narrative foil thoughts for The Pitt

 

girlboss

I am really enjoying the character of Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi in season 2 of The Pitt so far. I like the way she has been framed as a foil to Robby, starting from the first episode, where she requested that he stop referring to the ER as the Pitt, as it has a negative connotation. Calling it the Pitt is part of Robby's doom-and-gloom attitude in regard to where he works. He seems to think nothing can change, nothing can get better. The ER sucks, it's chaotic, they're gonna lose people. And that's all true! But Robby is incredibly reluctant to try to change the workflow and setup, even in a way that might make things run more smoothly. He was ready to dislike Al-Hashimi as soon as he heard of her becoming his replacement, because he knew someone else would run things differently than he did.

Meanwhile, Al-Hashimi has come into the Pitt hoping to change it for the better. The problem is, with little experience in emergency medicine, there's a bit of naïvety in how she's approaching it. Take, for example, her idea for patient passports. It's a good idea in theory! But the reality is that the cases they deal with are unpredictable and the passports could end up causing more frustration. Her obsession with introducing genAI into the workplace is another part of that. Most fans had a knee-jerk reaction when she first brought it up, instantly hating her, but as she's explained her reasoning, she definitely has her heart in the right place. She wants the doctors to spend less time charting so that they have more time during the day to treat patients, and don't need to stay overtime to finish like Santos has been. Of course, as an audience we know that genAI is not going to be the solution to that problem, but again, it's good that she's trying.

I hope that, by the end of the season, she and Robby will have been able to find a way to meet in the middle. The way Robby has been so dismissive of her and what she's trying to do has been bugging me, but I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be having a lot of problems with the way he's dealing with things so far this season. Curious to see where it goes!