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

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Speaker 2 Hello, welcome back to the Press Siege TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson.

Speaker 3 I'm Rob Mahoney.

Speaker 2 We're here today to talk to you about the pit.

Speaker 3 We sure are, Joe.

Speaker 2 Episodes 12 and 13 is what we're covering today. So, episode 12

Speaker 2 was a big one. Episode 13, also also a big one.

Speaker 2 So if you have not listened, if you've not watched those episodes of television, I really recommend

Speaker 2 you do that before you listen to us talk about it. That would be my recommendation personally.

Speaker 2 And we have two more episodes to go after this, episode 13. And we will, if all goes according to plan,

Speaker 2 Rob and I will be recording a podcast per pit. Look at that.

Speaker 3 Two pits, two pods.

Speaker 3 Just an embarrassment of medical riches.

Speaker 2 We're also, of course, wrapping up White Lotus.

Speaker 2 We've done all we can possibly ever do on suffering. Seriously.

Speaker 3 That's all I've got. My head is a deflated balloon at this point.

Speaker 2 We squeeze the lumen lemon dry.

Speaker 2 It's all over over there.

Speaker 2 And then what do we have on the horizon? Time will tell, and we'll let you know. But right now,

Speaker 2 let's dig into the pit. I want to start with a couple emails we got from folks.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 Press

Speaker 2 TV at spotify.com is where you can reach us because we don't have like a fun, pithy

Speaker 2 welcome to PitFest sort of at gmail.com email for you guys.

Speaker 3 I feel good about that in retrospect.

Speaker 2 You know what? Same, same.

Speaker 3 That we didn't do anything too cute. I felt good about it.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2 So Alexis wrote in to let us know

Speaker 2 that in addition to her delight over, you know, the Filipina nurses and a lot of other things on the show. I really like this line from her email.

Speaker 2 She said, watching the 17-year-old girl try to get her abortion drew my 16-year-old daughter to the show.

Speaker 2 We're going to 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.

Speaker 2 There's something for everyone kind of aspect of four quadrant aspect of the show. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 How, like, when you think about the show as a whole,

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 I think it is intentional, right?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But I think you also just have the med students themselves, right?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Collins turned 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.

Speaker 3 She's doing what she was told.

Speaker 2 She's doing what she was told, but it was made canon in episode 11 that Dr. Collins and Dr.
Robbie had a a romantic relationship. Yes.
And Caleb is pointing out the fact that, like,

Speaker 2 Collins as a resident and Robbie as her attending, she was like, I'm not sure I feel great about it. She was like, what if it were Santos

Speaker 2 and Robbie or something like that? And for me, there's, there's the power differential, but there's also the age differential. And I will just say that the actress who plays Dr.

Speaker 2 Collins is 40 years old and Noah Wiley is 53 years old. And so like, in theory, a Dr.
Collins and a Dr. Robbie got together 3750.
Like, the age gaps tend to like

Speaker 2 weird me out less the older we all get. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.
And I think a 37-year-old

Speaker 2 person,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And this happens quite often on TV.

Speaker 3 In every medical.

Speaker 3 I mean, not just medical, any workplace situation at all, comedy, drama, whatever. Bosses and supervisors and employees are constantly finding themselves in relationships.

Speaker 2 A lot of fraternization.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And this just happens to be where we're starting with the pit in a lot of ways.

Speaker 2 HR nightmares all around us. Okay.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 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 and their relationship had to exist outside the residential, you know, whatever.

Speaker 2 But like, it seems to me this has to have been a secondary career. She's only like three years.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's possible with someone like Collins.

Speaker 3 But also, I, I don't want like a justification for their relationship to be neat and tidy necessarily.

Speaker 3 I think like 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.

Speaker 3 That's that's good storytelling as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 2 Drama, baby.

Speaker 2 Okay, and then last but not least, on the messy drama front.

Speaker 2 We've got two, I believe two doctors have weighed in on the Langdon situation. Okay, good.

Speaker 2 And Peter, who did not drop his credentials, but don't worry, the next doctor did,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I thought if you stole medication from the hospital, you don't work in hospitals anymore.

Speaker 3 Seems like a reasonable conclusion to draw, Joe.

Speaker 3 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, one of them is just like Dr.

Speaker 3 Robbie kind of forgetting about it maybe after this, it seems like.

Speaker 2 Maybe.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I don't know what your read on that was, Joe, but my read was like he was thinking about flushing them. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And did decided not to, maybe to report them, maybe to not, at least to table the decision for later. That bag of pills is still in his pocket.

Speaker 3 And he's had a lot going on, but 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.

Speaker 2 So this is the other piece of information.

Speaker 2 Dr. John Crankshaw, MD, wrote in to us.
That is how his email was signed. Says in PA,

Speaker 2 Pennsylvania, where Pittsburgh is, Dr. Robbie is mandated to report to the state medical board about Dr.
Langdon, or Dr. Robbie could face fines.

Speaker 2 The exception to this would be: if Dr. Langdon enters an approved treatment center, the treating provider or center is not mandated to report.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 is that a path forward if Langdon, if does Dr. Robby not have to report him if Langdon agrees to go into some sort of rehab? Yes.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 this big picture impact of the pit or rollout of the pit that I want to talk about before we get into.

Speaker 2 Everything that happens in these two episodes, which is a lot.

Speaker 3 It's a lot. Dude, there's a lot of blood.

