The Pitt Recap: Code Triage

How many ways can one person say The Pitt rules? It rules, okay? Just when you think the medical drama can’t possibly have any additional tricks to show off or there’s no way it could one-up the previous hour, it goes and delivers an episode like this. As Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center is turned into what basically amounts to a war triage unit when there’s an active shooter situation with mass casualties at PittFest, “6:00 P.M.” sees both sides of what makes this show so great working in perfect tandem.

The craftsmanship here — this episode was directed by Amanda Marsalis and written by Joe Sachs and R. Scott Gemmill — is unmatched. The way Marsalis keeps the camera moving, giving us eyes on every element of this effort, from triage out in the ambulance bay to each of the allocated medical care stations to the cafeteria where family members await news, it all feels relentless and chaotic and so seamless. When night shift attending Dr. Shen says “Jesus, when is this gonna end?” at the end of the hour, you feel that. We are in it with these doctors from minute one. The amount of work this takes to pull off is staggering to think about — the preceding episodes feel almost like dry runs to prove something as complicated as this could actually be pulled off. And babes, do they pull it off.

The other half of what makes The Pitt work is its roster of compelling characters and the fact that over the past 12 hours, even though their specificities have only come in bits and pieces, we feel like we’ve gotten to know them. We care about them. While this episode is fast-moving and overflowing with patients, The Pitt has put in the character work already so that even a completely procedure-focused scene with all medical-jargon dialogue still reveals character. In a crisis like this people either rise to the occasion or crumble, and we get to watch all of these characters face that choice. While the moments we get with these people may be briefer than usual before the episode moves on to the next thing, each makes an impact. Like, did I fist-pump when Dr. Mel King went from being unsure she could lead the yellow tag section (injuries to extremities but otherwise good vitals) to basically forcing Robby to let her donate her own blood to her patient? Yeah, of course I did, dude. What are we doing here if you aren’t fist-pumping moments like that? But “6.00 PM” shows off The Pitt’s deft character work in other ways, too. Not to be all Dr. Shen all the time here, but we spend all of, what, five minutes with that guy, and still, from the casual way he’s just sipping an iced coffee and barely paying attention while Robby gets him situated running triage, to then revealing that he very much knows what he’s doing, we know everything we need to about him. On The Pitt, time crunches never seem to be a hindrance, and it continues to be a model of efficiency in storytelling.

That whole time-is-of-the-essence thing is a central part of The Pitt in a very meta way, but it’s also a central part of the show in a very real, visceral, oh my god can you believe how many patients are pouring into the hospital right now way. So let’s get into a few of the biggest moments from the episode. Things kick off with an unsettling, eye-of-the-storm type of quiet. The “code triage” has been called and Robby and Dana know that, as the closest trauma center to the event, they’ll be inundated in no time, and yet Robby still calmly goes about gathering the troops. Gloria Pink Blazer is down in the ER and even Robby seems a little surprised at just how prepared and helpful she’s being to make sure he has all the supplies, medicine, personnel, and room he needs to make this work. Every patient currently in the ER will either need to be discharged, moved upstairs, or taken to family medicine. In short: They can’t stay here. Gloria is all over it. Robby does still manage to get in a quick jab about not having enough nurses, and I commend his commitment to that bit.

Supplies are at the ready, even though Robby knows they’ll be out of so many things in almost no time. More doctors and nurses are being called in and Robby is truly kicking himself for letting Collins go home and explicitly telling her to turn off her phone. Dr. Abbott even reappears after hearing about the shooting on his police scanner (how’s that for a character detail), and as someone who watched The Faculty more than three times in my adolescence, I was really rooting for this return. The whole setup for incoming victims, down to the color-coded slap bracelets at the ready, is so smooth and organized that my first thought was, of course, look at how good these people are at their jobs. That quickly led to thoughts much more stomach-churning: How fucked up is it that we live in a world where hospital staffs know exactly how to prepare for a mass-casualty shooting event? That they know what to do because for many, this isn’t their first? That there are multiple “mass-casualty faculty meetings”? The Pitt doesn’t have time to be preachy about this country’s gun-violence problems, instead electing to simply show us the horror that we inflict on each other, and that is more than enough. It’s all there in the screams, the crying, the bloody handprints on ambulances because people are desperate for EMTs to stop and help. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I need to see what a gunshot wound through someone’s jaw looks like ever again, thanks.

