Updated April 10, 2025 at 22:01 PM ET
This is a recap of the Season 1 finale of The Pitt, which aired Thursday night. Spoilers for that episode obviously abound.
It's finally time for the day shift to go home.
The first season of Max's The Pitt followed the ER through a shift that started at 7 in the morning, with one episode covering each hour. But the shift was extended when the hospital was hit with the victims of a mass shooting at a local music festival. In the 15th and final episode of the season, the shift finally ends.
A timely, and scary, story
The most urgent patient at the beginning of the hour is a boy with measles whose mother not only never had him vaccinated, but also refuses the spinal tap the doctors need to treat now life-threatening complications. It's a sadly prescient storyline given the current measles outbreak, and Dr. Robby's frustration with the parents leads him to pull the boy's father into the makeshift morgue where the shooting victims are, to stress that some parents can't save their children, but he can. At first, it looks like this stunt has just made things worse, but it works: Dad gives consent while Mom is absent, and by the time she gets back mid-procedure and demands they stop, the spinal tap is already done.
But what happens after that is unresolved, because that's how this job works. The same goes for a guy who's injured while working on the hospital loading dock: The staff gets him through the immediate crisis, but he's not home free. And during his treatment, Robby's frayed nerves seem to make him dissociate, underscoring that it's in everyone's interests for him to go home.
Langdon tries to wiggle out of trouble
There's a lot of staff business to tie up, too. Langdon, having used the shooting to get himself back into the ER after his suspension, hopes Robby will agree not to report him for stealing meds, but he quickly learns that's not going to happen. Langdon goes to Dana, hoping she will intercede on his behalf, but she just gets sadder and sadder as she realizes how much trouble he's gotten himself into.
Langdon confronts Robby out in the ambulance bay. Uninterested in the rigors of rehab, Langdon goes after Robby: "I never had a complete meltdown." When Robby tries to walk away, Langdon doubles down: "Someone saw you in peds." This is a reference to Robby's panic attack in the morgue, and bringing it up it is a low, low blow. Somewhere between a taunt and a threat, it gets Robby's attention. Ultimately, it works as a way to hurt Robby, but it doesn't get Langdon anywhere.
Santos finds her empathy
Santos is the one doctor still following a patient who came in from Pittfest: a kid who was not shot but was literally blue when they got him. Although he's recovered, Santos is trying to figure out what happened. After quizzing him about industrial chemicals and other obvious causes, she returns to a suspicion she mentioned to Dr. Ellis earlier: that he was trying to take his own life. After gently pressing him and sharing a story of a friend who died by suicide after being abused, Santos convinces him to talk to someone about the thoughts that led him to harm himself.
One of the challenges of the format of The Pitt is that character growth over a season is technically happening over the course of a single day. But with some allowances for that, this is a satisfying ending for Santos. It's her best connection with a patient, and it continues a developing story about her, which is that perhaps because she doesn't have very much faith in people, Santos is pretty good at spotting situations where people are keeping things hidden.
Her day ends not here, but up in the empty wing of the hospital. She follows Whitaker — who mentioned that empty wing in passing many episodes ago — and discovers that he's staying in one of the unused hospital rooms while he is, as he puts it, "between places." (Again: Santos has a nose for suspicious behavior.) She offers him her spare room, rent-free, officially in exchange for some cleaning and "fixing stuff," but probably really in exchange for some company. Thrilled, he accepts. So a relationship that started with nastiness ends in the extension of a kindness.
Very tired doctors
When Mel gets to leave, we finally see her with Becca, the sister she's been talking about all day. As they leave the facility where Becca spent the day, Mel tucks away her haunted face and puts on a smile. The two walk home talking about their Friday night routine, and Taylor Dearden's performance makes clear both that this is the best and most restorative part of Mel's day because of how much she loves Becca, and also that it is hard to follow a 15-hour shift by caring for someone to whom she can't really talk about what's just happened.
Mohan's exhaustion is initially masked: She doesn't even want to leave. She's practically vibrating with energy, and while it seems odd at first, a look at recent episodes (like the adventure with the IO drill to the head) reveals that this paradoxical hyper-energized response has been building during the shooting. It can't last, though, and she ultimately ends up crying in the bathroom (who among us, and so forth). One of the most powerful images in the episode is the blood in the bathroom: blood on the sink, blood on the soap dispenser, blood on the trashcan, blood on the floor. Mohan, too, needs to go home.
A misstep with McKay
The one story with an unsatisfying ending is the conflict between Robby and McKay. Robby has explicitly blamed McKay's call to the police for the fact that Theresa's son David, who turned out not to be the shooter after all, was detained and now is waiting out a 72-hour hold. So, having been told this is her fault and she has to address it, McKay goes in and gives David a speech about how he has to understand that women are afraid of all men all the time, and that's why it's so important that he not casually throw around this kind of anger and that he get some help. (It feels a little undercooked, this explanation.)
