REVIEW: ‘The Pitt’ Episode 13 — “7:00 P.M.”

The mass shooting aftermath continues in The Pitt Episode 13, but this time, the episode focuses on a few patients rather than the reorganization around the response. This makes the episode one of the more emotionally devastating hours of the show, which is saying something after some of the previous episodes. But that’s all thanks to Noah Wyle’s performance as Dr. Robby. Who, after 12 hours of his shift, finally breaks down as the 8:00 PM approaches.

The same kind of quiet envelopes this episode as it did the last one. Watching the doctors and nurses do their jobs efficiently during such a traumatic event almost makes the horror of it all drop away. But the seams are subtly coming undone for everyone across the hour. Every attending is too busy to help the medical students or each other, supplies are dwindling, and the students are losing the confidence they gained in the last episode. There’s all of that, and then Robby’s stepson Jake arrives in the back of a truck holding his girlfriend, who’s been shot through the heart.

Despite the fact that Leah, Jake’s girlfriend, is pretty much a nonentity to the audience, this hour is the most emotionally wrought Robby gets. Jake, too, is relatively unknown. But each of their desperation in The Pitt Episode 13 becomes the focal point of the hour.

PTSD rears its head at 7:00 PM.

Robby has kept a tight lid on his COVID-19 trauma and the death of his mentor for the entire shift so far, but flashbacks and quickly cut-off panic attacks have seeped their way through his psyche. Faced with a mass casualty event ,and holding the life of someone else he knows in his hands is the last straw. As the team begins to call it for Leah, Robby tries everything he can to save her so he doesn’t have to deliver the news to Jake. This means he takes life-saving measures on a lost cause, in a hospital already running low on supplies during an emergency event.

It’s here where the power of well-established characters come in. Each character, from Dana (Katherine LaNasa) to Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif) to Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) and Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball), is tuned into Robby’s emotional state after watching him struggle the entire shift. It creates an even more complicated dynamic with Dr. Langdon, considering how on the outs he is with Robby. Even with Dr. Abbott (Shawn Hatosy), there’s a clear understanding of the situation, and he only just returned as the night shift attending. This is the payoff of the wonderful character work of the past 12 episodes.

When Robby finally decides to call it, it’s clear he’s already breaking down. He has just enough in him to bring Jake to identify Leah’s body before he collapses against the wall, the day’s events and the lost patients and his stepson’s devastation finally getting to him. If Noah Wyle doesn’t get an Emmy nomination for this scene, then voting members simply didn’t watch.

Elsewhere, the yellow zone starts to get overwhelming, but nothing has tipped over into absolute chaos yet. Dr. King, though she seems to be scrambling a bit, keeps it together for this hour, even as it’s clear that everyone’s barely keeping up.

The Pitt Episode 13 is packed with drama as every character shows up and does so close to exhaustion.

Despite the exhaustion coming for everyone, there’s a neat problem solving thread that echoes throughout The Pitt Episode 13. As supplies continue to dwindle, the doctors start improvising. Robby demonstrates a procedure involving a tube that’s not entirely by the book. Dr. Langdon does something he learned from a podcast, and Dr. Mohan applies a method she read from a research paper.

All of these quick-thinking tactics build on from the other one; as one person thinks outside the box, the next one is bold enough to do it, too. Dr. Santos even gets on the action when she can’t find an attending quick enough and jumps with two feet forward. Of course, she gets reprimanded and praised in the same breath by Dr. Abbott. But these little moments are a nice little thread to follow amidst the chaos.

David, the suspected shooter, shows back up at the hospital, though he seems pretty unaware of what’s happened. If he’s not the shooter, then that’s a huge coincidence. The Pitt doesn’t have a lot of twists and turns in it; there’s one major twist with Dr. Langdon, and they fumbled in the execution, but it seems like David might have been a red herring.

Things aren’t slowing down in this mass shooting aftermath, despite only two episodes remaining in this first season of The Pitt. The Pitt Episode 13 seamlessly continued from the last episode while also making things a bit more personal, bringing about a fantastic performance from Noah Wyle.

The Pitt airs new episodes every Thursday on Max, formerly HBO Max.