Speaker 2 Yeah. We are in the splash zone.

Speaker 3 I honestly would love to talk to whoever worked in 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.

Speaker 2 I saw the,

Speaker 2 you know, Martin McDonough, who does, you know, the very bloody Irish plays, among other things.

Speaker 2 I saw one of his plays, I think it was Lieutenant Inishmore at

Speaker 2 Berkeley Rep years ago, and they had a gutter in the front of the stage for the blood. And then the stage was like slightly canted.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So all the blood could like just roll down the stage into the gutter that's in the front of it.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 et cetera, et cetera. I thought that was amazing.

Speaker 2 Okay, but here in the pit. Okay, so let's say, let's say, for example, 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, which it can't.

Speaker 2 So those of us watching at home in the new TV model are like, when are we gonna figure this out? When is season two coming? Season two, the planet is for season two to debut.

Speaker 2 They've already picked it up for it to debut January of next year. So just like TV shows of old.

Speaker 3 Can we just say, God bless? Thank you. Exactly.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Max. Thank you, Pitt Gods.
Thank you, Noah Wiley.

Speaker 3 We need more regular TV in our lives.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So this is.

Speaker 3 I've never been more glad to be back to an old school model.

Speaker 2 So this is, so that's eight, uh, eight months, which is not nothing between the end of the season and the new season.

Speaker 2 But if we're like, hey, every January, we get to go back to the pit, that's kind of exciting.

Speaker 2 So Joe Dalian, who's a, who's a writer I love who writes about sort of ratings and 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 Bloise, who's the head of programming at HBO, about

Speaker 2 what they hope to accomplish with the pit. Basically, why 15 episodes? And Casey's like, I wanted something that felt like

Speaker 2 old school linear storytelling. Linear storytelling being

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 So the episodes drop Thursdays at nine Eastern. They don't drop at midnight like a lot of streaming shows do.
You know, this is a Mac show.

Speaker 2 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 it appointment television. Like,

Speaker 2 what did you want to say?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Casey gave an answer to Joe Dalion about that where he's like, I asked them why, and they said something about yada, yada, yada, maximize the night, yada, yada, yada.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 This is some Y2K bullshit. Like the numbers roll over and therefore we must publish them.
I just don't buy it.

Speaker 2 But yeah, so he's like, I wanted 15 episodes because it felt like too big of a 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.

Speaker 2 Now they do eight or six 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.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the results have been smash all the success in terms of reviews, in terms of,

Speaker 2 you know, any consideration, in terms of,

Speaker 2 you know, us hearing from our listeners about it. Oh, yeah.
And in terms of, I would say, the word of mouth build, build, build, which is what you want in a show.

Speaker 2 And then I'm going to talk about the storytelling impact in a second. But from like a business point of view,

Speaker 2 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 mouth building, especially around episode 12, which we're here to talk about today,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 If someone's like, okay, I got to binge and watch up to 12. I feel like what happened recently with Paradise, a show I didn't watch, but reportedly episode 7 of Paradise was like,

Speaker 2 wild and crazy. And you had to watch it, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 has pushed it even further

Speaker 2 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 Moni, what do you want to say about this?

Speaker 3 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...

Speaker 3 as something as heavy-hitting as episode 12 in episode 12 and not in episode four or five or like like a two-part premiere or something like that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 This is a complete mass 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.

Speaker 3 It turns episode 12 into just like an amazing episode of television, first of all.

Speaker 3 But I think 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.

Speaker 3 Like so often, we're talking about the pacing within seasons for respective shows and why things are happening at different times versus not.

Speaker 3 It feels really good to feel the sure hand. of a product that we're familiar with, admittedly, and thus that there's always going to be like a nostalgia baked into a medical drama like this.

Speaker 3 But 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 I was trying to deliver on.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And it becomes, to your point, like just kind of a different show entirely as we are sort of in this,

Speaker 2 even more of an emergency, emergency situation for the rest of the season, theoretically.

Speaker 2 And I think that

Speaker 2 a couple more things I want to mention is on sort of like the business of television front,

Speaker 2 not to step too much on the watch's corner because they're the best at this, but like

Speaker 2 this is a fairly cheap show to make. It's like

Speaker 2 $5 million an episode. That's not nothing, but we're in one location.
Logistically, that makes it hard.

Speaker 2 I was thinking a lot about 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.

Speaker 2 And for much of the episode, it's like 360. You can kind of see.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know, so like they have to constantly in the background be working on their own emergency.

Speaker 2 So it's like, it's, it's the heavy technical lift of that sort of one-er situation where you just have to like, it's theater.

Speaker 2 You just have to like be going and going and going constantly in order to give us this lived in 360 experience of this emergency event.

Speaker 3 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 big before. Like

Speaker 3 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 Pitch, you 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.

Speaker 2 And so it's like, it's huge life or death stakes, obviously. That's literally what we're talking about here.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 3 you know, not

Speaker 2 fingers crossed for season two.

Speaker 3 We don't know who the killer is at PitFest. It could have been a dragon.

Speaker 2 It could have been melee's or something like that. But I think that, like, yeah, you're just, you have your one set, essentially, more or less.

Speaker 2 You've got these scrubs. Like, that's, that's your costume for the most part.
And

Speaker 2 you go from there. And so you just got to pay for like gallons of fake blood.

