RECAP: ‘The Pitt’ Season 2 Episode 8 — “2:00 P.M.”

The chaos begins in The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8 as the ER goes analog, meaning all computers are shut down. Everything’s done on paper or white board for possibly the next 24 hours. Meanwhile, the place keeps filling up with extra patients from Westbridge, and tensions arise when Santos (Isa Briones) and Langdon (Patrick Ball) end up on the same case.

Whitaker almost saved the day when he took a quick photo of the patient board before everything turned off. But he was too quick, the picture too blurry to see any of the information. Luckily, Joy (Irene Choi) comes in clutch once again, revealing she has a photographic memory by reciting everyone’s patient information word for word. That takes care of that problem.

Santos rushes back to Harlow (Jessica ‘Limer’ Flores) once she remembers she left Harlow and the ASL interpreter abruptly. Fortunately, the delay in communication with Harlow didn’t lead to any worse symptoms and Santos is able to figure out a treatment plan that should work. She acknowledges to Al-Hashimi that she almost made Harlow go through an unnecessary CT scan because she was impatient. It’s great to see Santos be aware of her missteps and admitting to the mistakes she made along the way. It would be even more great to see that acknowledgement in the form of an apology toward Harlow.

The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8 finally thrusts Santos and Langdon together after a long wait.

Things between Robby (Noah Wyle) and Langdon have been rocky all season, but one pair that hasn’t had a chance to come face-to-face is Santos and Langdon. In The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8, they get thrown on a case together when a drunk girl comes in with half her tongue bitten off. Santos initially takes the case with Joy, but Langdon jumps in at the last second.

Professional courtesy keeps Santos’ from saying anything but that doesn’t stop her from showing visible signs of annoyance, enough that Joy picks up on it, with no comment. The dynamic between Santos and Langdon in The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8 is a lot like the mass shooting episode in Season 1. They work together, but the tension is palpable. Even as Langdon tries to give Santos compliments on her work, Santos brushes him off.

Considering Langdon is on a mission to complete the 12-step program, an apology to Santos might be in the future, but it’s most likely going to be a hard-earned one. Until then, it makes for some great tension in The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8.

Langdon is def on his way to apologizing but it may take some time before it happens.

But Langdon’s not facing brush offs from everyone in the ER. A short but lovely moment between Langdon and McKay occurs amongst the chaos of the rest of The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8. A quiet one-on-one exchange in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the ER going analog shows McKay telling Langdon she’s going on nine years sober. As she’s called away to another patient, she tells him if he ever needs to chat, he can talk with her.

There are plenty of moments throughout The Pitt Season 2 that showcases things the doctors and nurses have learned. In The Pitt Season 1, McKay had a moment where she judged a patient’s weight, leading to a biased diagnosis. In The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8, a new patient arrives named Howard who is experiencing abdominal pain and a fever. As the doctors start working on him, his weight becomes a factor in how to properly diagnose him.

Throughout Howard’s time at PTMC, Oglevy (Lucas Iverson) makes quite a few comments on his weight. The comments are first clocked by McKay, a nice follow through from The Pitt Season 1. This serves as a great callout moment for Oglevy, and also serves as another example of how The Pitt treats all of the patients that come through the ER doors with respect and humanity.

Issues surrounding weight and how the medical system treats patients rear up in The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8.

Howard apologizes multiple times for making the team go through extra steps to treat him, and those apologies are constantly met with a calm reassurance from Robby that they are there to treat their patients, including Howard, with the exact care they need. It’s an incredibly moving part of The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8, tied nicely to a thread that started with McKay in Season 1.

Ilana (Tina Ivlev) returns from her walk with Emma (Laëtitia Hollard) and agrees to continue the exam with Dana (Katherine LaNasa). She doesn’t explain what brought her back, but she arrives with a reinforced determination. And while this feels like a win in The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8, reality comes knocking shortly after Ilana’s exam finishes. Dana takes the kit to a lockbox where police are supposed to recover the kits within 72 hours, only to discover that a previous kit from two weeks ago was still in the lockbox.

It’s an incredibly harrowing yet not all that surprising discovery considering there are hundreds of thousands rape kits that have gone untested in the U.S. Dana’s quick to jump on a phone call to the local precinct and demand a detective arrive on scene to collect both kits.

Harsh realities surrounding the American legal system and failure to follow through on tests are shown.

Whether that person shows or not remains to be seen. But watching Ilana in the immediate aftermath of the assault and then experiencing the turmoil of the exam, almost bowing out of it, and then finding the courage to go through with it, only to be hit with the reality that her kit might never be processed, is awful.

The hours tick closer to Mel’s (Taylor Dearden) deposition, but Ellis arrives to ease some of Mel’s worries. The two of them were a part of the measles case in which they performed a spinal tap on a kid against the mother’s wishes and the dad’s go-ahead. Ellis tells Mel that she has nothing to worry about because the procedure was executed flawlessly, and whatever side effects the kid is experiencing are because his mother refused to allow him treatment for a deadly disease.

The Pitt Season 2 Episode 8 kicks off the season’s first episode of chaos, ending with Robby watching it all unfold in the middle of his ER as everyone’s stress starts spilling over. It’s an apt moment to end the episode on, one that serves as a reminder that the chaos is only just beginning.

The Pitt Season 2 airs new episodes at 8 p.m. Central every Thursday on HBO Max.

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