By stoking viewers’ dislike of Santos after which proving her proper, The Pitt is popping round its thematic curiosity in bias in order that it additionally implicates us.
Picture-Illustration: Vulture; Pictures: Warrick Web page/Max
Spoilers comply with for The Pitt via the tenth episode “4:00 P.M.,” which premiered on Max on March 6.
All ten episodes of The Pitt thus far have pushed us towards a sure concept: Who the hell does Dr. Trinity Santos suppose she is?
Of all of the characters within the Max medical drama’s deep ensemble, the big-talking, shit-stirring first-year resident is tailored to get on our nerves. Santos bullies her fellow trainees at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Middle with condescending nicknames and treats sufferers like sport items. She leverages surgeon Dr. Yolanda Garcia’s (presumably romantic) curiosity in her to carry out procedures she shouldn’t be doing this early in her profession after which proves she’s not ready sufficient by dropping a scalpel into Garcia’s foot. She goes behind the again of her supervising senior resident, Dr. Frank Langdon, again and again, performing as if she is aware of higher than practically everybody else when it’s simply her first day.
Probably the most constant issues about The Pitt, as reliable as Dr. Dennis Whitaker getting gross stuff splashed on him, is that Santos will likely be a ache within the ass. And that consistency is extremely intelligent as a result of, by stoking viewers’ dislike of Santos — she’s too impolite, too younger, too formidable, an excessive amount of — after which proving her proper about Langdon’s drug thieving, The Pitt turns round its thematic curiosity in bias in order that it additionally implicates us. Now PTMC’s medical doctors aren’t the one individuals coping with their very own prejudices, distortions, and preconceived notions. In being led so simply into doubting Santos, we’re placed on blast for our personal innate ageism, sexism, and “Jeez, she’s quite a bit”–ism, too.
The Pitt makes an attempt a degree of accuracy that has been praised as “completely” reflective of how precise emergency departments run, and that fast-paced, real-time nature lets the present tackle a wide range of instances, and their accompanying biases, per episode. One in every of its recurrent tensions is how a lot time medical doctors spend with sufferers: The hospital directors concurrently need medical doctors to see sick individuals extra rapidly and nonetheless obtain larger patient-satisfaction scores, and that inconceivable demand weighs on “the pit” and its backed-up ready room. And since hospitals are denying medical doctors needed sources and dashing them via their diagnoses, The Pitt argues, medical doctors are going to make errors and missteps that harm sufferers. No physician is immune from a mistaken judgment name, both as a result of they’re denied time or they’re falling into the identical rote patterns of detection, investigation, and dedication which have labored for them earlier than. What issues is how the medical doctors reply to being known as out by their superiors and friends for these errors and the way they act with their subsequent affected person. Reciting the Hippocratic Oath isn’t sufficient — they must dwell it.
As a result of The Pitt focuses on its characters’ progress, these bias arcs often finish with somebody vowing to do higher; PTMC is a instructing hospital, in spite of everything. The Pitt has routinely emphasised how a lot being a physician includes subjective decision-making towards goal information and the way that subjectivity might be swayed by opinions medical doctors could not even understand they’ve. Generally these classes are taught top-down: Third-year resident Dr. Samira Mohan teaches fourth-year med pupil Whitaker to problem his assumptions when a Black girl who’s initially dismissed as an addict is definitely in sickle-cell disaster, and Mohan firmly corrects Whitaker when he tries to lowball the lady’s morphine consumption as a result of he doesn’t take significantly how a lot ache she’s in. In a later episode, senior resident Dr. Heather Collins gently chastises second-year resident Dr. Cassie McKay for not doing an intensive sufficient examination of a bigger girl experiencing belly ache and for lacking her widespread an infection. “I increase it as a chance, not as an accusation” is Collins’s measured reply when McKay asks, “Are you saying I used to be biased towards the affected person due to her weight?”
To increase the concept PTMC is a instructing hospital the place everybody can be taught, typically the collection’ corrections circulation the opposite approach. Third-year medical pupil Victoria Javadi proactively adjustments a trans affected person’s incorrect gender pronouns in her medical file, drawing reward from McKay. Second-year resident Dr. Mel King questions Langdon’s bluntness with an autistic affected person and pushes towards his declaration that the affected person’s autism has nothing to do together with his present analysis. And typically the biases really feel like setups for a later narrative payoff, equivalent to Robby’s and McKay’s differing reactions to attainable homicidal incel David, who’s nonetheless within the wind after fleeing PTMC and his involved mom. Robby thought McKay was overreacting by calling the cops on the teenager, however as he admits to her after David goes lacking, “I didn’t suppose sufficient about these women” David had threatened to hurt. How a lot Robby could come to remorse his personal soft-handed response to David’s menace we’ll have to attend to search out out.
For probably the most half, these professionals settle for correction with a specific amount of humility and resolve to do higher — which could be very a lot not how Santos has acted for many of the season. Even together with her admission early on that she makes use of “sarcasm and comedy as a protect,” it has been laborious as a viewer to not get irritated together with her continuously cringe habits: her flustered defensiveness when Mohan criticizes her flippant small speak with a university pupil whose good friend died of a drug overdose; her unpolished questioning of a younger lady about whether or not her father is sexually abusing her; and her ordering medical exams with out Langdon’s approval. Santos often means properly, however she will’t appear to interrupt away from insubordination, both.
In fact, it’s attainable two issues might be true on the identical time: that Santos might be pushy and impolite and that she was proper about Langdon serving to himself to the hospital’s medication and stealing sufferers’ prescriptions. However with hindsight, it turns into clear how a lot The Pitt guided us down the anti-Santos path nearly as a take a look at, deliberately amping up her prickly qualities and the resistance from her extra skilled colleagues to see how prepared we have been to fall into the identical traps of false impression as The Pitt’s personal characters. Would we’ve got been so fast to activate Santos if she have been nicer to her fellow trainees or extra faithfully adopted the foundations? If she smiled extra? If Langdon weren’t so good-looking? If Santos have been male and Langdon feminine? If both of them have been a distinct race or nearer in age? If Langdon slid into twitchy paranoia extra rapidly? Was it solely after Robby discovered these drugs in Langdon’s locker that you simply lastly accepted she was proper, and in that case, is that the one factor that would have satisfied you?
With regards to its medical doctors’ biases, The Pitt reveals most of them after they’ve already affected a affected person, so we settle right into a sample of being stunned by the disclosure after which soothed by the character’s humble vow to do higher. In presenting Santos as extra bristly than deferential, The Pitt circumstances us to suspect her motives and deal with her otherwise from different characters, towards whom we could also be extra inclined to increase grace. It created in us the bias it asks us to acknowledge in others — trapped us within the pit, you may say, after which helped us climb out by making us admit our personal preconceptions. When Collins tells Robby, “Go away your baggage on the door like everybody else,” that’s additionally The Pitt telling all of us how you can watch.