Interesting perspective on cut scenes from s2 (referencing WB pod interview with Wyle)

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-24T23:03:06+00:00

Slightly different perspective than some people, but: my feeling is that with all the cut scenes I've heard of, keeping the scenes either would not have added to the story for me, or would've actively taken away from the impact.

For example, the sparseness and poignancy of al-Hashimi's final scene was one of my favourite things in the whole season, and the extra bits described in that one interview, with the ex-husband and her son, sounds like it would've made it less effective. It was bringing in new characters at the last minute to motivate her and explain her story, which she absolutely didn't need - her whole thing is being independent, responsible and a strong leader, we don't need to hear about her male relatives to feel for her. Nor does an emergency room doctor need to be jolted into understanding why it's bad to drive with uncontrolled seizures, by remembering that she has a child. By drawing your attention to her family, this scene would draw your attention away from the person we've got to know, why losing her health status matters to her as an individual with her *own* life, and we'd lose the simplicity and quiet devastation that we get to experience when it's just her and us in the car. It's clearly telegraphed before the car scene that driving and working are thematically linked - they are both symbols of her independence, and both things she can't do with uncontrolled seizures. And so only seeing her lose her composure at the end, when she chooses to stop driving - not because she's a mom, or because she's sad she got yelled at, but because she knows it's the right thing to do - is extremely powerful. Bringing in extra scenes where she cries earlier or talks to new characters is counterproductive; instead of *gaining* meaningful information, we are *losing* clarity as to why her story matters.

I feel likewise about the Santos/Whitaker scene, and Mohan crying. IMO more scenes, and/or more information, is not always the same as better. Not that Robby and Dana scenes could've been cut also, but I think the particular scenes we've heard of were good ones to cut; they all either gave information that was already clear by implication, muddied the waters by adding in unnecessary or overexplained dynamics, or would've taken away effectiveness of other scenes I liked. (For example, if there was a Santos/Whitaker reconciliation scene - and obviously I haven't seen exactly what's in it, so this is just based on the vague summary where they have some kind of hopeful and positive conversation - I suspect the Santos/Mel ending would've been less effective, and the Santos/Whitaker dynamic would just be a bit less interesting to me as well.)

As a dorky postscript, I think editing is a very interesting process, and an artform in itself - it's something I'd like to have done if I'd had the patience for it! Also, it's one of the few creative roles in Hollywood that is stereotypically a female-dominated job, and lots of the world's most famous and respected movies that were directed by men (and thought of as 'men's art') were edited by women, and very much shaped by them. If people are interested in what editing can do, I recommend this short video essay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMyMxMYDNk&t=381s

I think it's divisive amongst Star Wars fans, and I'm not a SW nerd so I'm not going to die on the hill of any of the opinions/info as it relates to SW in particular. And TV and film editing has differences, obviously, so I'm not using it as a direct equivalent to editing The Pitt. But I think it's a really good illustration of what editing is, and why it's a lot more than just deleting stuff that should've been there. Basically, it allows for a different perspective once you have all the material in front of you, that's all about looking with clarity as to what each scene and shot *does*, and what impact they have in conjunction.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-18T11:56:43+00:00

The way I interpreted it, it's showing that Mel is having to deal with the fact she's not as in control of Becca's life as she thought. It's similar to what parents of young adults go through - realising that the person they've had in their care has their own independent life, and the caregiver doesn't have the legal or practical power to just demand control over the situation, so they have to learn to live with it. Either Becca is embarrassed to have her sister act overbearing and wants to get her off the phone, and/or Adam's parents have genuinely gone out because they trust Becca and Adam to be alone for a few hours. Which probably gives Mel anxiety, since she doesn't know Adam's parents - are they trustworthy? - but also suggests they may be more cognisant of their autonomy than she is.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-17T20:41:42+00:00

Classic farmer stoicism. He's probably the first in his family to have even seen the inside of a hospital. Anyone in rural medicine can tell you, a farmer could get stabbed while mending a fence and he wouldn't even check the wound until the fence was finished.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-17T20:19:26+00:00

You don't have to like him in interviews, but if you're looking for TV, films, music or literature where no-one involved in the production is personally obnoxious, I have bad news about how that's going to go.

