‘The Pitt’ Aftershow: Noah Wyle, Patrick Ball, Isa Briones & More Break Down Season 2 Premiere (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 2 premiere, “7:00 a.m.”]

Welcome back to The Pitt. Oh, how we’ve missed this outstanding, award-winning, critically acclaimed HBO Max medical drama, and it doesn’t miss a step in its Season 2 return. The series remains a solid, grounded, raw, and realistic depiction of the life of the doctors and nurses of an emergency department, led by Noah Wyle, who’s surrounded by mostly the same stellar cast with one notable addition in new series regular Sepideh Moafi, whose character Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi served as Robby’s replacement during his sabbatical.

In the Season 2 premiere, Robby’s none too pleased to find that it’s Langdon’s (Patrick Ball) first shift back after rehab; he’d hoped to miss it with his time off. So, who’s more of a thorn in his side this season, Langdon or Al-Hashimi? “Different thorns, different sides,” Noah Wyle tells us.

Langdon does try to talk to Robby, first about his sabbatical, then about what happened, but the latter brushes him off and sends him to triage.

“I think there was a hope that once I did my time, so to speak, once I went off and did the work, I would be able to come back and have a mature conversation and own my part in what went wrong,” Patrick Ball explains to us as part of our Post-Op: The Pitt Aftershow in the above video with the cast. “But I think a lot of things were said at the end of Season 1 that were said out of pain and were said out of desperation and injured this relationship in a very real way.”

Warrick Page/HBO Max

As for that other thorn, Robby is surprised to find that Al-Hashimi is already there when he arrives. The two quickly clash – he didn’t read the packet she put together, and she’s for AI. He’d like nothing more than for the two to never interact, while she wants to get an idea of how he runs things. But she is seeing things in him she didn’t necessarily expect, says Moafi.

“She didn’t expect to be disarmed in the way that she’s disarmed by him because she’s been briefed by Gloria,” she explains. “But she walks in, and she sees this cowboy. She walks in, and it’s this culture that she could not have predicted, where he and Garcia [Alexandra Metz] are talking to each other in a crude way, and everything feels kind of loosey-goosey. He’s this cowboy running the show, and yet he is excellent at his work. And even though we have radically different approaches to the work, we have a similar goal.”

Elsewhere in the Season 2 premiere, thanks to an exchange about Whitaker (Gerran Howell) using people’s toothbrushes, we find out that Santos (Isa Briones) — his roommate — and Garcia are together in some capacity. But Briones cautions against getting too hopeful about how serious this might be.

“This is 10 months later, so clearly things have transpired. They are seeing each other regularly, but you’re still not, as an audience, quite sure what their relationship is. There’s flirtation, and they clearly spend the night; there’s toothbrushes at each other’s places. But I think you kind of start to see — I think maybe fans who have been shipping this maybe want to see like, oh my God, they’re so cute together. But that’s not necessarily what you’re going to get,” she says. “This is like a lot of workplace relationships that we know, where it’s a little awkward and maybe one person likes the other a little more than the other does, maybe one person wants more than the other does, and the lines are not fully defined.”

Something else that’s changing: Mohan’s (Supriya Ganesh) plans, possibly. She had committed to a partnership track in New Jersey next year to be close to her mother, only to find out she’s getting married and selling the house to go on a year-long cruise around the world. So, will she still want to leave PTMC?

Related

'The Pitt' Season 3: Cast, Premiere Date, Trailer, More Details

“I don’t know if she necessarily wants to do that anymore,” Ganesh admits. “She thought she was going home to this house and this life and this plan that she had sorted out, and now all of that’s just kind of up in the air. So I think she’s kind of trying to figure out if she should go, should stay.”

This is also going to affect the plan she had for her life outside work. “She kind of was like, ‘I’m going to go back to Jersey and then work on finding a relationship,'” Ganesh says. “That’s when it’ll happen, but you can’t plan things like that. So, yeah, I think she’s just feeling a little lost about everything.”

The season, like the first, begins with Robby on his way to work, riding his motorcycle but not wearing his helmet. “It’s a look into where his mindset is at the beginning of the season, and as the season progresses, that behavior becomes more and more concerning to some of his other coworkers,” explains executive producer R. Scott Gemmill, with his fellow EP John Wells adding, “It is a very specific character-based decision.”

The opening song is “Better Off Without You” by The Clarks, which Gemmill says is “a comment about what Robby’s trajectory is over the course of the season. Last year, Abbot [Shawn Hatosy] was having an existential crisis. This year, I think it’s a little bit more on Robby’s plate.”

Watch the full Post-Op: The Pitt Aftershow for a breakdown of the Season 2 premiere from Patrick Ball, Supriya Ganesh, Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Gerran Howell, Shabana Azeez, Sepideh Moafi, Shawn Hatosy, and executive producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells about the premiere, including Whitaker’s confidence this season, King’s deposition, and much more.

The Pitt, Thursdays, 9/8c, HBO Max