Noah Wyle on Robby in Season 2, Langdon’s Return
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the Season 2 premiere of “The Pitt,” now streaming on HBO Max.
The first season of “The Pitt” started in a way no one expected, but the tough question then became how to top it in season 2. Fortunately, star and executive producer Noah Wyle recalls director/EP John Wells telling him and creator R. Scott Gemmill, “You don’t have to be bigger, better, faster, stronger, funnier or bloodier. You just have to be true to the characters you’ve created and say, who are they 10 months from now on the other side of this season?” mass casualty event?”
From this a new 15 hours was born 10 months later. While the service begins at 7 a.m. on July 4, Wyle’s Dr. Robby heads to work for his last shift before a three-month sabbatical, a trip during which he will ride his motorcycle to Alberta. (He rides it to work, without a helmet, passing an ambulance on a bridge, which may be foreshadowing.)
“It was important to say that Robby can’t pretend he doesn’t have a problem anymore,” Wyle says of the trip. “We wanted to show what that looks like when you know you need help, but you don’t really want it. You don’t really know how to ask for it, and what you want is a quick fix and to be told when you’re going to get better. It’s easier to compartmentalize than to open Pandora’s box with no guarantees that this will ever work. So that’s really what I was curious to play with — that form of denial has many faces.”
Robby’s motorcycle ride, which his colleagues roll their eyes at, is an expression of that denial. “Instead of continuing with therapy, you decide you’re going to fix up an old motorcycle and take a very romantic, literary journey to find yourself,” says Wyle. “These are maybe avoidance techniques and maybe therapeutic techniques. And as the season goes on, we start to look a little more carefully at all these choices and motivations for everyone, not just Robby. I think if I were to plant a seed in the minds of the viewers, I would say: Look at what everyone is showing you – this is what they want to show you at work right now. This is what we want to present and project as who we are. But whether that is really who we are, whether we can maintain that calm throughout 15 hours straight will be interesting to see.”
A key to that plan is the new attending physician at Pitt, Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who will step in to lead the day shift when he is away. Not only does she have a different way of thinking, but she also knows no spatial boundaries – something that was very conscious.
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“We did want her to be a close target, but it also tied into what I’ve been playing with Robby for since the beginning: he doesn’t really like to be touched. He’ll occasionally touch someone else or put his arm around someone, but when it happens to him, he usually backs away from it,” says Wyle. “So when you get into a situation with a character who has no spatial boundaries, and it’s someone who doesn’t really like being preyed upon, it physically manifests itself in clumsiness and all kinds of interesting behavior. Dr. Al-Hashimi is a perfect complement to where Robby is now, because he’ll give her his baby to take care of in his absence, and he doesn’t like your parenting style, and that’s a really uncomfortable place to be.”
Gemmill agrees, adding, “Robby is literally trying to distance himself from her, and she’s constantly in his space, so it’s just to make him even more uncomfortable, to raise the stakes a little bit.”
Her opinion — she’s “very into modern medicine and trying to implement AI in the emergency department,” Wells says — creates “a little bit of friction” with not only Robby, but other doctors in the room.
The premiere also shows how Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) returns to work after months in rehab after being caught stealing drugs last season. Dr. Robby spent the first hour of their shift avoiding him, but that can’t last forever.
“For their health, their sense of closure and their peace of mind, they really need to interact. Fifteen hours is a very short period of time in which they can achieve something so big,” says Wyle. “Fifteen hours isn’t really that much time for people to radically change an opinion. It’s just enough to plant a seed and let it germinate – positive, negative, fearful, tearful, tragic. These are all things we start in one place and end up in another, but they’re kind of micro-journeys.”
The producers wanted to show the “reality of recovery” with Langdon’s return and show how it affects everyone involved.
“Langdon feels like he did something, and he worked hard at it, and it was hard. He doesn’t really expect a parade, but at the same time he expects to be recognized for how hard that was and how hard it was on his family – not working and damaging, possibly to his career,” Wells says. “Others are ordinary [thinking]We had to work twice as hard all that time to fill in for you. In Robby’s case, he was his protégé. He loved and respected him, and felt very betrayed. So I think it’s really important to show the reality of how difficult recovery is, and at the same time not expect everyone to accept that you’ve done that recovery.
Santos (Isa Briones) and Langdon will also eventually have to work together, but have yet to communicate since she reported his drug problem.
“There are a lot of hard feelings and unresolved feelings between the two,” Gemmill says. “She’s trying to be avoidant, partly because she doesn’t know how she’ll react. Eventually he’ll make an overature, but I’m not sure how well it will be received by her.”
“The Pitt” airs on HBO Max Thursdays at 9pm ET.
