‘The Pitt’ Aftershow: Noah Wyle & Cast Explain That Heartbreaking Death (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 2 Episode 6 “12:00 P.M.”]

Patients die in the ED, and that’s what The Pitt highlights in the Thursday, February 12, episode.

The next hour of the Fourth of July shift begins with Robby (Noah Wyle), Langdon (Patrick Ball), and Perlah (Amielynn Abellera) trying but failing to save Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.), then Dana (Katherine LaNasa) and Emma (Laetitia Hollard) are witness when he dies of a pulmonary hemorrhage from liver failure.

“You want to have the loss of a patient impact staff. Patients most of the time that come through are anonymous that you have no personal connection to. A frequent flyer like Louie who comes in perennially for treatment, for maintenance, to get in from the cold, to be sociable, becomes almost a kind of familial member to this emergency department. And yet his behavior and his inability to curb his drinking was going to take a toll eventually,” Noah Wyle, who did a fantastic job directing this episode, tells TV Insider as part of our Post-Op: The Pitt Aftershow. “We talked about that all through Season 1, that there’s really only one place where this leads, and Louie even says that he’s sort of digging his own grave in full knowledge that this is an unsustainable practice. So it seemed inevitable that this is where we would go with the character because the character is so sentimentally beloved, and obviously, it’s going to have great dramatic impact.”

Gerran Howell, whose Whitaker treated Louie this shift, echoes what Wyle said: “The death is going to happen. So I think, for me, it was just about seeing a little bit of a change in Whitaker for better or good, that he now knows a little bit to put up a bit of a barrier to that. It’s never not going to affect him. And it’s different when it’s a regular also, and it’s Louie, and it was kind of very unexpected.”

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Dana is the one to clean Louie’s body and get him set up in the viewing room, showing Emma that part of a nurse’s job. The nurses are highlighted in this episode, in every patient interaction and with every scene transitioning via them.

“I love the line about the frequent flyers and that they can be a real pain in the ass, but when they leave, it’s like a wound,” LaNasa says. “They’re part of the community. And when I did my research with Kathy Garvin at County Hospital in Los Angeles, there was a frequent flyer there, and the way she talked about him was like, ‘He’s going to die soon.’ She knew he was going to die, and she knew all about him. And she explained to me how sometimes those people just come in there because they need attention. And it’s not uncommon for an ED nurse to know these patients for a really long time and to care about them. So I think it was sad for her.”

Ball says that’s true for Langdon as well, especially after he had to, earlier in the shift, tell Louie that he’d stolen his pills in Season 1. “Louie is somebody that Langdon has wronged, and he’s somebody that Langdon sees himself in,” he explains. “He recognizes that we might be living different lives, but we’ve got the same wound. And Louie fights fights that Langdon is privileged enough to not have to fight. But I think they both got a hole in their bucket in a way that only an addict can understand. And I think whenever he comes back in, it’s a real gift from the universe to be able to reckon with that. And there’s a big loss when he goes.”

Most of the staff gathers in the viewing room in the final scene to say goodbye and remember Louie, sharing stories he’d told them over the years and even revealing, as Robby does, that his pregnant wife was killed in a car crash.

“I was fortunate enough to get the episode to direct where that all comes to a head, and that moment where everybody takes a minute and says something about Louie from the perspective in which they knew him or were allowed to know him was lovely,” Wyle says. “But what I love best about it is its brevity because you can only take so much time before you’ve got to get back to work.”

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This episode also continues to build to the introduction of Duke, Robby’s friend, who’s supposed to be coming in. The doc keeps checking if he’s checked in yet; he hasn’t.

“Duke represents the only person that we’ll ever meet that knows Robby outside this hospital as something other than doctor or boyfriend,” Wyle notes. “We’ve met Robby’s pseudo stepson Jake, and we’ve met Jake’s mother, and we know that he sees Noelle outside of the hospital. But aside from that, we never hear about him interacting or socializing with anybody ever. So the idea that he even has a friend or somebody that he’s been spending time with is interesting. And that relationship is refreshing for Robby because it’s completely separate from this world that he’s immersed in.”

Watch the full video aftershow above for a full breakdown from Noah Wyle, Patrick Ball, Katherine LaNasa, Gerran Howell, Fiona Dourif, Isa Briones, Shabana Azeez, Laetitia Hollard, and Lesley Boone about Louie’s death, being directed by Noah Wyle, and much more from Season 2 Episode 6.

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