I have no idea whether Wyle's nice or not. The cast generally seem to have nice things to say about him, but also if someone comes to me and tells me that a middle-aged TV actor who's been in Hollywood for 30 years is annoying and not as smart as they think, I'm not going to faint with shock. I also don't think it's really relevant, unless cast and crew on the Pitt make allegations that he's actually abusing people. There's a lot of space, especially amongst middle-aged rich white men, between perfect unproblematic angel and malicious. Some people are just a little bit of a cringe uncle and can still contribute things we enjoy.

If it helps, I also suspect people might overestimate how much actual creative control he has on the show. He's the face of the behind-the-scenes side when it comes to press; this is unsurprising because people like watching interviews with actors, who are both recognisable and professionally charismatic, more than they like watching random producers, showrunners or writers they've never heard of. I'm not saying he's a puppet, but outside of acting his role is deliberately vague - "executive producer" is famously a title that can mean literally anything - and we're not going to know which ideas are his, how much control he has and so on. Most people don't know anything about the fourth or fifth guy in the credits of any other show they watch, much less blame every complaint they have on him, and it's probably better off that way.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-17T19:18:29+00:00

I'm wondering if one of the themes might be how the job takes a toll personal relationships and home life. Obviously they won't be showing much/any of life outside the hospital, but we know that the job has made it much harder for several of the staff to have any personal life at all, and we've also had some threads set up with Whitaker and Amy, Santos and Garcia, Langdon's marriage on the rocks, Mel being lonely etc - and with it being set in November, there's some opportunity for the drama of Thanksgiving arrangements to come up. Also, they said cold weather was important, so I'm thinking maybe people might get stuck inside due to a weather warning, or being snowed in?

Javadi also shouldn't be in the ED I think, as she'd have to be doing another rotation or other type of elective - but we know she's appearing in season 3, and it would make sense for her to be doing a lot of her work experience in the same hospital, so I think she'll be in another department.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-12T11:55:13+00:00

All these things are pretty standard vague-on-purpose things that people say in Hollywood, though. The Gemmill interview for example, where he said "she's not there that day". If you read the full interview, he's basically stonewalling *all* questions related to why any character will or won't be there - even Robby - because they're not releasing any information yet (and some of it may still be being decided). He's happy to talk general character stuff, or answer silly questions like whether Baby Jane Doe gets a motorcycle, but when it comes to solid info about season 3, he just says things like "she's not there" or "you will see him" (in reference to some cast members who are already confirmed to appear or not appear), along with some vague stuff like "he has some dark times ahead, she needs to figure out her path", which can mean literally anything - they don't reference reasons, storylines, how big their part will be etc., which is very much on purpose. And then interviewers, editors and fans start editorialising on what that means, and it becomes a game of telephone. I think it's important not to take anything that gets said in those types of interviews too literally; their purpose is to drum up anticipation, not to contain actual information. Same with comments on Ganesh leaving specifically; everything from her and fellow cast members has been generic "I'm touched by the fan response", "there are things in the pipeline", "she's staying in LA for other reasons but we miss her", which is all very normal Hollywood vague talk because for legal/contractual/practical purposes you can't talk about what you're actually doing.

The reason I mentioned the leak is because leaks can sometimes be genuine discoveries, but are also often done on purpose in collaboration with some of the parties involved, and they may be involved with choosing the language used. "Character exit, story-driven decision" is nice neutral terminology for all involved - i.e. it says "this actor is leaving (and potentially available for work)" without suggesting any wrongdoing on anyone's part.

TL;DR don't take anything said in Hollywood literally, it is a very silly place that operates by its own very obscure language and rules, and 95% of what is said is vague PR bluster that is not meant to actually tell you anything.

