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Warning: This review contains full spoilers for The Pitt Season 2, Episode 2!
“Was The Pitt always this funny?”
That’s a question I found myself mulling over a lot while watching Season 2, Episode 2. Season 1 certainly had its moments of levity, but there definitely seems to be more of a concerted effort to inject some humor into the mix this time around. Not that this is a bad thing by any stretch. We’ve seen how dire things can get at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, and no doubt the situation will take a turn for the worse soon enough. We might as well have some fun before then.
There’s a lot to be entertained by in Episode 2, whether it’s rookie nurse Emma Nolan (Laëtitia Hollard) undergoing her first day trial by fire or our heroic doctors responding to the dreaded penile injection gone awry. Then you have Javadi’s (Shabana Azeez) personal and professional struggles and Mel’s (Taylor Dearden) sorry situation, where a seemingly innocuous and very flirtatious patient turns out to be a real POS.
Rather than immediately hit the ground running with a barrage of depressing medical cases, the goal is clearly to explore the more surreal side of life in emergency medicine. And why not? Hell, it’s the 4th of July, so it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing the obligatory, gnarly fireworks accidents start rolling through. If anything, it seems like the show is attempting to lull us into a false sense of security before the other shoe drops.
This also raises the question of which of these bizarre cases is going to take a turn for the tragic first. I certainly have my concerns about Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.), as he seems like a guy who might have finally pushed his luck too far. And there’s the cloud surrounding the mysteriously injury-prone girl. As relatively lighthearted as the show feels at present, it sure hasn’t forgotten that life in the ER is one plagued by human misery.
It’s also nice to see the new interns start to develop more coherent personalities. Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) is rapidly becoming the character everyone loves to hate with his insufferable know-it-all routine. I can only imagine that he’ll get blasted with a cold, hard dose of reality before long. In the meantime, his abrasiveness helps take the pressure off of Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who still isn’t doing much to endear herself to Robby (Noah Wyle). Of course she’s a big proponent of generative AI in the ER…
My main complaint with the direction of the season at this early stage is that we don’t get enough focus on Dr. Langdon (Frank Ball) as he tries to readjust to life in The Pitt. It really feels like he, not Robby, should be the focal point of Season 2 in light of everything he’s been through and his isolation from the rest of the group. Ball makes the most of what he’s given, though, with the quiet scene between him and Dearden’s Mel post-head injury easily being the highlight of the episode.