Speaker 2 yeah and and we go from there so all of that's to say all of that logistically because that makes it a lower an easier investment for HBO for Max to be like this this show costs us so much less than

Speaker 2 you know dude 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.

Speaker 2 We've been talking about this all season, but like this is what

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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, you have a different different level of investment than you do in characters that you spend eight weeks with or one binge drop weekend with.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 going to need some previously on, but you're not going to only need like 90 lore videos.

Speaker 2 You're not going to need a house of R to have done all the reading for you and stuff like that. You don't have a heavy lift on more.

Speaker 2 Not for the pit, for everything else. Yes.

Speaker 3 Mal and Joe go to medical school is a series I would follow up on. Would you? I just want you to know that.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think that we reached a tipping point a while ago in the streaming era where it was, the marketplace was so flooded.

Speaker 3 There was a like discretion is the better part of valor element where it was like, we can't dominate a monocrocultural discussion anymore.

Speaker 3 So let's pick a date, try to steer clear of the Game of Thrones or whatever like the big things on the calendar are, find our pocket and binge drop it and hope that it finds its audience. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I think it tipped into that maybe a little too quickly in some respects.

Speaker 3 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? Like we think this can be a hit.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Like not every network can stake its claim in quite that way.

Speaker 3 But 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,

Speaker 3 like it or not, in terms of like how in vogue a medical drama pitch would be in 2024 and 2025, we think this can work.

Speaker 3 I mean, fuck if it doesn't work, Joe. Like this is a super watchable show, basically no matter what the the cases of the week are or who's kind of featured in that episode.

Speaker 2 Because you care about the people who are there. And

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 last but not least, I will say that I had lunch with a friend of mine who's a TV writer, and 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.

Speaker 2 And HEO Max specifically are looking for, and Casey talks about this, 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.

Speaker 2 And, you know, they're just like, they're like, we're going to bring linear storytelling, high prestige, high-level linear storytelling to Max, not to HBO necessarily.

Speaker 2 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 going to stop, we're going to start dropping hacks. at 9 p.m.

Speaker 2 Easter on Thursday instead of midnight. We're going to start, you know, like the various MAX shows that they have,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 3 you know um 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 oh let's go home with Dana I want Dana's whole like

Speaker 3 the whole clan I'm sure it's the domestic drama of the Evanses yeah I mean sign me up exactly parenthood but make it the Evanses okay that's that's a pitch This episode is brought to you by Boar's Head.

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Speaker 2 Let's talk about the new cast members that we got as the night shift comes in to help with the mass casualty here.

Speaker 2 Just when I learned everyone's name, we have new people to meet.

Speaker 2 Let's start with, we get the return of Sean Haddissey as Dr. Jack Abbott.
Yes.

Speaker 2 A couple 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.

Speaker 2 He's like, I'm so glad you're here, brother. Like, thank you so much, like, that you're here.
Two things we got to know about Dr. Jack Abbott right from the jump here.

Speaker 2 He's got an Army combat backpack on his back.

Speaker 2 And he said, I heard about the PitFest shooting on the police scanner. So Dr.

Speaker 2 Jack Abbott is the guy 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.

Speaker 3 We all need white noise to sleep, Joe. You know,

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 2 Throughout, you know, you already cited his great line where he's like, this is now a MASH unit.

Speaker 2 MASH for the infants out there was another

Speaker 2 very great movie and a very popular medical TV show

Speaker 2 about

Speaker 2 army doctors. But like the moments that we get with Dr.
Abbott of him saying,

Speaker 2 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 night.
I could do this with bombs raining down overhead.

Speaker 2 This is something I can do is an interesting element to add into

Speaker 2 our already sort of, you know, emergency doctors.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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. Yeah.

Speaker 3 He's such a great avatar for that sort of idea, that like MacGyvering that's happening all throughout 12 and 13.

Speaker 2 Let's take a, before we go to your, uh, your favorite character of mine, Dr. Don, John Shen, let's go, let's go to this sort of like mass unit

Speaker 2 rundown. Do you have a favorite like mass unit problem-solving, MacGyvering, as you put it? And was it the use of the IO drill to relieve cranial pressure?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I'm going to shoehorn in another recurring bit that we have here 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?

Speaker 3 There is a whole subcategory of drill, IO drill-based gnarliness.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But yeah, drilling straight into a skull to relieve pressure while

Speaker 3 good thinking, quick on your feet, probably saved that person's life,

Speaker 3 did not love it.

Speaker 2 In case anyone is like

Speaker 2 wondering, at home wondering, because you get the gist of what the IO drill is. We see it used.
The IO drill is the star of episodes 12 and 13. We're dismantling ankle monitors.

Speaker 2 What can't the IO drill do, right?

Speaker 3 I think I need one.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 2 I was just curious what an I, like, what so IO refers to uh intraoceous 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.

Speaker 2 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 uh try to start an IV.

Speaker 2 Um, Incredible shit from the IO drill.

Speaker 2 It's real fast.

Speaker 3 Wait, before we move past the drilling, let me get your take on the gnarliest thing that we saw in these episodes.

Speaker 3 We have all those candidates also cutting the side of a dude's peck open with scissors to insert a tube.

Speaker 3 Blood catheter inserted directly into a guy's dick.

Speaker 3 Honestly, this one 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.

Speaker 3 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 2013?

Speaker 2 Honestly, it should not be the answer, but it was Dana wiping down the equipment.

