SPOILER ALERT: The following reveals major plot points for the Season 2 premiere of the HBO Max series The Pitt.
In the highly anticipated return of the smash hit series The Pitt with its second season, viewers are reunited tonight with the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s emergency department, led by Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle).
It’s been 10 months since the events of the show’s freshman season finale, and it’s the Fourth of July weekend, when anything and everything can and will happen. The episode titled “7:00 a.m.” opens with an outside shot of Dr. Robby on his motorcycle, looking carefree as the wind blows through his hair. Everything will change a few moments later, as soon as he’s back in the Pitt, the name of the emergency department, lovingly given to the hospital’s hot spot by the staff.
“We were looking to plot this 10 months into the future, so everybody could have had a little bit of time on the other side of that mass casualty event to absorb it. We wanted it to be on a busy holiday weekend. We wanted it to coincide with Dr. Langdon’s (Patrick Ball) return from having gone through drug and alcohol rehabilitation, which takes about 10 months,” Wyle told Deadline at the show’s junket in December.
He continued, “There are all sorts of creative accidents that happen on the Fourth of July. You’ve got fireworks, you’ve got motor sports, you’ve got water sports, you’ve got all sorts of stuff going on.”
Speaking of Frank Langdon, whom fans became acquainted with in Season 1 as a cocky and complicated doctor, is a far cry from that in the present day. In the premiere, he has been humbled, and there are amends to be made.
Catch more from our chat with Wyle, Katherine LaNasa, and Patrick Ball in the video above.
As far as Dr. Robby and Langdon are concerned, they are not in a good place on Independence Day. Langdon is going to be challenged every day on a professional level while also coping with his fractured relationship with Robby. Is it the end of the road for them indefinitely? That is yet to be seen, but Wyle has a lot to share on that front.
“Langdon really wants to be validated by Robby again, and Robbie really doesn’t want to have anything to do with Langdon. We think that it is because Langdon is the disappointment, you know, the student who betrayed him and lied to his face. And as the season progresses, you start to see that in some ways, Robby blames himself for Langdon’s behavior more than he blames Langdon, because he was the teacher, and it happened on his watch,” Wyle stated.
“Langdon was his star student, and that was more of a moral failing for Robby than it was for Langdon. Some of his hesitancy to be around him is like Superman being around kryptonite. He now represents somebody who has gone down the therapeutic road, faced their demons, made amends, humbled themselves, and come back to try to rebuild their life—but Robby’s not there yet. So it’s an interesting situation the two men find themselves in,” he continued.
While Robby won’t be offering the support Langdon hoped for, he does find respite with nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), who faced her own challenges last season after a patient physically assaulted her last season. How she is coping in the aftermath isn’t touched on in the premiere, but there’s a softness to her that is evident in her interactions with patients and staff.
When Langdon attempts to make amends with Dana, she tells him she doesn’t want to do all that with him. She reassures him that they are good, something LaNasa said was due to their longtime friendship.
“I think Dana really loves Langdon and sees him like a son,” she said. “I think when he messed up, it was hard for her. But at the same time, Dana has adult children. I have adult children in my life. I think kids mess up, kids disappoint us. So, I really want him to get on with it, but I also think it’s like, ‘You don’t have to apologize to me,’ because I don’t want to go there with him.”
The staff is also shaken up this season with Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), a new and badass attending physician who does not suffer fools gladly. Having previously worked with Mel (Taylor Dearden) and Samira (Supriya Ganesh) at a veterans hospital, Dr. Al-Hashimi is not a stranger to everyone coming into this tight-knit group. She couldn’t be if she tried. We know a baddy when we see one, and thy name is Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi.
Thanks to her calm, cool, and collected nature, she slips right into the groove and finds her place among the chaos, but don’t get it twisted. This queen will stand up for what she believes and go toe-to-toe with the best, including Dr. Robby, with whom she’s working closely on his last day of work before going off on a sabbatical on his motorcycle to Alberta.
Regarding the arrival of Dr. Al-Hashimi, Wyle shared, “It’s complicated. He’s about to leave, and he’s going to basically give this emergency department over to this woman whom he does not know. I don’t think he would comfortably give it to anybody; he feels so proprietary and so paternal towards it. So, with somebody who approaches the work so radically different from him gives him cause for concern, at least suspicion. Her reliance on AI, her insistence on its efficiency, all of that rings alarm bells for Robby.”
It’s hard to believe that Robby will be able to stay away while the show goes on without him, but the premiere does a great job of trying to convince us that it will really happen—and so does Wyle.
“Is that even gonna happen? Tune in and find out. He’s pretty resolved that this is happening. He’s ready to go. He’s got it all worked out,” stated a confident Wyle, though without fully convincing me. I guess we will all just have to see how it all plays out.
New episodes drop on Thursday via HBO Max.