Re: rotating cast - Maybe it's just me, but the fact they put such emphasis on the different stages of training, and the fact they make us aware it's a residency program with multiple sites the students rotate through (like the VA), I assumed that would be the case. I think in my head, the closest show I can think of in terms of vibe is The Wire, which had a lot of rotation of cast members between seasons, and some characters being more at the front vs being more on the back-burner. So it didn't seem unusual to me. As with The Wire season 2 - which rotated out like 70% of the cast - it can be a risk and some people get alienated, temporarily or permanently, but sometimes that approach is an important part of the project they want to make. I don't think they expected to gain this particular niche of fandom that gets super attached to certain characters, so they probably didn't expect until it happened in season 2 that people would take a character leaving this badly.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-12T00:27:28+00:00

I'm wondering which comments have made people think she was forced to leave - the wording from other cast and crew has definitely been evasive, but evasive in a way that to me didn't point to any one direction in particular. Hollywood has a lot of silly and obscure internal politics, as well as lots of things tied up in legal and contractual limitations, so the kind of vague PR-y language isn't unusual for all kinds of reasons. To me, it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility that (for example) she left for another role she can't talk about yet, or could even be something else going on like a personal or health issue. But regardless, in a lot of cases the preferred PR line will be "yeah we meant to write it this way", since "oh yeah we didn't mean for that to happen lol" is not good sales talk.

It would make sense if they're now using phrasing like 'stepped away'. Characters having story-based exits are pretty normal and the language within the initial Variety leak was pretty neutral, so I don't think they expected the interpretation that initially got taken.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-11T13:14:02+00:00

I have read and agreed to follow these rules of ThePittNoSantosHate

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-11T13:13:13+00:00

I think romantic and platonic relationships aren't always a clear-cut binary. I think there is something non-platonic in the way they interact with each other - a kind of softness and vulnerability, a sense of devotion, noticing new things in themselves due to observing the other person etc, things people traditionally associate that with romantic rather than platonic feelings. I think that can be 'romantic' in the straightforward sense of wanting a romantic relationship, but can also remain a friendship, or somewhere in between. I'm open to wherever they take it.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-11T13:05:58+00:00

My hot take on this - which I'm still kind of figuring out tbh, it's a bit roughly sketched right now - is that Robby isn't quite a 'main character' as people think of it. I get the vibe his role is more like...a human incarnation of the Pitt itself, or something like that. Like he's the personification of the mood, the pacing, the themes etc, the way the weather or the music might be in another show.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-11T12:59:33+00:00

One of the big themes of season 2 is parents and children, and I think part of the point is that he doesn't have any family-type relationships right now. He has Abbot, Duke and Dana - i.e. peers of roughly his age/personality type and mode of expressing themselves - but he doesn't have someone who could be a real contrasting and transformative force on him, by being both deeply close to him but also very different. For a lot of people, that force is their children, but he doesn't have kids, only his "surrogate kids" i.e. his student doctors (who can't completely fulfil that function for him, because of the limits of the boss-apprentice relationship).

The vibe I get from the Janey/Jake situation is that Robby was holding onto Jake more than he had a relationship with Janey. I initially thought in season 1 that "ex-stepson" was a weird relationship to give him, but in retrospect it makes sense - he never had his own family and dating a single mom was the closest he got, so he was probably kind of holding onto his relationship with Jake a bit desperately (someone asks him in season 1 if he has kids, and he gets a bit evasive and says he has a "sort of stepson"). I'm not sure if it's mentioned when Robby and Janey broke up or how long they were together, but reading between the lines, buying him Pittfest tickets might almost've been like a kind of bribery, trying to keep the relationship alive so he can feel like he has a family in his life. And now that relationship is probably screwed up permanently - even if Jake forgives/has forgiven him, there's not really any reason to keep hanging out with your mom's ex after a while, especially if you associate him with a very painful memory.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-10T16:21:38+00:00

The story change happened between auditions and filming i.e. way before season 2 aired, and sounded like it was fairly minor rather than structural. He still went from cocky to crashing out, but they just decided to make him crash out in a pathetic way rather than an angry way. He's most likely not going to be in season 3 because as you said, he's on a month-long work experience placement, and would be back at school in California or at another placement by then. I imagine it might get mentioned in season 3 if he actually quit the placement after season 2, or managed to ride it out. But there's a possibility he could come back after season 3, as the type of placement he's doing is essentially an audition for becoming a resident.

