WARNING! This article contains SPOILERS for The Pitt season 1, episode 8!When I finally sat down to binge-watch The Pitt season 1, I didn’t think there would be an episode that would leave me sobbing uncontrollably – something that doesn’t often happen to me when watching TV shows. I have to binge-watch shows for a living, so regardless of whether I know that a certain storyline is meant to be emotionally devastating ahead of time or I go into it blind, I’ve tried to avoid letting certain stories affect me too deeply so that I can focus on the work and keep watching.

That doesn’t mean I never shed a tear during heartbreaking TV moments (such as One Day’s ending), but not necessarily to this level. The Pitt, however, became an unexpected exception. After days of a friend telling me that I need to watch Max’s The Pitt, I set aside a weekend and did so. Thinking it would just be a gripping medical drama, I surprised myself by fully crying no less than three times before The Pitt season 1’s ending. One particular episode’s excruciating double whammy was so emotionally devastating that I had to turn off my TV for the night.

I Don’t Usually Cry At TV Shows, But The Pitt Season 1 Episode 8’s Teddy Bear & Honor Walk Scenes Got Me

“2:00 P.M.” Is Heartbreaking From Beginning To End

The beginning of “2:00 P.M.” was already full of tension and heartache. Collins had just suffered a miscarriage at the end of the previous episode, it looked like Ginger might be abandoned by her daughter, and Robby was still trying to carefully approach the subject of getting Nick’s parents to agree to organ donation. Then, a six-year-old girl, Amber, was rushed into the emergency department with her grandmother and little sister. After intense efforts by The Pitt’s main characters to resuscitate her, the young child was pronounced dead from drowning, having jumped into a pool to save her sister.

As if the heart-wrenching screams and cries of Amber’s grieving parents weren’t enough, The Pitt made the emotional weight of her sudden death even more excruciating through a quiet scene between Dr. Mel King and Amber’s younger sister, Bella. With Bella being intent on seeing her older sister but not being aware of Amber’s death, Mel came up with a solution to help Bella say everything she wanted to say to her sister, without having to do so to Amber’s dead body. Mel gave Bella a teddy bear to speak to, saying the bear would relay the message to Amber.

At that moment, we’re watching an innocent young girl tell her big sister, her best friend, her hero, and her savior how grateful she is for her – but Bella never actually gets to say these words directly to Amber. The five-year-old will never play with her sister again, and she’ll have to go the rest of her life without her best friend. It’s an emotionally gut-wrenching realization that becomes even more difficult to stomach when remembering that Amber died saving Bella. As she grows older, how will that guilt and pain manifest?

We’re not just grieving alongside this five-year-old waiting in The Pitt‘s emergency department, we’re mourning the life she will never have with Amber and how drastically her sister’s death will change her life forever. Amber saved Bella, and she would only want a fruitful life and future for her sister. But, it’s still devastating to think of how Bella will contend with the situation as she grows older.

Even when Bella spoke to the teddy bear, she was apologizing to Amber for playing with her toys and arguing with her. Bella describes a typical sibling dynamic that involves various factors of love and annoyance, but is something they would have grown out of as they grew up. But, that tragically won’t be the case for Bella, and not playing with Amber’s toys won’t bring her back.

All of these emotions and future conflicts that are at play in the brief lines said by a five-year-old carry so much poignant weight, and, as someone with three younger siblings, it’s hard not to get emotional about it. Plus, that emotion becomes all the more intense through the teddy bear being given to Bella by Mel, who has spent much of her life and free time dedicating herself to being her sister’s caretaker. Mel knows first-hand how important that sister relationship is, so the devastation she feels for Bella makes the scene even more difficult to watch as a viewer.

Then, just after the teddy bear scene ends, The Pitt’s realistic season 1 episode throws in another wave of emotions by showing the honor walk for Nick, a college student who was declared braindead after taking a fentanyl-laced Xanax. We had already been gradually watching the grief of the doctors, his parents, his friends, and Jenna, who took the drug with him but survived, and the honor walk was a tragic culmination of all these stages in accepting Nick’s death.