Speaker 3 There's something about it.

Speaker 2 There was just something.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Ginar watch. The other thing I want to say under the sort of like mash unit umbrella is like, shout out Victoria's Time to Shine in front of her mom and in front of Matteo.

Speaker 2 Matteo is like really enjoying how good Victor, how creative Victoria was with her Magai ring here. No, this is genius, is what he says about Victoria.
And you love to see it.

Speaker 2 And this is like such a great little, like, whatever happens with Matteo and Victoria.

Speaker 2 Like, I love that Matteo, 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 Matteo, you have a little crush on.

Speaker 2 Oh, a big crush on.

Speaker 3 A big crush-on. Asking out on day one crush on.
She's down so bad.

Speaker 2 So to shine in front of Mateo and then to have Matteo like reflect your shine back at you in front of your mom.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Everything's coming up, Victoria. I love that for her.

Speaker 3 I got to say, too, her mom not up for snuff here.

Speaker 2 You know, not ER ready at all.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 And then just

Speaker 3 so fussed, so fussed by all the unconventional methods that are happening in front of her.

Speaker 2 On the mass unit front, so Victoria's shining because of her creativity, her innovations, Santos because of her brashness, right?

Speaker 2 She does this move in episode 13 that Abbott is like, don't ever do, you've never done that on your own, but that was pretty bad. And also,

Speaker 2 good job. Yeah.
I love that. And I love that, like, his whispered delivery of that was really, really good.

Speaker 2 But I love, so Santos and her sort of, even, even in the midst of all this, Santos

Speaker 2 saying, that sounds boring. I want to do it.

Speaker 3 Like, I'm going to look for a different case.

Speaker 2 And then also her bedside manner, which is spotty at best, being extremely tested inside of a situation like this.

Speaker 2 Any Santos highlights that you want to point out here?

Speaker 3 I think just that she does,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.
Yes.

Speaker 3 And Santo's just like, I don't know what to do with you. I'm going to move on to the next person who's, uh, I can stick a tube into.

Speaker 3 Look, I'm not saying it's not effective under these circumstances. There's lots of people who need tubing.
Um,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 you would hope that that's kind of like part of her journey ultimately, right?

Speaker 3 Like like Whitaker has really been working on his over the course of the season, like communication with patients, trying to reassure them, trying to kind of get level with them in an emotional way.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I think Santos is okay at that up until the point where she has to do like emotional triage.

Speaker 2 What she is well suited for is chasing down a quote-unquote reporter. We'll talk about that more in a second.

Speaker 3 Come on. This is just.

Speaker 2 That's not a reporter. That's not a reporter.

Speaker 3 No. Okay.
That's like a a Jake Jill and Hall and Nightcrawler reporter.

Speaker 2 I literally wrote Nightcrawler in my notes.

Speaker 2 100%. I wrote Nightcrawler.
Okay. Last but not least on the MASH unit front, and then we'll go back to our favorite, Dr.
John Shen.

Speaker 2 How Mohan is handling, Slow-Mo, Mohan, Samira, how Samira is handling this new normal. It feels like she's just like enervated

Speaker 2 and ready for it. She's going.
Definitely.

Speaker 2 She's not.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Her instincts, pretty, pretty solid as well. Her thinking outside the box, pretty solid.

Speaker 2 Um, but being able to execute that under this amount of pressure and, and how little time they have to diagnose, to triage, to move on.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I thought it was really interesting.

Speaker 3 She gets a big call-up. Like she's on the red team with Robbie and Abbott for the most critical patients.
So it's like a great sign of affirmation in terms of Robbie's belief in her.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I thought Javati being basically like on the shorthanded team with Dr. Bangs was kind of

Speaker 3 a sign of like confidence in her abilities and knowledge. And then, of course, Mel without Langdon, without Collins being on the floor at that point in time,

Speaker 3 having to lead a team all by herself, really, really getting her moment in the pros.

Speaker 2 When Whitaker drills the clown, and she's like, okay, team meeting.

Speaker 3 Okay, 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.

Speaker 3 Look, we got to keep ourselves sane out on the floor, even in these trying times. Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right, let's go back to the long-promised Dr. John Chen because, of all the

Speaker 2 scenes that I will long remember from these two episodes,

Speaker 2 Robbie trying to give Dr.

Speaker 3 John Chen,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 the coffee, having a moment.

Speaker 3 Fuck yeah.

Speaker 2 But in the way that John's like, oh, yeah, I wasn't in that faculty meet.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 That's good negotiation, by the way.

Speaker 2 Dr. John Shen, absolute like scene stealer, rock star, and perfectly paired

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Shen in particular, particular, as you say, iced coffee enthusiast,

Speaker 3 dunkin' by my eye, clearly a dunkin' man.

Speaker 2 100% dunkin moment. Yes.

Speaker 3 Maybe a dissociative lunatic at the end of the day. Just or healthy work-life balance.
One of the two. You'd be the judge.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So we're going to see him, you know, we've, we've heard him say a couple of times, like, like it has, surely there has to be an end to this.

Speaker 2 Or like, you know, Robbie being like, yeah, this is, we're about halfway done.

Speaker 3 He's like, What are you talking about?

Speaker 2 So, you know, like, he's someone who's gonna be a different kind of guy, I think, on the other side of this. Um, great stuff, and then uh, Dr.