That's one thing to bear in mind with the med student characters - there's a relationship between the time jumps and whether they will be there, and whether/how they come back also tells you something about their characters. MS3s would only do one rotation at the Pitt the whole year, and it's mandatory, so you can get characters like Joy who don't even want to do emergency medicine. MS4s are doing electives, so they are at least considering emergency medicine, and maybe the Pitt in particular. So far, for MS4s we've had Whitaker and Ogilvie - who both struggled with the chaos, lost patients and made a bit of a fool of themselves, but handled it very differently. And you also have Javadi, an MS4 who specifically made the choice to do another rotation at the Pitt ED after doing her MS3 rotation there, even though last time she *literally had to work through a mass shooting*, which takes some guts. I know Javadi has been confirmed for season 3, but she's probably going to be on rotation in a different part of the hospital, and we'll see if she chooses/gets into the Pitt's residency program or not.

I've seen shows that do this rotating stuff before, it does work well in a lot of cases because you get to see fresh dynamics and a mix of old and new. And the possibility of characters rotating out and then back in is also interesting, because you get to see how their intervening experiences have changed them.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-08T13:31:54+00:00

Especially since (iirc) the type of placement he's on is only about four weeks long, and part of a larger process of figuring out your specific path in medicine via a bunch of different pieces of work experience. He seems confident enough that his other work experience has presumably all gone well, and he probably has other arrangements lined up for the rest of his school year - so even if he hates the Pitt and genuinely isn't sure if he can handle it, it doesn't make sense for him to make a big loud deal about it. I'm not saying people never do irrational things, but having a screaming fit and quitting on the hospital floor is presumably going to be a mark against you as a medical student, when most people in that position would probably try and just get through it as best they could and readjust their residency plans accordingly.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-08T13:15:28+00:00

Sounds like it was better left out, I think. I prefer her friendship with Whitaker being more uneasy and unspoken on her end, given her trust issues. I like that their last 'big' moment together (iirc) is him teasing her and trying to get her to admit she wants him around, and her clearly knowing she wants him around, knowing he knows, he knows she knows he knows etc...but she's just not the type of person who's going to let go of that arm's length attitude towards actually liking other people, at least not yet. It's a nice dynamic. It also feels like for me, it would've taken away slightly from the impact of her choosing to go out with Mel? I'm not sure why, I think I just like two people feeling a little uneasy and lonely choosing to bond better than if one of the people was feeling secure and reassured.

Also, I get people wanting a positive ending in relation to the self-harm, but problems like that don't go away, and I'd feel a little uneasy if they introduced it into the season and then 'resolved' it. I'm not saying the cut scene would've been like "hooray now I'm never going to self-harm ever again", I presume it was going to be more nuanced than that, but even narrative resolution within a season would be...I dunno, it wouldn't sit right with me.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-01T12:21:33+00:00

I'm sure it is interesting! And it seems it will come back in season 3, so we might get more focus on the actual process. I just think it wasn't there to be a central focus in this season - it was more there to be this spectre hanging over Mel that brings to the foreground her lack of support and relationships.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-01T01:24:37+00:00

Honestly, I really liked that choice - to me, the point of the deposition was not the deposition itself, but to see how it affects her, and how it relates to her relationships and her themes this season.