There are some problems with the story mechanics here. McKay called the police earlier in the day, before the shooting, to report the list of girls to "eliminate" that David's mother had found in his journal. But that's not why David was brought in, and it's not why he's on the psychiatric hold. And Robby knows it.
To rewind: Robby went to the police in the ambulance bay after the shooting, pointed out David's mother, and said, "See that woman over there? You need to speak to her." The officer said, "Why?" And Robby said, "Her son had something to do with the shooting. I'm not sure for certain, but you need to talk to her." Later, he saw that same officer out there and asked if they'd found the shooter, and then pressed about whether they had found David yet. Not long after that, the same officer saw David show up in the ambulance bay, recognized him as the kid Robby was talking about, tackled him, and dragged him inside. Robby also signed the paperwork for the psychiatric hold.
I think the idea behind this story goes something like this: This is all very tricky, because it's hard to know what threats to take seriously. McKay was in favor of involving the police, and at least at the time she did, Robby wasn't. And while David could have been the shooter, he wasn't, and that means he's been arrested and detained over suspicion of something he didn't do, which McKay has to live with, because she guessed wrong. That's a reasonable story to tell.
The problem is that this is not the story they, in fact, told. The story they told is that McKay's call earlier, right or wrong, was probably irrelevant, and didn't have anything to do with the shooting at Pittfest because it hadn't happened yet. David was detained because Robby told the police he might be the shooter. Robby knows all this. (He also knows that David not being the shooter doesn't mean David isn't dangerous to the girls on his list.) So what's with the disappointed scolding about McKay getting the police involved when he was supposedly against it? What's with the head-shaking "I told you he didn't do it" from the guy who went up to the cop and said David might be the shooter?
Robby isn't perfect, of course, and he shouldn't be. But putting McKay through this guilt trip and pressuring her to face David's anger when Robby knows she isn't responsible for his predicament would be very cruel, and thus does not track with the Robby we know. It plays more like production plans changed, like something got cut or didn't get cut that resulted in some confusion, though that's entirely a guess. Even in a good show, there's likely to be something that doesn't work for whatever reason, and in The Pitt, it was this.
The end of the day
As the episode winds down, after Robby gives an end-of-day speech to the exhausted day shift, there's a great scene between Robby and Abbot up on the roof, which mirrors the scene in the first episode in which Abbot seemed ready to jump and Robby talked him down. Robby is having trouble getting past his own limitations, especially since Jake still blames him for Leah's death. (We can say "still," of course, because it's been a couple of episodes, but of course, it's only been a couple of hours for Jake.) Abbot tells Robby he did a good job, that he did his best. It's hard to overstate how good Shawn Hatosy has been in these closing episodes, and how wise it was to give Robby someone who could push him and confront him more than the people who work for him are going to do.
It turns out that after a shift, some of the doctors and nurses like to gather in the park across the street for beers. Javadi is delighted when Mateo invites her to come along. Abbot and Robby end up there, and Donnie and Princess, and Mohan, Mateo and Javadi. Robby cackles when he remembers this was Javadi's first shift, and he tells her the next one will be easier. They all toast their team, the people they saved, and the people they didn't. This is also the first time we see Abbot's prosthetic leg, most likely a result of the military service that has come up before.
Dana might be done
The biggest open question after this first season, other than whether Langdon will ever stop feeling sorry for himself, is Dana. All season, Katherine LaNasa has been extraordinary in this role. In the episode in which Robby fails to save the life of his stepson's girlfriend, Leah, the most devastating moment in the entire sequence might be when Dana looks over at Abbot, stricken. Her eyes tell him two things: that Leah is gone, and that Robby is not going to stop trying to revive her — and wasting blood they desperately need for other people — unless somebody steps in to stop him. All that with a look.
And now, after a day of the regular grind plus a mass shooting plus getting punched in the face by a patient, Dana is thinking she might be done with this job. She even takes down the pictures at her desk when she leaves for the day. There is no big explosion of feeling; there is just her sense that she can't do it anymore. Who can blame her? It would be awfully disappointing not to see Dana next season, but if The Pitt is telling the story of the toll that work takes on doctors and nurses, having someone quit would not be unreasonable.
All in all, it was a very sharp season of television with outstanding performances across the board. Noah Wyle has been in top form and has faithfully shown Robby's gradual collapse over the course of the day. But this has also been one of the best supporting casts across the board in ages, and that includes the late additions on the night shift. Fortunately, the show will be back for a second season, ready to break (and repair) hearts all over again.
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