There’s not much time to get overly emotional (until the credits roll), since each new scene is just a shock to the system, but I will admit I was in tears as Robby gathers his team to tell them what’s happening and go over the plan: who is in charge of what, protocols to follow, the fact that there are no tests to be run, no labs, doctors are just checking pulses and awareness and going with their gut. It’s a scene full of very straightforward dialogue as Robby and Abbott quickly give out orders to everyone on staff, and there I am, in tears. The quiet, nervous energy, the fear in some of these characters’ faces is so real, if these professionals are this worried about what’s coming through those doors, uh, what are us plebes in for?

King is the most vocal about her nerves as she, Santos, and Whitaker man the yellow slap-band area, but once she gets to work she’s laser-focused on her patients. One is a woman named Sylvia, who arrived in the back of a van with her son Omar, who was shot in the chest. She was hit by a car in the melee, but is only thinking about getting her son, who is deaf, proper care. Omar is taken up to an OR almost immediately, though Garcia later reports back that he’ll be just fine, but Sylvia’s broken leg belies a bigger injury. King and Whitaker find her unconscious and through Abbott’s handy travel ultrasound machine, realize she has a liver laceration and is bleeding internally. It’s a major catch, that yes, leads to King demanding she be allowed to donate blood to save her patient’s life as they wait for an OR. I mean, it’s no “Jack Abbott tapes a blood bag to his leg so he can donate while still working” move (I know I shouldn’t be turned on right now, but the heart wants what the heart wants and also remember that whole thing about The Faculty?), but it is close. The moment is only made better for King thanks to the arrival of her favorite Senior Resident, Frank Langdon. Robby is in no way happy to see him, but it’s not the time to turn away doctors and they both know it.

Santos isn’t exactly thrilled by Langdon’s reappearance either, but she has enough going on to mostly ignore him. The look on her face during the big meeting at the top of the hour, maybe more than anyone’s, projected enough fear that I was waiting for tough-talking Santos to crash and burn here, but I was happy to be proved wrong. Instead, she gets a great little story in which she realizes one of her patients is faking an injury in order to get inside the hospital and she finds him filming what’s going on, realizing he’s a reporter. She calls for security and then watches as the guy runs off but slips in a puddle of blood. She has him admitted for his head injury and makes sure to include the order to have him in restraints for the next few hours. Then she takes his phone and chucks it into a mop bucket full of now-bloody water. Way to make us all very pro-Santos, show!

Hey, I guess almost all of our newbies in the ER get some time to show how well they handle a crisis (Sorry Whitaker, maybe you’ll shine in the next hour.) Javadi winds up side-by-side with her mother, who continues to smother her even in the middle of this horror show. It doesn’t take long for Javadi to hiss at her to “read the fucking room,” to let her work and go help someone who needs it; McKay gives her an approving smile. Then, when they’ve run out of chest tubes and thora-seals, it’s Javadi, in a real MacGyver move, who directs her mother to use an ET tube and a urine output bag instead. You know who is impressed with her then? Not her mom, that’s so cute you’d think that. No, it’s Mateo, who calls the idea “genius.” Utah is alive and well, it seems!

Every doctor save in this episode is pretty incredible, from Mohan’s blowhole incisions to save her patient with the subcutaneous emphysema to Robby’s bubble intubation. But one of the smartest moves The Pitt makes in this episode doesn’t involve a medical save. That would be having Chad — yes, that Chad — walk onto the floor. Chad remains, as ever, a dope. He walks off that elevator into the ER, after having been moved upstairs, with such arrogance. He doesn’t care what the security guard says, his ex-wife is a doctor, he’s allowed to be here, his son is in the break room. He has such a smug look on his dumb face as she lets him go and then he turns the corner and is smacked with a dose of reality. The chaos, the violence, the carnage of it all rattles him completely. When McKay yells at him to go find Harrison, he has no smartass reply, he just does it. Chad finds Harrison innocently watching a movie in the break room waiting for his mom and you can see it all over his face: All Chad wants to do is protect his son from the scene just outside the door, to keep him safe. Allowing us to watch this play out with a character like Chad only amps up the gravity of an already very grave situation.

A situation, unfortunately, that is nowhere near over according to Robby as the episode comes to a close. He’s been overseeing every aspect of the hospital’s response, moving from room to room, from patient to patient this entire time. He’s also one of the few people aware that the police, and soon the FBI, are talking to Theresa about her son David — after Robby alerted them to the situation when the police first arrived, they pinged David’s phone and he was at the shooting location. But on top of everything, Robby still can’t get ahold of Jake. So, if anyone wishes this nightmare would just end already, it’s Dr. Rabinavitch. And yet, all he can do is press on.