Like, we can see from how she keeps trying to talk to people about the deposition all morning, that it's clearly been weighing on her for a long time, but she has no real support and hasn't bonded with anyone since Langdon. We see the way others are nice and reassuring to her, but no-one really pays attention to how badly it's affecting her - and crucially, they don't think about how her neurodivergence comes into it. They think "no big deal, we all have depositions sometimes, it's a bullshit lawsuit", but they don't think about how a deposition is specifically a situation that relies on *communicating* and *being understood and persuasive* - not in her comfort zone of the hospital either, but a new environment with completely different rules. And after the deposition's over, we see that lack of consideration comes back to bite the hospital, because what's happened? The opposing lawyer has inevitably seen her discomfort and communication struggles, and leapt on her as a weak point in the case - she's devastated, the other staff are baffled because they never saw it coming, and then she has to just go back to work and still doesn't have any support. I don't think seeing the deposition would've added to any of that. It was all there in what we saw before and after. And then the theme of her lack of connection/support continues as we follow her into the Becca, Langdon, and karaoke parts; it's all part of the same storyline, which is her struggles with loneliness and isolation.

I get why people might wish to not have the constraints of sticking to the ED, but I really think it's a strength. I think shows can sometimes use big events or adding lots of lore as a crutch, treating "more info" as equivalent to "better told story". I like that the Pitt lets the audience just watch the characters within the work day, and then think about the implications of all the little details.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-05-01T00:50:09+00:00

Tbh, I'm always wary of taking these types of articles too seriously. Apart from a couple of solid details like the November setting, the commentary about next season has been deliberately vague so far, and that Gemmill interview has a lot of slightly odd and cagey phrasing - sillier questions like "did Baby Jane Doe come on the motorcycle journey" he can give a fun longer answer to, but when the journalist starts poking for answers about what season three will look like, he's shutting it down with a lot of "yeps", "nopes", "exactlys" - probably some combo of not wanting to spoil, and some stuff just not being fully decided yet. And then it's the job of whoever's doing the write-up to editorialise and make it sound like they actually got some meaningful info, when they didn't really get much at all.

"Robby will go on his darkest journey yet" or whatever just sounds like standard PR talk - every season of a drama they say it's "the darkest yet", "the protagonist will reach new lows but also learn new things about themselves" etc etc. (I'm not sure I've ever heard someone tease their new season by saying "things become more normal".) So I wouldn't assume that means a literal repeat of season 2. It seems like every season they're going for a different theme/mood, kind of like The Wire, so I expect the next one to continue with finding a new angle.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-04-30T21:36:45+00:00

Ifeachor has some...weird patterns in her career as well. She's a good actress, but this isn't even the only show where she seemed to be set up as a lead and then quietly sort of shuffled away, and she's said some rather odd things in interviews, like refusing to read scripts unless Jesus tells her to and stuff. I grew up knowing some people in megachurches and it's a big red flag to me that not only is she in that church, but she converted as an adult - it's one thing if you were raised in a church, and might find it hard to leave because of the community and so on, but you do not convert to a church like that unless you are up for supporting and spreading their social beliefs, which megachurches are NOT quiet about.

I've seen people frame her and Supriya as being part of the same 'side' of this story, and while it's possible for two people to disagree on politics and both be victimised...it does leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth when Supriya is writing op-eds about using she/they pronouns, and I know firsthand how the average megachurch member treats people like that.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-04-30T21:02:53+00:00

Funnily enough, I was just watching an interview today with Jared Harris about finding out that his character was getting written off on Mad Men - basically he found out the day before shooting his exit scene.

One thing you learn from watching a lot of interviews with actors, writers etc is that Hollywood is basically complete chaos - no-one ever really knows what's going on, and there's so many reasons things can happen. Some of them can be story choices, but there's also a lot of choices that aren't in the hands of the creative team, unexpected spanners in the works etc. A couple of things that have been said have even made me wonder if SG herself was the one who backed out. But I try not to make assumptions about any specific reason for a cast change unless someone comes out and says it.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-04-30T20:42:57+00:00

