‘The Pitt’: Noah Wyle, Katherine LaNasa & More Break Down Shocking Ending for Dana

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 1 Episode 9 3:00 P.M.”]

Oh. My. God. That’s the only way to describe the end of The Pitt Season 1 Episode 9, extraordinarily written by series star Noah Wyle.

It’s been clear all season that the situation with Doug Driscoll (Drew Powell), who had chest pain in the waiting room, has been building to something, and it’s in the 3:00 P.M. hour of the shift that the season covers in real time that it happens. When a fight breaks out in the waiting room, Doug tries to sneak into the emergency department in the chaos, but he’s caught. Dana (Katherine LaNasa) says he’ll be seen when his test results are back. When demanding he be seen doesn’t get him anywhere, he decides to leave, but Langdon (Patrick Ball) warns he’d be doing so AMA (against medical advice). He does sit back down.

However, in the final moments, as Dana’s taking a smoke break outside, Doug punches her in the face and throws the AMA form down next to her. He’ll take his chances. He keeps walking as she lays on the ground.

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“I read it on the page, and I’m a dancer, and I think I just detached from the fact that I was going to be hit because I have been hit in the past,” LaNasa admits to TV Insider. “I thought, ‘Oh, well, here’s this physical thing, and they’ll have a stunt person and then I’ll fall down, and then this will happen and that will happen. There’ll just be these little pieces that we’ll shoot.’ I think I just wanted to detach emotionally from the violence of it, and when we actually did it, it was like, wow, to really process that this is something that these types of people go through. When I shadowed the nurse at LA County, she told me this is very common for the nurses to get hit, punched, kicked bit, you name it.”

That’s why it was Dana in that moment, explains executive producer R. Scott Gemmill. “The reality is the violence towards emergency department workers is ridiculously high. One in four nurses have been assaulted, sometimes also with guns and knives. It’s a real problem. When we were younger and you went to the ER, you didn’t go through a metal detector or an X-ray machine. It’s insane, but the world’s changed a lot and she, I think, embodies kind of like the den mother of the ER, and I think having her be the one who gets hit has more impact because she’s been through it all so much,” he says. “To see her having an event happen that makes her question her devotion to this world has more impact than if it was a young nurse or a male nurse. We care for her, we really like her. And then to see her be on the end of this violent act has more impact because of it.”

Dana is also “a real lifeline” for attending Robby, Wyle shares. His intention writing it, he says, “was to sort of lace in all these moments prior to that where we get to see how invaluable she is as a peacemaker or as a caregiver or as an ally, a shoulder to cry on. She wears all these different hats in the emergency room and she certainly doesn’t deserve what happens to her.”

He adds, “There was an aspect to Doug Driscoll that I wanted to find humanity in as well. He crosses the line a couple times earlier in the season with things that he says that are sort of threatening and border racist, but that’s a guy blowing off steam. We wanted to show that this goes to a whole other level sometimes and that staff are being assaulted and that it isn’t always because somebody’s high or drunk or psychotic; sometimes it’s just somebody who’s really angry, looking for a place to put that anger on the most available target. And that’s something we’re seeing a lot more of, this sort of triggered aggression without consequence or remorse. That’s really terrifying and it makes the population who treat us give a second thought about wanting to go in and treat us. If they don’t feel safe in the workplace, what is the incentive? And it’s already been proven to be high risk in terms of infectious disease and hours and stress. You add safety on top of that and that just seems like too much to ask.”

The good news is we know Dana will be all right — physically. But the toll it’s going to take on her? That’s a different story. LaNasa teases an “existential crisis” for her character ahead. She’s worked at the hospital for over three decades. It’s “been her whole life,” she says. “It’s been where she’s put all her energy and where she gets all her pride and all her sense of purpose. In one fell swoop, this guy with this degrading action really kind of broke all that apart for her. How do you go home to your daughter, to your granddaughter and say, ‘Mom gets punched at work’? It’s about a three-episode arc, and I was living in kind of an existential crisis, just trying to kind of grapple with what she would be grappling with.”

On any other show, it would probably be safe to say that Doug would be found before the end of the season, especially with six episodes to go. However, with The Pitt playing out in real time, that’s not necessarily the case. He may not be found in six hours. “We might not see Doug Driscoll again,” Gemmill agrees. “We don’t wrap up everything with a nice clean bow because that’s not the way life is.” That’s also part of working in an ER: These doctors usually don’t see the patients again.

