Just like the first season’s finale, The Pitt Season 2’s last episode of the Fourth of July shift ends with an important conversation between Robby (Noah Wyle) and Abbot (Shawn Hatosy). It’s also, once again, Emmy reel material. We foresee back-to-back wins in Wyle and Hatosy’s futures.
The finale also features key moments for King (Taylor Dearden), just when she thought she’d gotten past something; Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), facing what her seizure disorder means for her future at PTMC; and Mohan (Supriya Ganesh, who sadly won’t be back for Season 3) as her future remains up in the air. TV Insider spoke with Supriya Ganesh, Sepideh Moafi, Taylor Dearden, Shawn Hatosy, and Jeff Kober for the Post-Op: The Pitt Aftershow for the finale. (Read what executive producer R. Scott Gemmill had to say about the finale and Season 3 here.) Warning: Spoilers for The Pitt Season 2 finale ahead!
As became very apparent over the course of this season, Robby’s the MCI (mass casualty incident) of it, and so it’s only fitting that his and Abbot’s conversation takes place in the trauma room, It’s the culmination of Abbot keeping an eye on Robby after Dana (Katherine LaNasa) asking him to since he listens to him. But why is that?
“It’s not easy to get him to listen,” Hatosy tells TV Insider in the video interview above. “They’re both people that have had to run this very challenging, stressful environment. And so Abbot understands it on a level that most others don’t, and they’re best friends. He says, ‘I’m your emergency contact,’ which that provides another layer of how deep their friendship is.”
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In trying to get through to Robby, who, in Episode 14, admitted to Duke (Jeff Kober) he doesn’t know if he wants to be anywhere anymore, Abbot opens up about his own history. “You want to know why I never killed myself? After what I saw and lived through, losing my leg, losing my wife? Because it comes for all of us, you and I know it more than most. We see it every shift, but we can’t let ourselves succumb to it. Yes, life can suck, it can be unbearable and brutal and ugly and heartbreaking, but it’s also beautiful and hilarious,” he says. Saving patients, like a pregnant woman and her baby as they just did, “that’s what we’re here for.”
Wyle delivers one of his best performances of the series — there are a number — showcasing Robby’s raw emotions, from his voice being hoarse with the tears he hasn’t let fall to when he finally does let them. “The most important things I’ve ever done in my life have been in this hospital,” Robby says. “Nothing will ever matter more than what I’ve done in this hospital, but it is killing me. You know how they say that a part of you dies when you lose someone you love? I’m not convinced that a part of you doesn’t die every time you see a fellow human pass, and I’ve seen so many people die that I feel like it’s leeching something from my soul. … I’m tired of being a role model. I’m tired of feeling like you can’t get ahead. I’m tired of feeling like I’m drowning every day. I’m tired of all of it.”
Abbot tells him to get away and get some help because, “You need this place as much as it needs you.” Yes, he’s “f**ked up,” as Robby asks, “but nobody works here as long as you and me doesn’t get screwed up. You gotta find somebody to help you. Dance through the darkness,” Abbot recommends, making it clear that as his emergency contact, “I do not want to be contacted.”
So, does Abbot think he’s gotten through to Robby after he leaves him with a hug? “I think he thinks he did the best he could,” Hatosy says.
Elsewhere in the episode, Mohan’s future remains up in the air; she had been planning to move home to New Jersey with her mom, only for those plans to be upended. Now, trying to find a spot to stay in Pittsburgh hasn’t been easy. We also now know that whatever happens next, we won’t see Mohan onscreen for Season 3, with Ganesh not returning.
“It’s strange because we’re talking about this in terms of finding a fellowship or an elective, but what I think she’s really trying to do is stay in Pittsburgh. I think she’s really trying to figure out a way to stay in the hospital because there’s nothing left for her in Jersey. Her mom really was her only tether there, and it is her realizing she has a few more tethers here than she does back home,” Ganesh admits. “So it’s like, yes, this idea of what I should do to stay, but she’s really scrambling to feel like she has community.”
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She continues, “But I also think, for me, I wish there was this sense of, ‘I wish you could just take a break. I really want you to take a break. I think you’re so burnt out. I think you’re reaching this point of exhaustion emotionally, physically, all of those things. And you’ve really gone through one of the worst days of your life.’ I almost want her to stop thinking about all of those things and focus on something else.’”
Al-Hashimi’s future is also up in the air at PTMC, with Robby not seeing her plan for double coverage as realistic to manage her seizure disorder after she had two this shift. It’s a far cry from what she’d wanted to get from him when she showed him her chart, but, as Moafi tells us, she’d also been hoping that, because of what she’d been seeing in him all shift, he would have responded differently.
“I think she’s been trying to appeal to his intellect, appeal to his practice, appeal to him emotionally, and everything is falling flat. So I think in approaching him, she brings her wound and appeals to his wound,” she explains.
Even with how tense their conversations were onscreen, Moafi loved filming those scenes with Wyle. “I was experimenting with something in my own work where I think historically when I’ve had really intense scenes, I isolate, I don’t talk to anybody, I try to stay in the pocket. But for this show and the way this show works, it’s really hard. There’s really not much space where you can carve out privacy. You’re all on set together,” she shares. “Noah and I were talking a lot. We were kind of shooting the s**t, and we were laughing, but then as soon as cameras would go up, we would get back in that place. And it was nice to dip in and out with him because I think there’s a certain agility about the both of us as actors where we can really focus intensely and then be loose.”
Meanwhile, poor King, after dreading her deposition all shift, finds out that she’s being called back to do another one. To say that she needs the night out that Santos (Isa Briones) invites her on — they sing karaoke over the credits! — is an understatement.
Finding out that deposition news is “more than she can handle. The truth is she’s been handling more than she can handle for her whole life by a lot,” Dearden tells us. “The kind of challenge the deposition is is something new to her. I think every young doctor has doubts if they’re going to be good enough. Every person in every profession is going to feel that, but obviously it’s a lot more heated when it’s life and death.”
Watch the full video aftershow above for much more from Supriya Ganesh, Sepideh Moafi, Taylor Dearden, Shawn Hatosy, and Jeff Kober.
The Pitt, Season 3, TBA, HBO Max