It was a devastating goodbye, with everyone silently surrounded to watch as a teenage boy was wheeled out with a Pittsburgh Steelers blanket covering his body. A promising, well-loved kid with his entire life ahead of him made one small mistake, and his future was snatched away from him. Nick’s case was one of the most brutal ongoing stories throughout The Pitt season 1, and it had a tragically bittersweet ending as he prepared to donate his organs to save someone else’s life. Nick and Amber’s deaths were a sob-inducing two-punch, with both kids’ endings revolving around saving others.

“2:00 P.M.” Is One Of The Most Heartbreaking TV Episodes I’ve Ever Watched

It Ranks High Among The Saddest Episodes I’ve Seen

From start to finish, “2:00 P.M.” is an emotional roller coaster, and sets the bar high for future stories in The Pitt season 2. Rather than playing with emotions for shock factor, it’s an intensely human exploration of grief, child death, the complexities of saving others, and compassion. Those intensely unexpected deaths are among the most difficult to grieve, and that theme has been present in some of the other saddest TV show episodes I’ve ever watched.

In the category of TV show episodes that make me cry harder than usual and immediately put a pit in my stomach, I now put The Pitt’s “2:00 P.M.” alongside tragic outings like Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “The Body” (in which Buffy unexpectedly loses her mother), How I Met Your Mother’s “Bad News” (when Marshall unexpectedly loses his father), episode 10 of Normal People (when Connell’s friend dies by suicide and he experiences severe depression), and One Day’s series finale (when Emma is unexpectedly killed in an accident and Dexter experiences years of grief).

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Grief is one of the most purely human emotions that one can experience, and when it comes unexpectedly, that devastating emotional toll can be all the more intense and difficult to recover from. It’s an emotion that can more easily evoke extreme empathy and compassion from viewers to fictional characters and stories. It’s also something that we don’t always see portrayed as intensely and frequently in TV medical dramas, whereas The Pitt gives great focus to these tragic experiences’ impacts on families and the staff alike throughout the course of one fifteen-hour shift.

The Pitt Season 1 Episode 8’s Most Tragic Scenes Reversed The Context Of Mr. Spencer’s Devastating Episode 4 Death

The Expected & Unexpected Mourning Scenes Were Difficult To Watch

While “2:00 P.M.” is arguably The Pitt season 1’s most emotional episode, there were plenty of moments dealing with grief and loss beforehand that weren’t easy to watch without choking up. One example is with the story of the Spencer family, as the elderly Mr. Spencer’s battle with pneumonia led to his kids being put in a difficult position. While Mr. Spencer had a do-not-resuscitate order, his adult children weren’t ready to let go of their father yet, and they had the ability to override his decision.

Despite cautions from Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby that keeping him alive might simply give him a slower and more painful death, they sought treatment. The siblings didn’t easily agree on what to do with their father, but after he ripped out his breathing tube, they decided to adhere to his wishes and allow him to pass away naturally without pain. Though their father being elderly with health problems meant they knew it would happen some day, The Pitt season 1, episode 4’s ending still dealt with the devastation of children making the choice to let go of their beloved father.

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Later in that episode, Robby told Spencer’s son about a ritual phrase to say that can help with saying goodbye to a loved one, “I love you. Thank you. I forgive you. Please forgive me.” It sounds simple, but those words come with decades of hurt, love, and guilt on both sides. Without having to hash through every wrong decision they’ve made in their life and thank them for everything great they’ve done, they can use these words as a heartbreaking catch-all to address the complications of a parent-child relationship.

It was one of the Max TV show’s most heartbreaking moments, as the vulnerable children address how much love and appreciation they had for their father while still acknowledging the resentment they might hold against their parent and the guilt they harbor for their own wrongs. That confession while saying goodbye is similar to the emotional weight of the speech that Bella makes to Amber through the teddy bear in episode 8, but under very different circumstances.

With the Spencers, their grief centers around having expected that their father’s death might occur soon, given his age and illnesses, but not being able to accept it when that moment arrives. Meanwhile, Amber and Nick’s families could never have been prepared for their children to pre-decease them. The context for grieving their loved ones is completely different, but The Pitt masterfully approaches both heartbreaking situations with care, compassion, and complexity.

The Pitt

8/10

Release Date

January 9, 2025

Network

Max

Showrunner

R. Scott Gemmill

Directors

Amanda Marsalis

Writers

Joe Sachs, Cynthia Adarkwa

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  Noah Wyle

  Dr. Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch

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  Tracy Ifeachor

  Uncredited