‘The Pitt’ failed Dr. Samira Mohan
How season two forgot the character it built and then wrote her off
Welcome to Girl Culture, the newsletter where Caroline Siede examines pop culture, feminism, and more. To get the full Girl Culture experience—including my rom-com column and my Disney princess series—you can become a paid subscriber.
Ever since Variety revealed Supriya Ganesh won’t be returning for a third season of The Pitt, there’s been a lot of assertions about Dr. Samira Mohan. That she’s not cut out for ER medicine. That she’s a natural fit for geriatrics. That this was obviously where her arc was headed all along. That it totally makes sense that she won’t be in season three even though it’s set four months into her final year of residency training. But as someone who watched my finale screener before the news broke and assumed the show was setting up a big, meaty ongoing relationship arc for Samira and her prickly mentor Dr. Robby, none of those assertions quite sat right with me. So, like any good doctor—er, TV critic—I decided to run a full diagnostic.
By that I mean, I went back and rewatched both seasons of The Pitt in one Easter weekend binge. And I was shocked to discover just how much the show had basically rewritten Samira’s entire character between seasons. It’s not just that she has a tougher shift in season two than she did last year, it’s that her once complex characterization has been replaced with something much more simplistic, conventional, and borderline offensive. (She literally kills a man because she gets distracted thinking about her eggs drying up.) Even worse, the fact that she’s leaving means The Pitt won’t get to challenge or undo or deepen any of that in the future. The absolute best-case scenario here is that next season is about Dr. Robby realizing he did wrong by his one-time mentee by projecting his personal issues onto her. But even then, that means the show is depicting workplace bias in action by… cutting a woman of color from the cast and making the story about a white guy feeling bad it.
So who was Samira Mohan originally and what did she become in season two? Well for one thing, the idea that she’s a softhearted, empathetic doctor who spends too much time with her patients because she cares about them isn’t actually how she’s presented at all. Samira does care about her patients and she does spend a lot of time talking to them, but that’s more out of a data-driven desire to understand who they are in order to get their diagnosis right. The person who will sit with their patients just to talk through how they’re feeling is McKay or Whitaker or (most notably) Robby. Samira is the one who asks about a patient’s social media career specifically to deduce that she’s suffering from mercury poisoning rather than experiencing a psychotic break.
When Robby chides her for being slow, it’s not because she can’t handle a crisis. (In fact, she thrives in the mass casualty event or when she leaps into leadership mode to help a sickle cell patient in pain.) It’s because she wants to understand the big picture before she jumps in with a solution—particularly because she’s hyperaware of how racial biases can impact medical care, which is how her father died when she was 13 years old. The idea that Samira is sweet and slow and should therefore work with older patients doesn’t stem naturally from her more analytical season one characterization at all. She’s Sherlock Holmes, not Izzie Stevens.
