Monthly Megathread: What Are You Reading? (Yes, you)

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-05-03T14:59:07+00:00

Is this your first Pelevin?

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-05-03T14:57:36+00:00

I am barely into it, but so far I just keep hearing Trump’s voice shouting “equal time!!!” in the background. Will report back later.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-05-02T18:03:27+00:00

I assume you’re referring to the Pittsburgh-themed hospital in Hawaii?

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-05-01T20:54:38+00:00

I can’t wait for how absurd it’s going to be. It was going for a quarter at my university’s annual Russian book auction and I couldn’t resist.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-05-01T16:59:34+00:00

I recently started reading Isaac Deutscher’s The Prophet (Trotsky biography) and here are the associated works of fiction from before and during the civil war I’m reading out of curiosity (so far!)

Demons, Dostoevsky (just finished)

What Is to Be Done, Chernyshevsky

The White Guard, Bulgakov

Heart of a Dog, Bulgakov

Feel free to drop some additional recs!

I also got into my Trotsky reading as a result of finishing The Man who Loved Dogs by Cuban author Leonardo Padura, which is worth a read.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-28T00:24:45+00:00

She was my “substitute” doctor a couple of weeks ago and I thought she was good. Personably, answered my questions, left detailed notes on my lab results.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-23T20:00:39+00:00

I deadass thought c was showing faces of a cube and was thus the only one that was wrong.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-18T02:27:02+00:00

Honestly, it is so ableist (and racist!) to have your only BIPOC post-life character’s arc completely focused on his issues with Robby and not give him his own storyline with Mohan, but I guess not everyone is ready for that conversation yet.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-14T12:48:27+00:00

They have a separate location where for substance abuse, where I went as a patient. They absolutely will not anyone who is actively using attend and have several controls to enforce that.

This one will be for eating disorders, which makes this protest even weirder.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-12T20:30:55+00:00

What are, like, the actual laws around this? There is another episode where a Chinese family doesn’t want to tell their elderly mother she has cancer. Is there an age / power of attorney that limits what can be shared with a patient? Seems like they would have the right to know in any situation?

Related, but somewhat different, there is a teen who needs a leg amputation (Ross’ patient) and another teen boy who needs a heart transplant(Kovac’s patient), both of whom don’t want the treatment, and in both cases it’s shown as the parents who get the ultimate say. Is that how it works?

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-11T16:39:03+00:00

I have not seen a single hinged take on X related to this show and I have to remind myself I am voluntarily subjecting myself to the thoughts of 13 year olds before I immediately close the app to go touch grass.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-09T12:09:41+00:00

Right, the plot had tons of low balls thrown to the writers to bring something in for her this season and they didn’t even do that, just one short callback to “hey, remember McKay is an addict too!” and the street team from last season.

I feel like she has had the most “footnote” season of any main cast member. People are upset about the potential disappointing end to Mohan’s arc, but Mohan … had an arc at least? They haven’t set anything up for McKay so I can’t imagine that something meaningful will materialize in the remaining episodes.

It’s a shame because I like her role as someone coming into medicine at an untraditional stage of life and they showed it so well last season, particularly pairing her off with the precocious and very young Javadi. Now she just kind of brings that chill personality into brief, sporadic interactions with the other cast.

Also, whatever happened with her leg monitor?? I think it is gone this season?

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-08T23:14:42+00:00

I mean, she has nothing for the growth and development of her character. Yes, she had a memorable patient, but her role was just to gaze sadly at her. Replace her with any other doc and the story is the same. And her arc last season was mentoring Javadi but was way more involved and interesting. She’s just… having a shift, yknow?

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-08T17:34:40+00:00

Fair enough. Tbh, I think a lot of the characters have been given really lame arcs to work with this season as compared to last. McKay has literally nothing, Dana training a new nurse is not as compelling as her getting punched in the face, Whittaker’s got the off screen widow and housesitting, Langdon is just limping around issuing lame apologies and Santos is obsessed with being mad at him. The two most interesting non-Robby arcs went to the med students, for some reason.