Executive producer John Wells does promise that they will show how the attack affects the rest of the nurses. “They all have their own stories about how they’ve been assaulted,” he says. “That’s just an attempt to really highlight to everyone how much danger there is for these frontline healthcare workers.”

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Earlier in the episode, after the staff cannot save a young girl who drowned saving her sister, Robby gives a speech about difficult cases and losses that linger (like one does for him), which Dana says is essentially about how to bury your feelings. (“I adore Noah,” LaNasa says when discussing what’s our favorite relationship on the show, that of Robby and Dana.) All shift, on the anniversary of his mentor’s death, a day he usually takes off, has so clearly been building to the point that he can no longer do that.

“He’s swallowed a lot of things for a long time and my experience and I think with what we’re trying to do with Robby is that eventually that stuff comes out and it’ll come out when you least want it to,” Gemmill teases. “And that’s ultimately what’s going to happen to him today because he hasn’t addressed it, because he hasn’t shared it and then he gets triggered and then it’s there for everyone to see in a way.”

Dana is the one who’s constantly checking if Robby’s doing okay — and she’s the only who can keep asking — and LaNasa points out that she also needs him to be okay because she needs him to run the emergency department. “I don’t think she’s realizing he’s going that far [nearing a breakdown], but I do think she’s concerned about him,” she adds. “My own son lost his dad when he was 19, and so I think as the mother hen of Dana, I view Robby almost like a son, and so I was able to just bring my personal life, that relationship of concern for my own son and how much he struggled after he lost his dad and just kind of put that into that relationship.”

Elsewhere in the episode, the tension between Langdon and Santos (Isa Briones) continues to near a boiling point. In fact, Santos gives Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) credit for a good call she makes and takes the blame for a delay in care. As she explains, there’s no reason for him to be pissed at them both and she doesn’t think he’ll ever change his mind about her not belonging there.

“This is a nice moment of humanity for Santos where I think she just knows whatever I do, he’s not going to acknowledge, and at this point she’s like, I don’t even want his praise,” Briones says. “There’s not anything to get from there. She just is over him and knows that no matter what she does, he’s going to find a way to dress her down and pick apart what she’s done. It’s a nice moment of her taking the hit and being like, yeah, it can’t get any worse. But it is also a nice moment of doing something nice for someone else. It’s a rare moment of that, but it’s a nice storytelling moment to remind us that she’s not a terrible person.”

She also likes what we see from Santos with Mohan and vice versa. “Her character is so compassionate and so just such a heart in the show, and Santos is so icy. It is a nice moment of thawing that wall, and Santos kind of emboldens her to speak up for herself because she’s trying to speak up for herself.”

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Robby intervenes after seeing Langdon yell at Santos and makes it clear that behavior like that won’t be tolerated, that harassment has no educational value. That’s tough for Langdon, considering how much he respects Robby, agrees Ball.

“I think a big part of the friction between Langdon and Santos is that I think Langdon is very aware of how complex of a machine that this emergency room is and how it is really dependent on respecting rank, respecting order. Things are organized in such a way to provide the best care possible. And I also think that it is more of an existential thing of believing that experience matters. That’s what Langdon believes,” he says. “I’ve got a ton of respect for Robby because Robby has more experience than I do, and I’m going to push myself to the very extent of my ability and my knowledge and my experience. And if I misstep and Robby comes forward and corrects me, I accept that because I accept that he spent 20 years learning things that I hope to learn over my next 20 years.”

Langdon feels like Santos is giving him the attitude of, “You can’t teach me anything because I already know everything because I got it all figured out and so get out of my way,” Ball says. “I understand because I think when Langdon came into this job, he probably had a very similar attitude as Santos does, and so I think there’s a certain amount of reflection there. But I think also it comes down to a respect for experience and understanding where on the learning curve you are. This is not a negative thing. This can be a positive thing. Know that you are at the front end of a learning curve, which is great because that means you get to learn things for the next three years across this residency that make you a better doctor, and all of these experiences that you have mean something. And I think that’s a positive worldview. That’s a dynamic worldview that I think she is not easily convinced of.”

Were you shocked by that ending with Dana and Doug? Are you worried about Robby? What’s your take on Langdon vs. Santos? Let us know in the comments section below.

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