‘The Pitt’ Finale: Noah Wyle & Cast Unpack Roof Scene, Robby-Langdon Fight & Abbot Reveal (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 1 finale “9:00 PM.”]

The shift is finally over. Robby (Noah Wyle, with the year’s best performance, one as raw as the show itself) does walk away the same way he walked to the hospital at the end of The Pitt Season 1 finale, but there’s a moment where we’re definitely worried he might not.

The episode does the reverse of a scene from the pilot, with Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) finding Robby on the roof. Other key moments include Robby and Langdon’s (Patrick Ball) about the latter’s addiction, the moment Dana (Katherine LaNasa) takes before leaving that has us wondering if she’ll return to work after getting punched, the reveal about Abbot’s prosthetic leg, and an emotional speech from Robby. In the video above and below, Wyle, Ball, LaNasa, Ball, and Fiona Dourif break down those and more. (Plus, check out a deep dive into the finale with executive producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells, who wrote and directed the episode, respectively, here.)

Robby Close to the Edge

It’s already a rough shift for Robby even before this hour. It’s the anniversary of his mentor’s death. He tries and fails to save the girlfriend of his stepson, who then says they’re not friends and he’s not his father (Ouch!). He loses patient after patient. Langdon throws his breakdown in his face when refusing to get the help he needs for his addiction. And so when Abbot finds Robby standing close to the edge of the roof after he gives a debrief speech (more on that in a bit), Robby says, “I broke. … I shut down. The moment everybody needed me the most, I wasn’t there.” Abbot assures him it wasn’t for long and they all experience that. He talks him down.

But how worried should we have been about what he was possibly going to do? “How worried were you?” Wyle asks TV Insider. Very. “That’s probably right,” he says. “To make that moment truthful — Why does somebody step out to the edge of a roof unless they’re absolutely contemplating what it would be like to step off of it? When we blocked it, I intentionally made sure that I got closer to the edge than Shawn had been to make that point. And who knows if Abbot hadn’t shown up where that scene would’ve gone.” (When it comes to how close Abbot has come, Hatosy says, “When we were doing it, I think it’s more of a ritual. I hope he’s not getting close. I think it’s just more facing the reality of his situation, and it’s his way of meditating through it.”)

In that moment, Abbot, with his time in combat, “knows it’s fleeting,” explains Hatosy, “and he’ll get through it.” And he was the one that Robby needed with him, due to their shared experience. “The fact that Abbot’s in therapy and seemingly on a road to recovery is potentially a ladder being extended to Robby to climb,” adds Wyle.

As Robby’s walking home by the end of the episode, he seems to be slightly better, but it’s very much a process, and he can easily end up back on that roof during his next shift. Could he go to therapy? That’s part of the ongoing discussions for Season 2. For now, Wyle can say that Robby will return to work.

“What he is going to do when he goes home and how that evening’s going to go from there, he is going to knock himself out and get some sleep and then take it day by day. My guess is he’s a one step forward, two steps back kind of guy sometimes, or two steps forward, one step back guy,” he details. “It won’t be a linear road, but I don’t think that he can go through the experience that he’s just had and be conscious of how out of control he got for a moment there without recognizing that there’s no more pretending to himself. There’s no more compartmentalizing to be done. The compartments are full and something’s got to be emptied now.”

Robby vs. Langdon

After Robby realizes that Langdon’s an addict and has been stealing patients’ pills, he sends him home. But when he hears about the Pittfest shooting, Langdon takes it upon himself to return to the hospital and work. With the chaos over, Langdon tries to convince Robby not to report him. Ball says that was “an earnest hope” on his character’s part.

“Whether that is a responsible or appropriate hope or the desperate hope of an addict who has been caught and is afraid of the repercussions of his actions, I think that he genuinely hopes that Robby would be able to value their friendship, value his skill as a physician, and his value as a teammate, and find a way to not torpedo everything in reporting it,” he adds.

