‘The Pitt’ season 2, episode 3 recap: Code Black
Robby meets a Tree of Life congregate; McKay has a new admirer; Santos learns not to jump to conclusions
This recap contains spoilers for The Pitt season 2, episode 3.
THINGS ARE STARTING to pick up at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre. We start the episode with that violent, out-of-sorts patient we ended last week on. Apparently he got violent with a security guard at his university library, who followed him all the way to the Pitt. Santos’ senses are sharper than ever, but Al-Hashimi thinks she needs to learn how to not jump to conclusions. The show gives a tribute to the Tree of Life shooting. Dr McKay has a new admirer. Al-Hashimi and Robby let their guard down as a woman faints in the ER.
If you haven’t already, read our recap on last week’s episode of The Pitt here.
Langdon waxes poetic
A little wholesome appetiser for you before we get into the more horrific cases from this episode. Let’s start with Langdon, who receives a young patient who’s stuffed beads up his nose to “shoot out like rockets” at his sister. He and nurse Donnie use a neat syringe with an inflatable balloon fixed to its tip to push out the beads. Donnie’s arc as a new dad has seen him be more observant this season of what he can learn from his colleagues and patients. During the procedure, Langdon imparts on Donnie, as well as for the patient’s father, a poem by Irish author John O’Donohue about reconnecting with your humanity and professionalism. As Langdon “waxes poetic”, the two colleagues punctuate it with a fist-bump.
Dr Santos smells something’s off
As Dr Robby said of Santos to Al-Hashimi last episode, she has a heightened sense of empathy. We saw that last season when she clocked a little girl’s bruises to be sexual assault markings from her father. (While he was immobile, she gave him a withering threat that left him squirming.)
She sensed a little bit of that again when young Kylie Connors arrived in the Pitt last episode with her dad’s new girlfriend covered in bruises. The girlfriend said Kylie plays soccer and that she and her dad like to “roughhouse” it. When he arrives this episode, he’s furious at the claim coming from his girlfriend, who he’s now deduced to “who are you to say?!” Before things escalate, Dana intervenes saying that the bruises were caused by ITP, an immune system illness that make bruising occur more often.
When they get Kylie’s mother over the phone to tell her of the diagnosis, the dad’s girlfriend hightails it out of there after his outburst. “Happy Fourth of July,” he says. “Happy Independence Day,” she retorts.
Tribute to the Tree of Life shooting
We and the medical staff of PTMC may never leave the hospital grounds, but The Pitt manages to poignantly connect us with the outside world via the patients. One such patient is Yana Kovalenko, who’s in for burn wounds after dropping her pipping hot samovar, a self-boiler popular to eastern Europe to make tea. Student nurse Emma doesn’t know what Yana is talking about, but Robby clocks it, saying his grandmother never allowed him to touch hers as a child.
That’s when Yana opens up after she finds out Robby is Jewish, though not practicing and with a complicated relationship with his faith. She reveals that she used to be a Tree of Life congregate, a synagogue in Pittsburgh where on October 27, 2018, a man named Robert Bowers opened fire and killed 11 congregates in a horrific act of anti-semitism. He was sentenced to death on August 2023; he remains on death row. Yana tells the story of how she had narrowly missed the shooter; turns out she dropped her samovar after hearing firecrackers.
Towards the end of the episode, Perlah tends to Yana’s wounds. It’s instantly tense when the patient asks the nurse if she’s Muslim. But Yana says the Muslim community didn’t hesitate to coming to the Jewish community’s aid after the shooting. It’s short exchange, but one that highlights unity above all. Once Robby walks in, Yana assumes the comic role of nagging mother after Perlah tells her that he, an unmarried middle-aged man, is driving away on a motorcycle for a three-month sabbatical.
Alway assess your patients
New patients in the ER are the Yees, who arrive after a near-fatal car crash. Husband Mark arrives paralysed on a gurney with his doting wife, Nancy, by his side, who declines a medical assessment. Nancy reveals that she had been planning a surprise trip away with Mark, but it soon turned into a fight before the accident. “We said some horrible things, please don’t let them be our last words to each other,” she pleads to Robby.
Mark is on the mend after Robby, Al-Hashimi and Mohan asses that his potassium levels are suffering from hypokalemic periodic paralysis, an exceedingly rare but treatable condition occurring after adolescence that’s causing his current condition. It’s good news to Nancy’s ears, until she faints. The doctors open her shirt to find she’s had internal bleeding all along. Once Mark wakes up, it’s off to the OR Nancy goes.
Dr McKay has a new admirer
You’re telling me that the old man, who’s been respectfully flirting with “Dr Hazel Eyes” and sings “La Mer”, is doing all that in his job as a greeter at Walmart? Honestly, we need more romantics like that in the world. More power to you, sir. In the middle of his and Dr McKay’s little routine, McKay catches the attention of another patient who wants her to “save him a dance” and likes her witch’s cackle. More on that in the next episodes.
Back on her head trauma patient since last week, Michael Williams, the CT scan McKay ordered shows that he has a large mass in the frontal lobe of his brain. It’s too soon to call it cancer, but she assesses that it’s been the cause of his mood swings and changes in demeanor. The next course of action is to alert his emergency contact, who happens to be his ex-wife.
She arrives in a huff, perplexed as to why she’s still listed as his emergency contact even though they’ve been divorced for years. She tells McKay that they were high school sweethearts, and that he was very sweet early on, but gradually grew moodier and angrier until the two separated. The mass in his brain is news to her, which answers her questions to the mood-swings. Will the two rekindle a friendship in the face of his diagnosis? Will this be the patient that emotionally ruins us? Stay tuned.
Code Black
By the end of the episode, Dana picks up the phone to an alert that neighbouring hospital Westbridge is on code black (as to why is yet to be seen, but it could range from beds hitting capacity to being in imminent danger), meaning all emergency service will be redirected to PTMC. On top of the deluge of incoming patients, the Fourth of July horrors in the hours ahead, and the to-be-seen “we’re going analogue” moment teased in the season two trailer, it’ll be one hell of a season from here on in.
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