‘The Pitt’ Team Goes Inside Powerful, ‘Gut-Wrenching’ Honor Walk

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 1 Episode 8 “2:00 P.M.”]

Never is the real-time aspect of The Pitt been more felt than in moments like the one that closes out Episode 8, written by Dr. Joe Sachs (a practicing ER physician).

Up until now, we’ve been following the parents (Brandon Keener, Samantha Sloyan) of a brain-dead teen as they must first accept that their son, Nick, is gone and then if they’ll donate his organs. In this episode, they agree to the latter. Nick receives his last rites. (This also comes as the doctors fight but fail to save a young girl who drowns saving her sister. It’s a tough, heartbreaking episode all around.)

The episode ends with an honor walk — used to commemorate a patient whose organs are donated — for Nick from his hospital room out to the ambulance transporting him. The entire staff of the ER lines up, and Robby (Noah Wyle) tells Nick’s parents that a lot of them want to attend his funeral.

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For that powerful ending, “We watched a lot of footage on honor walks,” Wyle (who also serves as an executive producer) tells TV Insider. “Honor walks are pretty spectacular to behold. The concept of organ donation is such an interesting one to delve into in real time because these decisions often have to be made very quickly because of the timeliness of needing to get organs harvested in order to get them procured and transported. You’re talking about having to make the most difficult and painful decisions so fast.”

The timeliness of that decision having to be made also factored into when in the season it took place, according to executive producer R. Scott Gemmill. “That was a story that Dr. Joe Sachs really wanted to tell. It seemed like we could get those parents of the Nick Bradley character to that point in eight hours,” he explains. “It’s not like a show where traditionally we would have that patient come in in the first act and by a fourth act the parents would say, ‘Okay.’ We wanted to show that process of coming to terms with a loved one is, one, not coming back, but then you’re being asked to donate their organs to help other people. For some people, that’s very difficult because they still believe the sanctity of this body, of this loved one, and how do we get them there? It was a powerful episode.”

Wyle notes it was also “a really good and gut-wrenching way to extend the fentanyl tragedy [and] storyline even farther, to try to find some aspects of meaning and value in the tragedy in that, even though they’re going to lose their son, their son is going to make it possible for 18 other people to maybe not have similar fates. The honor walk sort of underscores the tragedy, but also the heroism and the bravery of the decision and the humanity of how this boy’s eyes, this boy’s liver, this boy’s lungs, this boy’s [other organs] are going to go into other people. We can be interchanged like that. You get underneath the surface of our skin color, I can have your heart, you can have my kidney. We can exchange these things and survive them. I think that’s an incredible thesis to underscore. You want to talk about our differences all day long. We can save each other’s lives on the most biological level, but we can’t seem to do it on a practical level.”

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Filming that scene affected everyone, even those who hadn’t been part of the storyline all season like Isa Briones (who plays Santos). “The pace of the show is so fast that the moments where we take a breath are so powerful. That was a very beautiful moment. That storyline really lasts so long, and it’s a beautiful storyline and it is really something that I think grounds so much of the show,” she shares, adding that it’s something that can make everyone feel for anyone in that situation, even those without children.

Even though she had “very little” involvement in the storyline, “it’s a moment where no matter where you were, everyone came together and everyone felt the weight of that,” she adds. “Even someone like Santos, who keeps away from the emotional, it’s like, we’re all going to accept that this is a horrible thing and this is a moment for us to be silent. And it was very emotional. Anytime I was in the vicinity of that storyline, I couldn’t help but cry. And I was like, ‘Oh, Santos wouldn’t do this. Santos wouldn’t do this.’ Stuff like that happens in a hospital because no matter what, even if you see terrible things, see death every day, stuff like that, still you have to honor it because it’s a life. It’s a life that was lost. And that’s never easy.”

Katherine LaNasa (who plays charge nurse Dana) agrees and praises Sloyan and Keener’s performances. “That was really painful, and I remember just feeling so full of emotion and tears that day. There’s a part of playing this role that dives into the deepest part of you every day, and it’s not a bad thing, but it really opens you up because even though these charge nurses have a sort of efficiency of emotion in order to be able to deal with a trauma, then deal with another trauma and deal with another trauma, they’re incredibly compassionate people,” she notes. “They wouldn’t do it otherwise. I remember that day really, really striking me. It was a very painful day, very teary day for everybody. You didn’t even have to try. It was so unbelievably sad.”

What did you think of the honor walk? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Pitt, Thursdays, 9/8c, Max