Speaker 2 Emery Walsh, who is their sort of like uh surgical floor liaison, who comes in, and she's the one who like calls in on Leah essentially and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 So, like, that's that's a new, a new member of the team. Different colored scrubs, always helpful.

Speaker 2 Bright orange vests, always helpful to understand who's in charge, uh, where 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 takes, gives her vest to Princess so that she can like be with Robbie while he's helping Leah.

Speaker 2 She's like, well, I can't, I can't do this job and be here for Robbie at the same time. So,

Speaker 2 you know, Princess take the wheel.

Speaker 3 She's like, I don't want to. 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.

Speaker 2 You've already

Speaker 2 mentioned a few things, but I want to talk for a moment about Langdon's return. Sure.
What did you observe about that? What did you most want to say about that?

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 to borrow from his probably worst line of the entire season, the man has skills, and I say that with a Z.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 To improvise, to do things that clearly 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 experimental methods of treatment in these cases.

Speaker 3 And I think his presence is very welcome in that way, just in terms of treating the people who are coming in.

Speaker 3 But also you can see like the relief in Mel when she sees him, which I admit, like I'm, I am charmed by that, even if Santos herself isn't so glad to see him.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I really hope it is for the sake of everyone who's in this ER, but it feels like Langdon is not about to leave this show.

Speaker 2 It was an interesting combination because you've got like when Robbie first spots him and I like gasp.

Speaker 3 I was like, oh my God, Langdon's back. Oh no.

Speaker 2 Langdon jump scare yeah exactly Langdon jump scare when Santos has to first register that he's there and

Speaker 3 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 yeah understandably

Speaker 2 But yeah, to your point, like Mel being so, you're back, right? Like so excited to see him. And then when he helps him and he's like, could catch you too.
Yeah, he's like a good teacher, supportive.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He's both, you know, and to your, like to what you said earlier about

Speaker 2 you don't need the Collins and Robbie romance to be clean. You don't need, you know, we don't need these characters to be one thing or the other.

Speaker 2 Isn't it so much more interesting when they're all different kinds of things to different people? Because that's what humans are, you know.

Speaker 3 And in particular to set it up in this way, whereas we've alluded to many times, if something makes mel happy it generally makes us happy and we we like seeing that character you know succeed and reward it 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.

Speaker 3 And then Santos, as we discussed in the last pod, who we have like personal issues with and can be a grading personality, not just because of her bedside manner, but like she's even calling Javati Javati Crash in this episode.

Speaker 3 She's even kind of supportively, she's like hanging their crash. I don't know if hanging their crash counts as supportively, but I think she also gets a huckleberry off, too.

Speaker 2 Like, she's rolling out the nicknames, you know. She is who she is.

Speaker 3 And that's that's a flawed person, too, who wants something, who is striving, who's clearly very smart, who also can come off as being a little bit much sometimes.

Speaker 2 I love your point of like, if Mel cares about something, we care about something.

Speaker 2 A pal pointed out to me that he thinks Mel sounds a lot like

Speaker 2 Willow on Buffy.

Speaker 3 As I said, this is the Willow rule, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, when Willow cries, we cry. Like, that's yeah, that's the Willow rule.
And I would apply it to Melking. Um,

Speaker 2 I did like that Layden got at least two rebukes, uh, other than like Robbie being like, get the fuck out of here. Uh,

Speaker 2 these are healing hands, too bad they're so tiny.

Speaker 3 This is good, great,

Speaker 2 and also,

Speaker 2 uh,

Speaker 2 you know, um, Victoria's mom being like, don't, like, why 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?

Speaker 2 The shooter could be coming his way. She's like, why are you spreading gossip and panic when we don't need that right now?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We do have one actual reporter at the ambulance bay, and they're like, you can't go elsewhere.

Speaker 2 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 and is filming things on his cell phone.

Speaker 2 I just want to say, I'm indignant as someone who is,

Speaker 2 I wouldn't say currently a reputable journalist, but was once a journalist.

Speaker 3 You are a reporter still. You've reported things in this podcast based on source conversations you had.

Speaker 2 Rob is a reputable NBA journalist.

Speaker 2 We don't do this shit. This is not what the media does.

Speaker 2 If you want to say like, I don't know, Paparazzi to a certain degree, but like, yeah, this is nightcrawler shit. So, but I'm glad he slipped in that puddle of blood.
That was great.

Speaker 2 And he's going to be here for a while. Soft restraint, six hours of observation.
He's making it to the finale. Strapped to that bed.

Speaker 3 Good job.

Speaker 2 Okay, then we've got the cop, Officer Stefano, who gets shot. Yeah.
And the SWAT team comes in essentially because they want to

Speaker 2 watch to make sure he's okay. Right.

Speaker 2 I would suggest they have more important things to do, but okay.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 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 standing strong on

Speaker 2 it, wasn't David Corner.

Speaker 3 Feels like a head fake to me. It feels like we're being told the shooter will return.
We see David. Dr.
Bangs is flagging real early. Do we know where David is as soon as the shooting goes down?

Speaker 2 Told you.

Speaker 3 Like, she's just ready for her victory lap.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I wonder if he's going to start hearing from them a very different description from David or something that might be able to like clarify that it was not him. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I'm thinking that's how things might kind of unfold from here. But ultimately.

