitar is not very squeezable into a tight 45 minute music festival time slot.

Jam fest. God, not it can't be a jam band, not at Pit Fest.
Jake and Leah aren't going to go see a jam band.

There's no way. Do you think anyone under 20 is going to see a jam band? They don't have time.
They've got TikTok brains, Joe. Come on.
Someone did. One of our listeners did ask, like, why, you know, this young man who is deaf and his mom are at Pit Fest.
Why bring your deaf son to Pit Fest? But, like, my understanding is that, like, for a variety of people uh music is you know it doesn't matter that like the the music sort of transcends the experience of being the the rhythms that you can feel like all sorts of stuff is that there's something for everyone at pit fest but the question is what is that something oh maybe we'll find out by episode I'm going to go on a limb. Here's, I on a limb what do you have i'm gonna say it's gogo bordello he's i think the hippie likes gogo bordello i mean gogo bordello does rip i was first like a great live show you know i oh i would i would a hundred percent see gogo bordello live yeah i have seen yeah but they seem much more like a rowdy a rowdy bar show than a music festival show that's true i've only ever seen them in rowdy bars uh no but no but i saw them at at the bluegrass festival in san francisco i'm very i'm very tempted to bust out the accent right now but that just seems disrespectful and I'm not going to do it.

So that has been our coverage of the pit.

You can start wearing purple if you want to.

And we'll be back for... Please email us,

PrestiTV at Spotify.com.

If you think you know who played Pit Fest,

we would like to know.

In fact, if you can draw us a Venn diagram of jake and leah side circle hippie circle and what is the act that is bringing them together that's the kind of alchemy that we need the prestige tv listeners to help us with but i feel like jake jake is going to pit like i jake is going to go to pit fest with robbie so like it doesn't have to see Pearl Jam. Like we know his demo.
But I'm saying it doesn't have to. It could be a Pearl.
Like it could be like, oh, Jake was going to go with Robbie. And then, you know what I mean? So it doesn't have to be like a TikTok brain sort of band.
Oh, definitely not. I'm just wondering what could possibly be the midpoint that would bring these people together.
And I'm saying that in the hope that they could be. You know, that it's not all about Jake and Lear at stage one and old hippie is at stage three all day.
I want the intermingle. We're here to create four quadrant entertainment, Joe.
Where is the clown? You know what this is reminding me of is, oh, fuck, what was it called? Parks and Recreation Harvest Festival vibes to me. I don't know.
Like, there's a clown doing balloon animals there. Like, you know, we're having delicious coconut-based desserts sold at a food table.
Sounds wonderful to me. It sounds like a whole carnival, a cornucopia of delights at Pit Fest.
Once again, press hv at Spotify.com. If you have any uh pit fest insights we would love to hear them thanks as

always to our uh four quadrant team it's uh it's john richter it's justin sales and it's donnie

thank you guys so much for your help on this episode we'll be back with white lotus and more