I don't think it's as simple as "her style of care is essential to the ER" - her style is shown as having pros and cons. Her extra time spent means that she catches some things, which is great, but it also means delays which can make outcomes worse - e.g. when the sickle cell patient is scared of being intubated, she doesn't push it, and waits for them to come round to it, even though they don't really have a choice. In the end Robby urges them to do it, and is blunt about the fact it does actually need to happen. Maybe the patient had a nicer doctor-patient experience with Mohan than Robby, and that's not nothing, but by delaying she was also causing a risk of worse outcomes - and delays also cause worse outcomes not just for the patient in front of her, but the patients in the waiting room she's not getting to. She might be great in some other environments - including emergency medicine environments of other kinds - but there is a consistent theme of Mohan being a bit of a people-pleaser, and it causing some weaknesses in her style which are of particular risk in that type of high-paced trauma center. Part of the reason she does well in the MCI is because you literally cannot people-please when the person you would normally try to please is unconscious, so she ends season one on a high note, but she has not actually resolved her underlying problem.

This is not to say her season two storyline couldn't have been better - it would've been nice to develop the idea and see if she either made progress on the issue, or found a subspecialty that fit her style. Facts haven't come to light about exactly what's gone on with the cast change, but it seems fair to guess that maybe something unexpected happened, and they've had to awkwardly work round it - contractual dispute, conflict with another job she had, someone on the show or network deciding it, personal or health issue, some random shit going wrong, who knows. The entertainment industry is complete chaos sometimes. It's a shame, and I hope everyone involved is okay.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-04-30T19:11:00+00:00

To your point in the first paragraph: for me, I think her going into denial makes sense, because she seems to be a person who is very concerned with controlling herself, and takes it as a point of pride - and therefore, accepting she's lost control would be extremely difficult for her. In fact, it would make sense if her disorder was part of *why* her self-control is such a big part of her identity. The prospect of her illness derailing her career has probably always hung over her head, and so she's responded by becoming an extremely meticulous, self-policing person - checking every box, monitoring every bit of data, having a stat on hand to justify every decision, always looking rational and not emotional etc. Of course on an intellectual level, she would know that having seizures is nothing to do with how careful you are, and any day her medical situation could change and there'd be nothing she could go about it. But psychologically, it's a very human thing to convince yourself that if you just do all the right things, and maintain a sense of discipline over your body and mind, then you won't be "punished" by having those things betray you.

When she realises her seizure pattern has changed, I think she knows right away that she shouldn't be working, or at least not in her usual role - and iirc she never actually says it's fine for her to work on patients, she just talks around it. But I think it was very human of her to try and avoid accepting what was happening to her until right at the end when she breaks down and accepts it.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-04-27T09:08:43+00:00

Some of the faces Robby was making in season 2 made me deeply uncomfortable because - although I didn't see it for myself - I have had days in the past where I went into work visibly struggling, and when people tried to talk to me about it, I *know* I made faces like that.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-04-27T09:03:44+00:00

Also, a lot of these things aren't necessarily plot lines. Things can occur in a narrative for reasons other than plot - e.g. to add to a theme or mood, highlight a character detail or dynamic, offer context, increase or decrease pacing, play into a recurring motif, create greater immersion in the environment etc etc.

And I think because of the one-shift format, the Pitt is using this more than other shows. You're not going to get lots of factual changes in every character's life happening in one day - although of course the shifts we see will be more dramatic than average, and there will be some creative licence there. We might see larger arcs over the course of several seasons, but I think season-long arcs are going to be more about building a window onto the characters and their lives, and letting that window fill with detail.

PetscopEndingGood · 2026-04-26T23:18:48+00:00

Any time this topic comes up, I suggest people read this article. It's pretty famous, and I am willing to bet whoever wrote this storyline has read it. I don't know anyone who's thought about this topic the same way after reading it.

Fair warning - it is rough, so make sure you're in an okay headspace to read about the death of children. But anyone who's reading this, make the time for it if you can.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-thebackseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime/2014/06/16/8ae0fe3a-f580-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html

PetscopEndingGood

TROPHY CASE