‘The Pitt’ Aftershow: Team Breaks Down Robby’s Confession (VIDEO)

We just watched Noah Wyle secure his Emmy (and all the other awards) for The Pitt Season 2 with his raw, emotional performance in a scene near the end of the penultimate episode. All season had been building to this (much like the first was to Robby’s breakdown in Episode 13), as more and more, those around him noticed that something’s not quite right in the hours leading up to his “sabbatical.”

Elsewhere, Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) reveals her diagnosis to Robby, Langdon (Patrick Ball) gets a win, Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) continues to deal with her patient Orlando’s return, and much more as the season nears its end. TV Insider spoke with Supriya Ganesh, Isa Briones, Jeff Kober, and Jalen Thomas Brooks in this episode’s Post-Op: The Pitt Aftershow, which you can watch above. Plus, read on for insight from executive producer R. Scott Gemmill. Warning: Spoilers for The Pitt Season 2 Episode 14 ahead!

It has become exceedingly clear that it’s just a matter of when, not if, Robby tells someone exactly what he’s really planning on his trip. Dana (Katherine LaNasa) wants Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) talk to him because she feels Robby will listen to him (even if he doesn’t like to do so). Caleb (Christopher Thornton) tries to talk to Robby after hearing him say that Orlando should have found a higher place to jump from and reminds him to keep his number handy.

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But it’s to Duke (Jeff Kober), Robby’s “VIP” patient and friend who’s helped him with his motorcycle, that the doctor unloads. As Duke fixes his bike after an EMT accidentally drives an ambulance into it, he speaks about how he’s done bad things and hurt people, and himself, and some things can’t be changed — like death, he stresses. And no, he’s not talking about his upcoming surgery or himself. Robby, emotional, red-eyed, and his voice hoarse like he’s holding back tears and so heavy with everything he’s feeling, admits, “I don’t know if I want to be anywhere anymore.” And so his plan is to ride away from everything. Duke argues that’s running.

“Duke can talk to him in a different way than his colleagues can. I think Duke sees through a lot of the bulls**t. And this is a guy who’s been around a long time, seen a lot, done a lot. I think he sees Robby’s struggle. I think he knows that Robby’s not in a good place, but he also knows he’s a grown man and there’s only so much he can do, and Robby’s going to have to figure things out for himself, but he pretty much lays it on the line for him,” explains Gemmill.

Kober thinks that Duke had an idea “from the beginning,” and that is at least one of the reasons he even came into the ED. In that powerful scene, which is bound to be on Emmy reels, Duke is “seeing the desperation of no good solution, the recognition in Robby of seeing no way out of his present circumstance, no way to deal with the way it feels to be him. And that helplessness and hopelessness is, it’s the dark night of the soul. It’s the bottom that someone has to hit before they’re willing to have a change of heart, willing to have a change in the way they are approaching their life,” says the guest star. “It’s a really dangerous place because the bottom might be past the point of death or the bottom might be just before that point of death.”

Kober raves about working with Wyle. “Noah’s amazing,” he shares. “He just brings so much expertise and wisdom about the whole experience of television to the equation. And then he has this big heart, and he lets himself go all in. And as an actor, it’s rare to have that. And I really had that with him. He let himself be present. So we got to really discover the scene and then discover it again and then discover it again and find out all the colors of it, all the nooks and crannies of it. I could have stayed there and done that scene for another day.”

Santos (Isa Briones) is among the hospital staff present when Robby, following that confession to Duke, yells at EMTs for incorrectly putting leads on a female patient who came in having a heart attack. While Santos looks up to Robby, “a lot of the time, the people we look up to are very flawed people. And I think she’s witnessing the facade breaking in the last couple of episodes and seeing like, ‘Oh s**t, I think he’s doing just as poorly as I am. I think we actually might be going through the exact same thing,'” Briones says.

She continues, “That’s even scarier when you kind of lose the person that you’ve put on a pedestal, and you realize they’re just a broken human being, too. It’s really scary. And yeah, I think it’s pushing her. It makes her feel even more isolated.”

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The episode ends with Al-Hashimi bringing Robby into an exam room for an honest second opinion on a case, one that, as he reads the chart, he realizes is hers. She’s had a history of a seizure disorder for the past 35 years after having viral meningitis at the age of 5.

Elsewhere in the episode, Mohan continues to deal with Orlando being back and in critical condition. And when Robby checks on how she’s doing, her first thought is it’s a trick question. Who could blame her, after how he reacted to her panic attack in Episode 10?

“It’s a little like, ‘Are you really asking? Are you really making space for me to answer?'” Ganesh explains. She adds that Mohan’s also realizing that “something’s not right” after his remark about Orlando finding a higher place to jump from and “maybe he is projecting something onto her that is really to do with his own stuff.”

Quite a few members of the hospital staff are going through it this shift — Robby, Langdon, Santos, Dana, and Mohan are just a few — and so it’s not exactly easy to find someone to lean on necessarily. “I think sometimes when s**t hits the fan for you, you tend to isolate a little bit more,” Ganesh says. “I think especially as people in professions like these that are high stress, I think sometimes … It’s interesting, I was speaking to a resident doctor, and she always said that she could tell that something was off in terms of how she was handling her stress and how the mental health was affecting her profession when she would isolate. And I think those moments in the show really, really played true to that.”

The good news of the episode comes with Langdon doing a closed reduction on a patient (Eugene Byrd) with a unilateral facet dislocation (a partial dislocation of two vertebrae in his neck). He’s at least seen it done — Robby hasn’t — so it falls on him to perform the procedure. Robby, who hasn’t been happy that Langdon is back after stealing pills and rehab, encourages him to do it and seems impressed after he’s successful, but he’s still harsh.

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“Langdon came back with a lack of confidence for a number of reasons, not just the fact that he was gone for 10 months, but also that he’s coming back as a known drug user. And so that’s very tough for him, and he has a lot of apologies and amends to make. Robby isn’t really in the mood. And part of it is I think Robby sees Langdon doing the work that he needs to do himself, but hasn’t brought himself to do it yet,” Gemmill tells TV Insider. “So I think some of it might be a little self-loathing that’s projected onto Langdon. And in that moment, Langdon is having a lot of self-doubts, and Robby pushes him very hard, very aggressively, and to do this, which is a somewhat of a tricky technique, but he pulls it off and he’s basically trying to give Langdon his confidence back, but he’s going about it in a way that’s questionable.”

Watch the full video interview above for more from Supriya Ganesh, Isa Briones, Jeff Kober, and Jalen Thomas Brooks.

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