Langdon then tries to convince Dana to talk to Robby for him. He’s not a drug addict, he insists. “What I am is scared. I’m really f**king scared of what happens next. I f**ked up, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” She tells him to trust Robby, and he’ll do what’s best.

“Robby trusts Dana, and if anybody can convince Robby of something, Dana can,” Ball explains. “I trust Dana. She’s a mother figure.”

In his time of need, Langdon is so focused on his own problems that he cares more about her saying she’s done when it comes to how it affects him than her. At first, LaNasa looked at that scene as from his perspective and all he got from her was, “I don’t want to talk to you,” she says, but then, “I realized because I love Langdon so much that his problem becomes my problem. I’m mad at him because he disappointed me, and I want to vouch for him.”

Later, Robby details what Langdon needs to do to keep his job: Attend a 30-day inpatient treatment program, then submit to random urine tests, 50-60 a year, followed by mandatory NA meetings three to four times a week for the first three years, of a five-year program. He needs help. But Langdon argues, “I’m not the only one who’s a little f**ked up here. Why don’t you look in a mirror?” Meaning? “I never had a complete meltdown.” Ouch. “No, you just cause them in other people,” Robby throws back, making it clear that Langdon let him down. When Langdon doesn’t stop there (“I wasn’t the one talking to cartoon animals in peds”), Robby walks off, yelling back, “F**k you!”

With that argument, Robby’s not seeing a doctor he wants in his ED, says Wyle. “Wrong play, right? Wouldn’t you say, of all the strategies to employ Dr. Langdon throwing my meltdown in my face, probably not the wisest?”

The star, executive producer, and writer has been thinking about what it would take for Robby to trust Langdon again. “There’s a distinction to be made between what Robby has to do professionally to welcome him back into the environment, and then the other side of that would be what he would need to do to get back into his personal good graces and how much harder that would probably be,” he says.

That is going to be tough considering some of the things that Langdon said to him, which Ball says his character didn’t set out to do. “There’s an incredible soul price that is paid in that moment … [He’s] faced with the reality of what it’s going to mean to go to rehab and to be put on leave and to be monitored for five years, what that’s going to mean for him professionally,” he tells us.

It does play into the cliche, it’s worse to have someone disappointed in you than angry. (We’d never want to disappoint Robby or Dana.) That’s “brutal,” agrees Ball. “I thought we had a mutual understanding of the price that is paid every day in doing this job and knew how to support each other, knowing that we both carry a burden and we carry it well for other people. And now all of a sudden he’s saying, ‘You’re too much’? I’m not the only one going through this. And if you are going to pretend that you are fine, while hanging me out to dry, no. If he’s going to ruin my life, I think there is to some degree insinuation of mutually assured destruction there.”

So what will it take for Langdon to agree to the plan that Robby lays out? “That depends on how much baby is put in the corner,” according to Ball. “I think I’d probably do anything I can to avoid that situation, but if that’s the only way I can keep this job, then we’ll see what happens. But I’m not going to be happy about it.”

Will Dana be back?

Dana says she’s “done” after she’s punched by a disgruntled patient who’s sick of the waiting time in Episode 9. She says it again here. And she takes a moment to look around the ED — and take photos from her desk (LaNasa’s daughter, as Dana’s granddaughter) — at the end of the shift. But when Robby tells her he’ll see her on Monday, there seems to be a bit of acknowledgement that she’ll be back … possibly. (Gemmill tells us that she doesn’t show up on Monday.)

Getting punched “was so demoralizing,” explains LaNasa. But due to the timing of the mass casualty, “I don’t think she’s had time to process how she feels. It’s why Dana hasn’t wanted to go home from the hospital because she can’t deal with it. It’s such a big thing. And so I don’t think I know where I stand, but I definitely feel done.”

It’s hard, she continues, since “her whole life has been this hospital. She started working in the hospital in high school. Her mother died when she was in high school. It’s her whole sense of herself or her integrity, her pride, her family pride. It’s a lot to process that you wouldn’t go back to that. Just like when you walk out of a marriage, you might not know what it would take to bring you back. You just know it’s not working.”

