The crew earns a few moments of peace in quiet(er) finale

This article contains spoilers for The Pitt‘s season 1 finale, “9:00 p.m.”

“Today should never have happened.”

Standing in the emergency room at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) addresses his exhausted staff after a grueling day shift. The doctors, nurses, and medical students at the under-resourced urban hospital have spent the last 15 hours being inundated with human tragedy: A college kid brain-dead after accidentally ingesting fentanyl; a 6-year-old drowning victim; a tense conflict between a mother and her abortion-seeking teen daughter; a violent assault on the Pitt’s beloved charge nurse, Dana (Katherine LaNasa); and finally, a tsunami of 146 wounded from a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh music festival.

“None of us are going to forget today, even if we really, really want to,” continues Dr. Robby, his voice tight with tears. “So go home, let yourselves cry. You’ll feel better — it’s just grief leaving the body.”

After 14 episodes of immersive med-drama action, The Pitt used its final hour of the season to focus on the emotional aftermath of the traumatic shift — and the revelations that had to be swept aside during the life-saving chaos. Compared to what came before, “9:00 p.m.” is relatively quiet, and if it almost feels like a let-down, that’s likely by design. All season, we rode the adrenaline wave with The Pitt’s dedicated lifesavers — it’s only fair that we crash with them, too.

With all the shooting victims treated and accounted for, things are starting to calm down in the ER, which has opened back up to the public. There are still patients to tend to, of course — a driver with a crushed pelvis (Emanuel Loarca), a 14-year-old boy with measles (Ivan Fraser) — but the doctors and nurses finally have time to talk about more than urgent intubations and dire blood shortages. And creator R. Scott Gemmill, who wrote the season finale, uses this considerable calm to tell us more about who these characters really are.

Though her duties are over for the day, Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones), asks her senior resident (Aayesha Harris) for permission to stay a little longer. She just wants to try one more time to convince her patient Max (Aidan Laprete) — who she suspects tried to kill himself — to get help. In the quiet of his private room, Trinita shares a painful memory of her past. “I had a good friend who, um, went through some really ugly stuff with me,” she says. “We were young, and someone older was taking advantage of our age. And things got so bad that my friend took her own life.”

It’s the second time Trinity alluded to sexual abuse in her past — remember that intubated dad she threatened with prison in episode 7? — and highlights the maddeningly clever way The Pitt’s writers subverted our expectations with this character. When Dr. Trinity Santos stormed into the ER, she was a walking TV trope — the cocky, obnoxious, mean-nickname-giving maverick med student — and I’ll admit, I wasn’t sure there was much more to her. But slowly, Gemmill and his team proved me wrong, unveiling new dimensions under her quick-read exterior and having her instincts about Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) be more than a disgruntled student’s petty revenge.  

Having slipped back into the hospital during the all-hands-on-deck mass casualty event, Langdon spends much of the finale trying to do damage control about those stolen drugs Robby found in his locker earlier that day. “I was never high,” Dr. Langdon insists to his boss. “I was just treating my own withdrawal symptoms.” He pleads with Robby not to report him, and when he’s rebuffed, Langdon lashes out. “I’m not the only one who’s a little f—ed up here, Robby,” he sneers. “I wasn’t the one talking to cartoon animals in pedes.”

It’s a cruel reference to Robby’s long-time-coming moment of emotional disintegration at the end of episode 13. Devastated by the carnage around him and the heart-wrenching duty of telling his quasi-stepson, Jake (Taj Speights), that his girlfriend (Sloan Mannino) died in the shooting, Robby sank to the floor of the pediatrics room, sobbing and whispering the Shema prayer to himself.

All season long, we knew it was coming for Robby, this “total meltdown,” as Langdon so flippantly dubs it. But The Pitt eschewed a show-stopping, season finale breakdown scene for a piercing, carefully contained crisis, executed with breathtaking skill by Wyle. (I’d say it’s his Emmy moment, but it’s only one of many.) It was also the show’s most effective use of Robby’s horrendous pandemic experience, which up until now manifested in flashbacks that felt dutiful and disconnected from the larger story. But in “7:00 p.m.,” those flashbacks finally felt earned, as Robby found himself again in that pediatric-room morgue — dead bodies on stretchers making an awful contrast to the colorful animals painted on the walls — and collapsed under the weight of four years of tamped-down grief.

By the time 9:00 p.m. rolled around, though, Robby’s “brief moment of silent reflection” — as kindhearted student doctor Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) described it — is mostly forgotten. There’s a little gossip, of course; Langdon heard about the incident from a night-shift nurse. It feels to Robby like a catastrophic failure, but everyone else views it for what it is: An understandable moment of human weakness. In a scene that mirrors the opening minutes of the series, Dr. Abbott (Shawn Hatosy) finds Robby on the roof of the hospital, standing on the wrong side of the guardrail and staring sightlessly into the horizon. “I choked,” Robby confesses. “What, for 40 seconds? Three minutes? 10 minutes?” Abbott scoffs in return. “So f—ing what?”

It’s an open question — is Robby’s breakdown a harbinger of something more serious down the road? Or is it all in a day’s work? In February, Max renewed The Pitt for a second season, and the finale hints at several potential storylines for the ER crew. Langdon’s fate remains unresolved, and his bitterness toward Robby suggests he may try to use his boss’ mental state against him. Shaken after being assaulted by a patient, Dana ends her shift by taking down the family photos she’s taped around her workstation. Could she really be “done,” as she insisted more than once this season? (I would be stunned if Gemmill really let the brilliant LaNassa and her fan-favorite character go, but Dana did stay quiet when Robby called out, “See you Monday.”)

We finally meet Becca (Talia Anderson), twin sister of Dr. Mel King (the remarkable Taylor Dearden), and get a glimpse of their endearing dynamic. And when she discovers that Whitaker has been crashing at the hospital because he’s “between apartments,” Santos invites him to crash with her. Will Odd Couple hijinks ensue? And now that nurse Mateo (Jalen Thomas Brooks) asked smitten med student Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) to join the gang for beers and a post-shift hang in a park across the street, will romance blossom?

It was a little jarring to see the doctors and nurses outside of the hospital in the finale’s final scenes. After just 15 episodes, I’m almost pathologically attached to these characters, thanks to Gemmill and The Pitt’s outstanding ensemble. When season 2 takes us deeper into their personal lives, I fear it might be too much to bear. Perhaps it’s best to follow Dr. Robby’s advice and just cry it out. Grief leaving the body has never felt so good.

Finale grade: B+
Season grade: A

All 15 episodes of The Pitt season 1 are streaming now on Max.