Speaker 3 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 uh because i was i was talking to i was talking to a friend of mine who who

Speaker 2 a different person who like writes for television he was like oh another reporting source i knew i knew as soon as

Speaker 2 like robbie let him go essentially

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 david was gonna wind up doing something terrible really i don't know the answer but i'm just sort of like

Speaker 2 am i more interested if dr robbie's wrong or am I more interested in if Dr. McKay is wrong? Yeah, uh, aka Dr.
Bangs, or

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 3 totally wrong. I don't think she's wrong, regardless.
This was a flaggable, concernable course of events that needed to be addressed.

Speaker 2 We've seen adolescents, we have indeed seen adolescents, we have seen adolescents.

Speaker 3 I would say on the Robbie front, just from a character standpoint, 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

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 2 I don't think I could handle the pitch that the ringing in his ears would have to get to in order to convey that kind of drama.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 2 All right, let's talk about. Well,

Speaker 2 before we get into sort of like the last couple of segments I want to talk about, I did want to shout out

Speaker 2 Kiara and Lupe, who are running in the cafeteria, running the identification aspect, dealing with the grieving loved ones. I thought that was like, again,

Speaker 2 everything we've heard from people

Speaker 2 who work in the medical field say that the PID has gotten everything right.

Speaker 2 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 I'm sure this is actually how it runs.

Speaker 2 But what it gives us in terms of like Kiara, who we've been, Kiara and Lupe, who we've been watching all season,

Speaker 2 and Lupe, especially, who has had to be like such a hardliner, her

Speaker 2 empathy face

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 you know, to show the woman whose husband and brother were at PitFest and stuff like like that. Like

Speaker 2 that angle is,

Speaker 2 I just think it's so well done and it doesn't overwhelm the story, the adrenaline of

Speaker 2 it's a different, it's a different tempo.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't, but it's like perfectly in balance, in harmony with the sort of relentless

Speaker 2 frenetic energy of the ER, you know?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 12 is 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 yeah of being involved in something important and urgent and are just like flying around the er

Speaker 3 13 is where everyone starts breaking down and it's it's where the hospital is basically overrun with patients more than they could ever conceivably treat it's where the QR has to start identifying these victims and telling their families.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So much of Kiara's work, even on a normal day, is emotional labor, right? Like that is her job.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 She's having to do her version of that same thing.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 It's an excruciating thing to have to do.

Speaker 2 On the like sort of family connection front,

Speaker 2 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 a one shift, a shift plus some overtime.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we've been getting it here and there. And so like chief among the people, I mean,

Speaker 2 not counting Langdon's old deal,

Speaker 2 but the two people who have their personal lives sort of interacting most with their work here are Dr. Bangs herself, McKay,

Speaker 2 and Robbie, of course. So the Harrison and Chad piece, the fact that Harrison's in the in the doctor's lounge

Speaker 2 and Chad just like crutches his way onto the floor.

Speaker 3 Just the fucking worst.

Speaker 3 Chad

Speaker 3 on screen. This guy.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But when he like stops to watch her, yeah, and his like competency kink comes through, and he's just like, man, she's really good at her job.

Speaker 3 That's so hot.

Speaker 2 I thought it was really good. And then, yeah, like

Speaker 2 Chad's the worst.

Speaker 3 But,

Speaker 2 you know, I think him being in there with Harrison, he's like, let's watch a movie together. Like, you know, I'll stay here with you.

Speaker 2 You don't want to, 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 going to stay here with you.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to take you out to the bathroom in the middle of all that, though.

Speaker 2 And let us all listen together as mom's ankle monitor distracts the entire ER.

Speaker 3 Why not? I think that's very, that's very gracious of you, Joe. Very, a very generous read of Chad.

Speaker 2 I'm always looking out for the Chads of the world, Rob.

Speaker 3 You know that about me. I do know this about you.
I would describe his presence in this episode as Dr.

Speaker 3 Bangs' 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.

Speaker 3 Please go wait in the staff room and watch the movie.

Speaker 3 Harrison, on on the other hand, just a young, budding cinephile right in front of us. All he wants to do is watch movies.
And

Speaker 3 I would say under these circumstances, fuck it. Let him watch whatever he wants.
It's not, whatever he's going to watch is not scarier than whatever is happening out here.

Speaker 2 Rob, what are you watching in

Speaker 2 the lounge with Harrison while everything happens outside in the ER?

Speaker 3 Trying to think of what Harrison. I see.
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

Speaker 3 I would rather not.

Speaker 3 a child's idea of a scary movie, I hope, is better than that. I'm hoping Harrison is evolved.

Speaker 3 I'm hoping he's tapped into something truly dark and is ready to embrace something more horrible than that on screen, at least.

Speaker 2 Sounds like Nosferatu in the lounge to me. That sounds wonderful.
Great time. Great time.
I hope Chad.

Speaker 3 Although on a small screen, maybe not.

Speaker 3 Haggers would never, you know.

Speaker 2 Cast it on the wall.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 Then we get Jake and Leah, of of course. And this is, of course, I mean, we've been like, we knew was headed towards this the moment that Jake goes to PitFest, you know, blah, blah.

Speaker 2 I guess I always assumed that it would be Jake who was injured and not Leah. Yeah.
That it would be Jake that he would have to try to save. This is somehow worse.

Speaker 3 It's his ticket.

Speaker 2 One thing that I

Speaker 2 on rewatch that I thought was really brilliant was, you know, as we watch Robbie take too long, go above and beyond.