She does know that she wasn’t ready to tell Robby she wouldn’t be coming back because of what she’s seeing in him at that moment. “I don’t think she feels like Robby can really deal with anything. I was so soft in that last scene and John Wells wanted me to be a little bit stronger with him,” LaNasa reveals. “I realized it’s just instinctual because Noah’s so excellent that I always feel his fragility and I kind of want to tiptoe around him.”

While some of the staff — including Robby, Abbot, Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), and Javadi (Shabana Azeez) — gather at the park across the street for beers at the end of the day, Dana’s left before then. So how does she decompress? “When I got punched, I remember thinking, I just want to go home and have pizza night with my granddaughter,” says LaNasa.

Robby’s speech

“Did we just watch him win an Emmy?” That’s what the cast said amongst themselves when Wyle gave Robby’s debrief speech at the end of the shift, Dourif tells us.

“I can’t tell you how proud I am of all of you,” an emotional Robby said about their response to the mass casualty. “This place will break your heart, but it is also full of miracles and that is a testament to all of you coming together and doing what we do best. Thank you for everything you did here today. … None of us are going to forget today — even if we really, really want to. So go home, let yourselves cry, you’ll feel better, just grief leaving the body.”

Wyle admits that he had originally thought that speech would be “catching him in a weak moment” but “it ended up being much more intimate. …. He has a little bit of a breakdown and then he just wants to tell everybody he really appreciates what they’re doing, put the energy on them, really inspire a sense of competency and pride in the troops, and in doing so, I think he just is unable any longer to have any kind of filter to his interior life and it just comes out embarrassingly so. But at the same time, he sort of spins that and says, this display of emotion you’re seeing is something we should all probably engage in because it’s healthy.”

His costars praise his performance in that scene.

“I was just blown away by watching Noah deliver that speech,” shares Hatosy. “He’s probably had to do the speech 15, 20 times, various angles, and I’ve done that before, but it just blew me away how he delivered an emotional, heart-wrenching performance every f**king time. It is just so impressive, and my hat’s off to him. He’s just an incredibly talented dude, and it was remarkable to watch.”

LaNasa agrees, “Noah is so great and so gritty and so emotional and he’s just such a wonderful actor,” but shares that from Dana’s perspective, “I didn’t want to feel anything. [I was] trying to push it down because also I know I’m going to go and if I let myself feel much, I was going to be a basket case.”

Adds Dourif, “It very much felt like he was talking also about the experience of the show. He’s so effortless and alive and he’s so good in it that there was definitely this moment where, I forget who it was, everyone was like, ‘Did we just watch him win an Emmy?’ Even though he would kill me if he knew we were saying that, he’s so modest. But it very much felt like that. I just felt like I was watching an ice skater dance. He was so good, and he would give me relaxation techniques, and I really, really look up to him as a performer.”

Abbot’s leg

It’s not until the end of the finale that The Pitt reveals that Abbot lost his leg and has a prosthetic, which he takes off to clean while they’re all sitting around in the park. Hatosy knew about that from discussions with Gemmill about him joining the cast.

“Scott put together a pretty extensive backstory for Abbot. And so I knew exactly what was going on with his leg and I discussed it with him and John, like, do we need a limp? I did the research. They felt that they didn’t want to tip it off because it is a revelation that he lost his leg in — we assume it’s combat. We don’t really know the answer,” he says. Having the reveal be the way it is “reminds us that the injury does not define him. He’s very capable up until this point, and what defines him as his strength, his presence, the quiet command he brings to every moment.”

As he says, we can assume it was in combat, but how much does he know about what happened? “Usually, I would come up with a very definitive thing,” Hatosy says. “But I was lucky with this character to receive such an extensive history from Scott. And so hopefully as we get to know Abbot more, that stuff will be revealed.”

Watch the video above for much more from Wyle, Ball, LaNasa, and Hatosy.

What did you think of the finale and the first season? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Pitt, Season 1, Streaming Now, Max