The Pitt's Noah Wyle And Katherine LaNasa Talk Violent End To Episode 9 And 'Existential Crisis' That Will Follow
During their first hour down in The Pitt, emergency department chief Michael "Robby" Robinavitch tells the new med students and interns that charge nurse Dana Evans (played by Katherine LaNasa) is the most important person they will meet on Day 1. "She is the ringleader of our circus," he says, before instructing them to "do whatever she says, when she says it."
Alas, nurses don't always get the respect they deserve.
The shift is beginning to weigh on everyone in Episode 9 — the doctors, nurses and custodial crew are all visibly shaken by the loss of a young drowning victim — but Dana doesn't get a moment to catch her breath. Before long, she's out in chairs, breaking up a brawl between warring moms, and placating Doug Driscoll, an irate patient (played by Drew Powell) who attempts to sneak past security and into triage. It's only at the end of another harrowing hour that Dana manages to step outside for a cigarette — and it's there, in the ambulance bay, that she is ambushed by Driscoll. He punches her in the face, knocks her to the ground, and walks off without any remorse.
Series star and executive producer Noah Wyle, who penned Episode 9, tells me that the assault on Dana is meant to represent the rise in violence against health care workers in recent years. "But I think there's also something else going on, which is an erosion of our sense of decorum and decency," he posits. "We wanted to depict that, and Dana is a perfect choice because she is so instrumental to the running of the place. She gives her life to the work, and she's an innocent victim. It underscores the importance of recognizing the strain that these people work under every day — and sometimes the threat."
LaNasa concurs, adding that "Dana gets her whole sense of self from this job. Her mother died when she was 16, she has been working there for 30 years... she even volunteered there in high school. The emergency department has been Dana's entire life," and this is the worst thing that has ever happened to her. "It rocks her world."
I ask LaNasa whether she thinks Dana was Driscoll's intended target, or whether he would have assaulted any Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center employee he had encountered in chairs — be it Mateo, McKay or Javadi — had they been standing outside when he left against medical advice. "Possibly," she answers, "but she's in charge of the department, and she's the one that put up a front and told him what's what. She said, 'Hey, we're super busy, we're doing the best that we can,' and he didn't see [how hard she was working] that whole day. She takes a three-minute smoke break, and that's all he sees. Nobody has seen him, she's out there smoking, and he loses it.
"In a way, we're also supposed to see things from his point of view," LaNasa explains. "He thinks he's having a heart attack, and he's sitting in the waiting room for hours, and that's what the show is about as well — shining a light on the fact that people are not getting seen because the hospital is being run inefficiently."
As for whether Dana can go so far as to empathize with her attacker, given that inefficiency, LaNasa isn't sure. "This happens at the end of the ninth hour. We do 15 hours, so there are only six more hours, in one day, removed from the attack. That's a really short time to process that and come to a place of compassion, so I don't think I ever got there," she says. "There is [an upcoming episode] when we refer back to him, and we're talking about whether or not to press charges, and I can tell you that, without even working on it, what came up for me was fear. I realized that I'm afraid of seeing that guy [again]. In my thinking about him, under no circumstance did I wrap around and feel compassion for the guy.
"This guy wasn't psychologically imbalanced," LaNasa points out. "He wasn't high, he wasn't drunk, he wasn't schizophrenic — he was just angry. There's something incredibly degrading about the fact that someone thinks they can just beat me up."
As Dana nears the end of her shift, she will begin to ask herself, "How do you go home and raise your own daughters and your granddaughter and say, 'I'm going to go back to this place where I got beat up?' How do you do that? What kind of example is that? There's a lot of fear about leaving the hospital because if I leave, I have to face what happened. If I don't go home, I don't have to face what happened. If I tell my husband, surely he is going to say, 'You can't go back,' and I can't process how I feel about it." But one thing's for certain: "There's a Dana before she gets hit, and there's a Dana after she gets hit," and in subsequent episodes, "we will see Dana go through an existential crisis as she deals with this. She puts on a brave face, but she's broken now."
What did you think of The Pitt Season 1, Episode 9? Drop your thoughts in a comment below.