Truly baffled by these takes which require you to pretend Langdon's drug stealing and addiction was no big deal and that Santos should just "get over it" because some of her other colleagues are really good at detachment and compartmentalizing. |
I agree Langdon is nice/charming and Santos is rude/abrasive. Langdon's charm is an achilles heel though -- it's often a trait of narcissists, abusers and addicts, because it enables them to get away with things other people can't. Santos' rudeness is a secret strength because in certain situations it can enable her to tell truth to power, as she did when she reported Langdon. I think Santos is actually a good doctor having a shitty day, and that she's an R2 which is a tough residency year with a very heavy workload. Langdon's competency is, to some degree, simply a function of having been doing it for longer. I don't get the sense that he's a good doctor and Santos is a bad doctor. Would a good doctor siphon Ativan out of a drug vial, replace it with saline, and then blithely tell a subordinate that "sometimes you have to double the dose for it to kick in"? I find their storyline fascinating because it really challenges preconceptions and interpretations. Langdon is easy to like but did something weak and horrible. Santos is easy to hate and did something brave and impressive. The show encourages you to look at them in different lights (as a colleague, as a patient, as a boss) and the light is always shifting. |
It can be a big deal but it's dominated Santos's brain space for 10 months to the point that her FWB is tired of it. Also, the reality is Langdon will not be the last medical professional with drug issues Santos deals with. |
Right! That reminds me of the episode when Mr. Roper overheard a conversation between Jack and Chrissy and misinterpreted the whole situation. |
I agree 100%. I would like to rewatch this one. As always, the pace was so fast that I almost missed the patients scurrying out of the waiting room. The ICE agents were scary as heck. And OMG, that shot of Robby's face when Al-Hashimi asked the mom if she had thought about hurting herself. I also very much agree with the characterization of Langdon's bad apology on the previous page. And I LOVE him. But that scene was very good and it went a long way toward explaining why Santos is so mad. |
I think that moment where Al-Hashimi was asking the mom about self-harm was hitting Robby especially hard because she was talking about second-guessing her choices, and how she'd thought she'd been doing the right thing, and now having to confront the idea that her son might be permanently disabled because she lost track of him for a few minutes. Robby carries enormous guilt about removing his mentor from a ventilator during Covid to save someone else, and also from being unable to save his step-son's girlfriend after the mass shooting, and also from failing to see signs of Langdon's drug abuse and intervene before it got to the point where it harmed Langdon, Santos, and others. He's a conscientious person who genuinely has been trying to make the right choices and do the right things in his life, and yet he feels like he's still failed and is to blame for people he loves dying and hurting. So yes I think some of it was him having to confront his own feelings about maybe self-harming or at least not caring about his well-being, but I think really what he was identifying with was the heaviness of her guilt and sense of having failed her responsibility to the person she loves most in the world. I think that's exactly how Robby feels and that many days he does feel like wandering into traffic, not because of a concrete desire to die, but because the weight of that [perceived] failure is just too much for him to carry. I really hope he gets help in carrying it by the end of this season. It's too much. |
Agree! Finally liking Robby again. Loved the bit with Javadi. I really dislike her mom who has this amazing, brilliant daughter but nothing she does is good enough. Mel was a favorite of mine last season but she annoys the crap out of me this season. I feel like they have overdone it with her character. I am rooting for Langdon. |
| any predictions for the kid who had heatstroke in the car? |
Hopefully nothing. There's only a few hours of season left, which is too little time for him to have a full recovery and to discover he has no disabilities as a result of the heat stroke -- that will take days to determine, possibly longer. So if we hear about him again, it's more likely to be bad news -- something went wrong and he took a turn for the worse. Thus I hope his storyline is concluded and he just continues to recover in stable condition in the ICU for the rest of the season. Same with the obese patient who had the risky surgery. Dana reported that he'd survived his surgery and is in post-op. There's no way for his story to get better than that with the time remaining (he'll barely be lucid by the end of the season, and it will be happening elsewhere in the hospital, he has no reason to return to the ED), so I hope we hear nothing more about him because the only news that the ED could get was that something went wrong. This is pretty much true across the board on the show. Patients are not making full recoveries and walking out of the hospital at the end of the season with a new lease on life. There simply isn't time. They are either dying, heading into surgery, released with a treatment plan, or admitted to the hospital for testing and supervision. |
| Robby reminds me of the typical older guys at work, think they are smarter just because they have been around forever, but no use for new ideas or technology that actually might help them. |
| There have been (unsurprisingly) many echoes of ER on The Pitt, so I sincerely hope that they don’t give poor Emma the “Lucy Knight” treatment. |
| Y'all seem to forget that in Season 1, Santos was wearing an ANKLE MONITOR. We don't know exactly what she did but we know she only has limited access to her kid and whatever she did, everyone knows about it. So you can sort of see why she resents the fact that her colleague doesn't appear ot have experienced the same consequences for his behavior. We don't know for sure, but Santos might also have an addictdion problem, and if she was forced to face the consequences of her actions, then clearly she thinks Langdono is getting off too easy. |
I can't remember Lucy Knight but I have been rewatching the first couple seasons of ER and one "echo" that recently jumped out at me (because I watched the episodes from each show where it was mentioned near in time to each other) is that both shows have an Asian-American female medical student who reveals she has a photographic memory at an opportune time. It's such a specific detail that it's really wild that they both have it. Another recent echo was that ER had a nurse trying to quit smoking by loading up on nicotine gum and really struggling, similar to Gloria this season needing strong nicotine gum to deal with her cravings. The shows are actually pretty different in scope and feel, especially because of the timelines -- it was common for ER to weeks or even months between consecutive episodes so they could jump from summer to winter in a handful of episodes. This influences everything else -- patients rarely cross over between episodes, the doctor's personal lives can change drastically over the course of the season, and the younger doctors are progressing in their careers much more swiftly as you watch the show. But it's funny to see this small similarities that sometimes feel like intentional reference points because they are so specific. |
That was McKay |
How could someone mix this up? |