‘The Pitt’ star Katherine LaNasa on Dana and Robby’s fight, his sabbatical

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for “7:00 pm,” the 13th episode of Season 2 of “The Pitt,” now streaming on HBO Max.

Katherine LaNasa says her head nurse, Dana Evans, would never use the word “trigger” on “The Pitt,” but the Emmy winner can’t help but reach for it as she tries to grapple with the end of Season 2’s 13th hour on the clock. For two episodes, Dana has been feuding with Robby (Noah Wyle), her strongest ally on the police force and the person who usually aligns her – a service she also provides to him.

But neither works at its best on July 4 at 7 p.m. Specifically for Dana, she is triggered on two fronts. After her student nurse Emma (Laëtitia Hollard) is attacked by a poisoned patient, one that Dana subdued with a punch and a mysteriously convenient shot of Versed, she struggles to find any sense of calm as she fights back the PTSD from her own attack last season.

“She is incredibly unbalanced,” says LaNasa Variety. “She’s still recovering from that blow. She didn’t take care of herself. I think that’s part of why it was so important to her that the rape victim gave herself the opportunity to get justice for herself if she changed her mind. Because Dana didn’t do it. Dana didn’t press charges. That’s a good choice if you want to make that choice. But I don’t know if it works out well for Dana.”

Adding to her defensiveness is Robby’s continued investigation into the tactics she used to tackle Emma’s attacker. Every time he tries to ask why she had a sedative in her pocket, or wonders what really happened, she launches into her own questions about Robby’s increasingly worrying mindset surrounding his impending motorcycle sabbatical.

By the end of episode 13, she has once again confronted him about his inability to clarify the true purpose of his journey and his volatile anger at the state of the emergency room leading up to his impending absence. She reminds him that they can survive without him until he gets back, just like they did when she quit last season after her own attack.

“What if I don’t come back?” he responds in the episode’s final conversation, blackening out on a stunned Dana’s face.

“I think when he leaves, she’s all alone there, and Dana is someone who’s also not confronted with her own need for help,” LaNasa says. “But more importantly, there’s just something very organically stressed about her because he’s not okay and he doesn’t make the promise to come back. It’s that kind of unwillingness to answer me or even look at me sometimes. That would be her worst nightmare, if anything were to happen to him. They’ve been through this together for decades. It would be like losing a husband in a way. So I think she’s just cognizant of her inability to reach him. He’s vital to her.”

This isn’t the first shouting match they’ve gotten into this season, or even this episode. Their last few encounters left Dana on the verge of tears or screaming at herself in anger in the bathroom. Robby, for his part, doesn’t exactly smile after every fight either. But this final conversation of the episode is their most honest and alarming.

Before he even admits that he might not come back, Dana tells Robby that he’s being overly confrontational and aggressive, and that he should go home if he wants to. Her exact words are that he needs a time-out, like she always gave her children; he responds by telling her that he doesn’t need a mother. He had one of those, he says, and she walked away from him.

In that moment, Dana learns something deeply personal about her friend and colleague that she never knew, and emphatically apologizes for stepping on an emotional landmine she didn’t know was there. Robby replies, “It doesn’t matter. Who cares?”

“I love that moment and I try to justify it to myself,” LaNasa says. “You could just assume that people weren’t close [with family]and if they never opened up about their parents or anything, just leave it be. I don’t really have a relationship with either of my parents, and most people don’t really know that about me. It doesn’t really come up, so it makes sense that it didn’t happen for them.”

But for Dana, her maternal instinct toward Robby comes from a genuine concern that her boyfriend has decided to commit suicide. “There’s a kind of panicky desperation that he induces in her,” LaNasa says. “I think it all feels scary, and I think it’s also happening at a time when she’s not feeling well. I once had a therapist who said to my husband and me, ‘You can’t both have a problem at the same time. Who’s going to be the one to listen?’ At this point, for Dana and Robby, no one can listen. No one is doing well. No one is the pillar.”

Even though they spend the episode going back and forth between avoiding each other and attacking each other, Dana never loses sight of her bedside manner. She joins Emma to continue their season-long care of the unhoused Digby (Charles Baker), whom they have bathed and now offer to give a haircut. As they gently give him the idea to clean up his appearance, they talk about his family and his daughter’s wedding. Emma’s kindness towards him makes Dana shine, a mentor-mentee relationship often reserved for Robby and his residents. After worrying about her safety all day, LaNasa says it wasn’t hard to feel proud of the young woman sitting in front of her.

“It’s easy to feel,” she says. “I’m also very proud of Laëtitia. She just graduated from Juilliard and walked onto the set. It’s incredible.”

In that scene, Dana pulls back the curtain on her own family, which she doesn’t talk about often and which the audience has never seen, given the four-wall, one-day framework of the series. She mentions that she cut her husband Benji’s hair throughout their marriage; she later mentions her children to Robby in their heated argument. While the series never gave audiences a full family tree for Dana, LaNasa often reflects on who she is outside of her pressure-cooker job. It’s second nature to her understanding of Dana, so much so that she can get to work on it in an instant.

“Dana has a middle daughter who is difficult,” she says. “That has caused her a lot of stress. You’re only doing as well as your children. If one of your children is doing poorly, you’re doing just as well. I think she has a daughter who keeps her a little bit on edge, and she always hopes that things will work out. In my imagination she has a very good relationship with her granddaughter. She has a granddaughter who is 23 years old, and that’s someone she looks forward to on certain evenings. Those are the evenings when she comes over, and then they have their movie and their pizza or whatever they do.”

For Dana’s husband, LaNasa doesn’t fully address what little insight the show’s writers have given him so far.

“I know they said he would fly off the handle, but I would say overall I think of him as a big, calm guy,” she says. “I think Dana’s house is very neat and a bit minimalist, and I don’t think she has bad taste. She just likes quiet things. I think she likes it when her family comes over. But I think Dana is tired. Dana is really tired. I also imagine that she went to the family cabin somewhere in the woods after she got hit, and she was going to take some time off. But because she didn’t get any help, she just wasn’t doing well. One of her wasn’t doing so well. with her. daughters said, ‘This isn’t working for you.’ So I think she got help. I just don’t think she got enough help.”

All of which informs the person who stands before Robby at the end of episode 13 and begs him to be honest about what he really wants to do with this sabbatical. LaNasa was nervous about the writers’ choice to give tough duo Robby and Dana so many obstacles this season, but she ultimately gave in to that free fall.

“Noah was really annoyed that we were arguing, and I said, ‘Let’s do it,’” she says. “I trust [executive producers] John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill enormously. I didn’t want it to come across as them being mean to each other. I want the audience to know and that the story is that they love each other, but they are human and they are having a hard time.”