Speaker 2 Again, we've got everyone glancing over and looking at him and knowing that he's taking too long.

Speaker 2 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 Robbie's the king.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's important that Dana's there.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then we see Abbott donating.

Speaker 3 I will say when Mel donates, I know we've been calling some of these pods pit stops. I would describe Mel's blood donation as a straight-up pit stop.

Speaker 3 Like she rolls in there, Dana's like the mechanic crew, needle her up, get the blood out, change the tires. All right, get back out there.

Speaker 2 Oh, she's, when Mel's like, I donate all the time, I'm like, of course you do, you perfect angel.

Speaker 2 Of course you do.

Speaker 2 But we saw, you know, 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

Speaker 2 on Leah,

Speaker 2 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 bumping in her?

Speaker 2 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 Oneg are not a limitless resource inside of this situation and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 I thought that was really interesting.

Speaker 3 I thought so too. I mean, I'm of two minds about, I would say, overall the Robbie Jake Leah stuff.

Speaker 3 Because 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 PitFest to begin with. Right.
Very TV drama thing to do.

Speaker 3 Counterpoint, this is a TV drama.

Speaker 3 This is what we're doing. This is the enterprise we have laid out for ourselves.

Speaker 3 And frankly, I would say Robbie as a character is such a 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.

Speaker 3 That they want him to have this Dr. Adamson recall breakdown moment.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Can't even bring himself to tell Jake that she's dead.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 The way that Noah 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-faced, uh, you know, ingenue that he was on ER.

Speaker 2 But there's this, like, he can like barely squeeze out.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 obviously, this would be harder, but like to have that comparison is so informative to us. For Robbie to recap the day,

Speaker 2 for Robbie to recap the day and say, talk about the people he didn't save, the teen with the fentanyl overdose, Mr.

Speaker 2 Spencer who died in front of his kids, the guy with a heart condition, little girl who drowned trying to save her sister. And he's like, barely talk at that point.

Speaker 2 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 of the premise of the show, but this has been a day.

Speaker 2 It's been a day. This has been one day

Speaker 2 in this guy's life.

Speaker 3 He's supposed to be home by now. He's supposed to be off shift.
Right.

Speaker 2 And he's got so many of those days in his career. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then we get the

Speaker 2 ringing in the ears.

Speaker 3 Yep.

Speaker 2 He's in.

Speaker 2 Peads, which is where, you know, Dr. Adamson was.

Speaker 3 Sure is.

Speaker 2 And then we get, and this is something we have, we've like neglected to talk about in all of our pit coverage,

Speaker 2 unless we did, and I don't remember it, but that's possible. But

Speaker 2 the lack of music on the show.

Speaker 3 We've talked about it briefly. I think specifically with things like the honor walk and stuff like that.
You're right, right.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then it feeds into this song,

Speaker 2 which is,

Speaker 2 I don't know if you Shazammed it.

Speaker 3 I did not.

Speaker 2 It is an original song composed by the show's

Speaker 2 composer, Gavin Brivek,

Speaker 2 and an artist called Taji, and it's called Fail Forward. And they've been playing

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he says they're going to release the full song at the end of the season.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 that's interesting to me because I have 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.

Speaker 2 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 what theme songs are, but like.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And in this moment of absolute crisis for Robbie and 13, this is when we get like the full version of it over the closing credits. I thought that was pretty effective.

Speaker 3 They just know how to pick their spots on this show. Yeah.
And that's something that's hard to fake and hard to kind of find your way into if you haven't made TV before.

Speaker 3 I think 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I think Collins coming back and talking to him is avenue one.

Speaker 3 Dana

Speaker 3 having a conversation with him is probably avenue two. And Abbott having a conversation with him is probably avenue three.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But I, I leave it, I leave myself open to being surprised on that.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 3 I'm going to say under two episodes.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's funny on Rewatch of 13

Speaker 2 my memory was

Speaker 2 my memory which we just established is 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

Speaker 2 so that is

Speaker 2 you know it but it just feels like it goes on forever and that's you know effective storytelling but yeah i'll i'll be curious to know how long Robbie stays down. Is it going to be an Abbott or a Dana

Speaker 2 coming in and talking to him?

Speaker 2 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 what happened there.

Speaker 3 Actually, can I throw? I want to throw a dark horse into the ring, please. Where's Myrna? What's she up to?

Speaker 2 Where is Myrna?

Speaker 3 She broke out of the handcuffs somehow. Who knows what's going on with her at this moment?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 All right. The last couple of things I have are ER flashbacks that I just want to save to La Verian so that anyone who hasn't seen ER doesn't get spoiled by anything.

Speaker 2 But anything else you want to mention, Rob, before we go?

Speaker 3 Just that I am one such person, but I'm walking straight into the spoiler.

Speaker 2 I think you have opened yourself up to this. You've already explored

Speaker 3 Dr.

Speaker 2 John Carter's

Speaker 2 addiction plot line.

Speaker 3 But I did not catch, 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 There's two.

Speaker 2 One is minor.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 to have a nurse doing CPR on top of a person on top of a gurney riding into the room.

Speaker 2 And I'm not saying we haven't necessarily seen it this season, but we have not seen it the way we saw nurse Jesse doing CPR on top of the gurney going through the ER.

