The Pitt's Noah Wyle On Robby's Selective Compassion — And Why He Can't Extend It To Langdon
By the end of "The Pitt" Season 2, Episode 6, Robby's instinct at the close of the previous hour — wanting to bring Louie a beer — takes on a heavier meaning. What initially reads as an unconventional choice is reframed as an act of compassion once the HBO Max medical drama reveals Louie's backstory: decades earlier, he lost his pregnant wife in a car accident, a trauma that shattered his life. And that compassion Robby has for PTMC's frequent flyer (R.I.P.!) stands in stark contrast to his behavior toward Langdon — his refusal to extend tha same grace, despite the honest work Langdon has done to overcome his demons.
When I sit down with Noah Wyle to unpack the episode, I first asked about Robby bringing Louie a beer, and where that impulse came from.
"That beer came from a very specific anecdote," he reveals. "There was a doctor named Dr. Paul Farmer. Tracy Kidder wrote a book called 'Mountains Beyond Mountains' about him. He was a really significant figure. He worked in Massachusetts but did a lot of relief work in Africa with AIDS patients. And he was the kind of physician who would have brought that alcoholic patient a beer because it's got a lot of calories in it. It would stave off the DTs. He needs it. It's the decent thing to do. It's not going to hurt him. But it's that kind of unorthodox approach that I thought, 'I want to borrow some of that for Robby.' So that came from a very specific place."
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But that explanation only sharpens the contrast at the center of Episode 6. If Robby is capable of that kind of empathy for a patient like Louie, why does he struggle to let Langdon back in?
"That's complicated," Wyle admits. "That's the stuff we worked through over the course of the season. You want to believe in the beginning that it's a sense of betrayal and dishonesty that's at root there. And then you get a sense that it might be a little bit of tough love. Like, 'don't come back here and think that everything is going to be hunky-dory. You kind of have to earn your keep again.'
"Then there's another aspect of it: 20 percent of the people that come back relapse," Wyle explains, which leads Robby to ask of Langdon: "'Are you going to be that one in five?' And then part of it is, 'You didn't fail me, I failed you. I'm the teacher. You're the student. This happened under my watch. I was supposed to be looking out for you.' So, how does this reflect on me ultimately? All of that complexity is in addition to the fact that Langdon is now coming back from having walked the therapeutic road. He's humbled himself. He's faced his demons. And he's come back to rebuild his life — none of which Robby has done yet. That's kryptonite to Superman, and until Robby's willing to admit that he could use a dose of kryptonite, he doesn't want anything to do with it."