‘The Pitt’ Aftershow: Noah Wyle Reacts to What Happened to Collins in Season 2 (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 2 Episode 4 “10:00 A.M.”]

As the Fourth of July shift continues, The Pitt Season 2 reveals what happened to one of the major Season 1 characters in its fourth episode.

During the 10:00 a.m. hour of the shift, Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.) asks Whitaker (Gerran Howell) if Collins (Tracy Ifeachor, who did not return for Season 2) is around. Whitaker explains, as Robby (Noah Wyle) pokes his head in, that Collins finished her residency, took up a job in Portland as an attending physician, and is adopting a baby, wanting to be closer to family. (Collins had a miscarriage in Season 1, after which she went home. At the time, she also revealed to Robby that she’d once been pregnant with his baby and didn’t have it.)

“I wasn’t supposed to be in that scene,” Noah Wyle reveals to TV Insider as part of our Post-Op: The Pitt Aftershow. “That was supposed to be a scene just between Whitaker and Louie, and I talked to the director, and I said, ‘Would it be interesting if I just poked my head in at that very moment when he’s giving this information so we could see that information land with Robby?’ And everybody liked that idea.”

For Robby, he continues, “It’s melancholy, it’s layered. I think that on one hand, he thinks of her as the one that got away, the one he wasn’t quite equipped to be mature enough to be with. On the other hand, she’s a rock star and was on a trajectory that he would only be an impediment to. And if she’s happier going back and doing what she’s doing and she’s building a family for herself, then how could he have been anything but happy for her in that regard? But it can’t help but to sort of become a self-reflective moment of where he is at this moment and what he doesn’t have to offer.”

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The new attending, Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), who will be filling in for Robby while he’s on his sabbatical, tells Langdon (Patrick Ball) to wrap it up in triage and join them in the ED — after Robby had put him there. It’s Langdon’s first day back from rehab (he stole pills from Louie and was revealed to be an addict in the first season), and Robby had hoped he wouldn’t have to see him.

“It’s a workplace, and it’s a workplace with a lot of requirements of needing people to do things. And so the frustration and disappointment and anger that Robby has towards Langdon get in the way of the fact that he’s a physician that’s needed in the emergency room to be treating patients,” executive producer John Wells notes. “So I think Robby was really very hopeful that he would be gone on a sabbatical before Landon came back. And now the last thing in the world he wants to have to deal with this day is that, but at the same time, Al-Hashimi realizes we need the doctors in the emergency room. You can’t just avoid it.”

Robby has been doing the best he can to avoid Langdon thus far. “What I think will become clearer as the season wears on is that this is less about Langdon being a disappointment to Robby or being the acolyte who didn’t measure up or who betrayed him, and more of Robby feeling somehow responsible for this lapse and for Langdon that he was the mentor, he was the role model, and this happened under his watch under his nose, and he didn’t catch it, couldn’t help it, couldn’t fix it, didn’t save it,” explains Wyle. “And as a result, it goes on his record more than it goes on Langdon’s. I think that, in some ways, failing a student is even more profound than a student failing a teacher.”

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The second season does have more romance mentioned — not overtly shown, that’s not what this show is — than the first. “That’s just the reality of finding out a little bit about each character,” explains executive producer R. Scott Gemmill. Adds Wells, “If you’re looking for romance, you’re going to be disappointed watching The Pitt.” (You’ll never be disappointed watching this show — the second season has already proven it’s still the best show on television after the masterpiece that was the first.

This episode does see McKay (Fiona Dourif) make plans for after shift with a patient who expressed his interest in her. “I think she’s gotten to a point where she wants to expand her horizons, and it’s quite scary to be that vulnerable and maybe get shot down,” Dourif says. “But I think I remember when I filmed the scene, the sentence that I thought right before I turned around was like, ‘If not now, when?'”

Watch the full aftershow above for a complete breakdown of Season 2 Episode 4 with Noah Wyle, Gerran Howell, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Shabana Azeez, Sepideh Moafi, Shawn Hatosy, and executive producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells.

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