Speaker 2 That was like just such a classic ER visual to me.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That could be anything, though. I'm not saying that that necessarily is the more pertinent one.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 And again,

Speaker 2 you can leave if you don't want really, really dusty old ER spoilers.

Speaker 2 Is the helicopter.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 moment in ER where Dr. Romano, going to get some like

Speaker 2 organs or whatever out of like gets his arm taken off by a helicopter what Joe what

Speaker 2 they have to like fix him um so yeah I like I will never forget where I was when I saw dr.

Speaker 3 Romano get his uh arm taken off by the helicopter so maybe this is just expressing my naivety you've seen many movies where people have been cut in half de-armed

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 where is the upward motion that's leading you to get an arm chopped off by the ball?

Speaker 2 There's like things happening. Okay, okay.

Speaker 2 It's not just like a standard walk out and reach a little too high for the cooler and oops you lots of narrow.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Like it happens with a truly disturbing frequency. So

Speaker 3 who am I? Who am I to judge?

Speaker 2 After I

Speaker 2 saw that,

Speaker 2 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.
You gotta duck.

Speaker 3 That's rule number one: you duck.

Speaker 2 You gotta duck down.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 3 I will also say in Javati and Whitaker's defense, I believe they're the two who are sent up to get the blood cooler. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And they were given instructions about, like, okay, you got to stay between 10 and and 2.

Speaker 3 Is that, and they're confused by those instructions? I'm similarly confused. Is that an arm orientation instruction?

Speaker 3 Yeah, probably.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Dr. Armano, 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.

Speaker 3 We'll be back for more pit. I have one final question for you, Joe,

Speaker 3 before we fly off. Please do.
One of my favorite patients

Speaker 3 as we're course. Does it fly off like Dr.

Speaker 2 Armado's arm did in season nine of ER?

Speaker 3 God, I hope not.

Speaker 3 Of the hundreds of patients who are going through the ER in these episodes,

Speaker 3 we get this old hippie who has been grazed by a bullet.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 who is seeing in humanity today?

Speaker 3 Like, who is playing at PitFest?

Speaker 2 Yeah, we've got the, we've got the

Speaker 2 guy with the bleach wand hair, who Ode'd, who is, who is just like taking some Percocet for his knees so he could dance.

Speaker 2 at Pitfest?

Speaker 3 So 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.

Speaker 3 But like, this guy is seeing like Fish or Dead and Company. Yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 It's a jam fest.

Speaker 2 God,

Speaker 2 it can't be a jam band, not at PitFest. Jake and Leah aren't going to go see a jam band.

Speaker 3 They're not going to see it.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Someone did, one of our listeners did ask, like,

Speaker 2 why,

Speaker 2 you know, this young man who is deaf and his mom are at PitFest, why bring your deaf son to PitFest? But like, my understanding is that, like, for a a variety of people,

Speaker 2 music is, you know, it doesn't matter that, like, the music sort of transcends the experience of being the rhythms that you can feel, like, all sorts of stuff.

Speaker 2 There's something for everyone at PitFest. But the question is, what is that something?

Speaker 3 Maybe we'll find out by episode. I'm going to go on a limb.

Speaker 2 Here's what I'm going to go on a limb. What do you have?

Speaker 2 I'm going to say

Speaker 2 it's Gogo Bordello.

Speaker 3 He's.

Speaker 2 I think the hippie likes Gogo Bordello.

Speaker 3 I mean, Gogo Bordello does rip. I was first.
And like a great live show, you know? Oh, I would 100% see Gogo Bordello live. Yeah.
That does seem. But they seem much more like a

Speaker 3 rowdy bar show than a music festival show.

Speaker 2 That's true. I've only ever seen them in rowdy bars.
No, but no, but I saw them at the Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco.

Speaker 3 I'm very tempted to bust out the accent right now, but that just seems disrespectful, and I'm not going to do it.

Speaker 2 So that has been our coverage of the pit.

Speaker 2 You can start wearing purple if you want to.

Speaker 2 And we'll be back for,

Speaker 2 please email us, pressytv at spotify.com. If you think you know who played PitFest,

Speaker 2 we would like to know.

Speaker 3 In fact, if you can draw us a Venn diagram of...

Speaker 3 Jake and Leah's 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.

Speaker 2 But I feel like Jake, Jake is going to pit, like I feel, Jake is going to go to a pitfest with Robbie. So like, it could be.

Speaker 3 Robbie's there to see Pearl Jam. Like he, we know his demo.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then,

Speaker 2 you know what I mean? So it doesn't have to be like a TikTok brain sort of band.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You know, that it's not all about Jake and Lee are at stage one and old hippie is at stage three all day. I'm

Speaker 3 not sure.

Speaker 3 We're here to create four quadrant entertainment, Joe.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, that's a clown doing balloon animals there. Like, you know,

Speaker 2 we're having delicious coconut-based desserts sold at a food table.

Speaker 3 Sounds wonderful to me.

Speaker 2 It sounds like a whole carnival, a cornucopia of delights at PitFest. Once again, press HTV at Spotify.com if you have any PitFest insights.
We would love to hear them. Thanks, as always,

Speaker 2 to our

Speaker 2 four quadrant team.

Speaker 2 It's John Richter.

Speaker 2 It's Justin Sales, and it's Donnie Beacham. Thank you guys so much for your help on this episode.
We'll be back with White Lotus and more Pit.

Speaker 2 And see you soon.

Speaker 3 Bye.