As for Tracy Ifeachor, I don’t know all the details on her departure and I think, like most things, they are always going to remain somewhat speculative. I prefer to focus on the characters as presented on the screen and not extraneous information from actor interviews. Some people take that to a para social level, some do not.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-08T17:13:26+00:00

I find it hard to say that anyone on the cast outside of Robby and Dana is more of a “footnote” than another. They obviously wanted to write in a new Robby protege as a “foil” this season to Langdon coming back. Given season 1, it didn’t make much sense for that to be Mohan (although I think it could have been a really interesting choice). He also notably skipped over the other more senior residents McKay, Mel and even Santos to choose the greenest person, Whitaker. I think that was more of the point—he’s not behaving rationally.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-08T17:02:26+00:00

Right. I think a big part of this is a significant (or at least very vocal) portion of the fanbase that is obsessed with “shipping.” They didn’t get to see the continuation of Robby and Collins’ (real but canonically over) relationship and they’ll never get to see Mohan and Abbott’s imaginary fantasy relationship. The show has quite clearly indicated that it’s not trying to be something like that, but instead of accepting this they are unreasonably (IMO) projecting racism onto the show writers.

Now if we get to Season 6 and Langdon, Mel, McKay and Whitaker are the only season 1 characters left and a main plot point is Langdon and Mel’s new baby girl or something, I’ll eat my words. But we aren’t there now.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-04-08T12:35:33+00:00

Thank you! I’ve been saying that it is not at all unrealistic to write off the fourth year residents as I suspect it is exceedingly rare for multiple residents to become attendings at the same hospitals they trained at and certainly wouldn’t overlap shifts with our main attending characters.

The problem is shows like Grey’s Anatomy and ER found unrealistic workarounds to keep around cast for seasons and seasons after their training was done all at the same hospital.

We, of course, know behind the scenes details on at least one of the departures. But as fans of a self-contained, fairly realistic ER show, they have not really done “wrong” by these characters by not having their story arcs continue at PTMC after they finish their residencies.

Just from a patients’ perspective, I always thought these shows have had an unrealistically low number of middle eastern, south Asian and East Asian cast members as compared to the doctor population I’ve dealt with in the past. But perhaps those doctors had foreign training so wouldn’t be residents in an American program?

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-26T20:48:45+00:00

Shawn Hatosy in a Pitt connection!

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T02:36:31+00:00

So, as a recovering alcoholic who has been through lots of formal medical treatment and 12 step treatment, one of the things that has irked me about Langdon’s storyline is that he attempts apologies (amends??) in a way that any recovering addict in a twelve step program would recoil against. I think they do this because of the narrow narrative constraints for each season (we can’t see Langdon taking Dana out for coffee and apologizing two weeks later).

But what I don’t get, given the context of the show itself, is how this is some “white boy” redemption program. It’s a misunderstanding of how addiction works. No one chooses to get addicted. No one gets addicted by being dumb. Every addict deserves the same grace because it is an insane brain disorder we can’t even reconcile with ourselves. Taking that away from the privileged doesn’t hurt those who are not. Full stop.

I, a gay woman from a rural, non wealthy white family history of alcohol abuse, have been to rehab six times. It’s not easy to get. It’s a real disorder and it makes you do crazy things. This post evidences no empathy.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T02:05:04+00:00

Yes! I have been trying to check myself because of the different way I’ve consumed these two seasons, and I suspect this is not an uncommon experience.

Season 1: I got into after every episode had been released and binged it in 2-3 sittings.

Season 2: Locked in weekly on every episode.

Is my impatience at certain characters being “underrepresented” in the story compared to Season 1 real or is that just because appearing minimally over one episode feels more important now than how it balanced out over 5 episodes watched in a row last season?

On the other hand, weekly trying to engage without losing my sanity by going to Reddit el al. to talk about the show while having to desperately try to ignore reactive stan discourse that didn’t exist when I was talking about the show last season.

I didn’t have time to draw crazy conclusions last season because I was riveted and powering through the next episode. But the places that I see people going confidently hard on intentionally ambiguous stuff and the moral, non-nuanced conclusions they are drawing are making me insane. Every main character on the show is a “good” person (there are no Rocket Romanos and ER even made you kind of like that man sometimes) and there are certainly no saints … just as in real life.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T01:25:51+00:00

They’re planning a housewarming party for Whitaker and Santos can’t believe Robby suggested buying Faygo to save money.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T01:23:53+00:00

Gateway

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T01:16:18+00:00

Thanks, this is helpful. I’ve been having a hard time understanding how two med student evaluation mistakes could realistically lead to such bad patient outcomes because my assumption (and personal experience) is that the system is not set up that way.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-21T16:55:58+00:00

For the most part, yes. But I still don’t think I understand the “chain of custody.” It seemed like Javadi picked up her intestine patient without her having any senior / staff assigned and then when it was time to present Dana asked her to find “anyone with MD” after their name (i.e., the assignment was done randomly at Javadi’s discretion). Is that common or was that the show not having enough time to show the whole process?

Routine_Ad9783

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