doctormohansamira

[doctormohansamira]

I just want you all to know, I am being soooo restrained by not ranting about this at length, and connecting it how in The Pitt, we can easily read the situation as none of the residents or med students are getting laid and the only one feeling actually bereft from the lack of sex and romance is Javadi (even Santos! We see people flirting with her; we see little of her flirting back), and while the others have things in their lives that feel empty, sex has nothing to do with it.

Maybe one day, fandoms will stop equating sex with adulthood and a lack of it with infantilization.

[doctormohansamira]

Maybe one day, fandoms will stop equating sex with adulthood and a lack of it with infantilization.

[doctormohansamira]

Whenever I see people describe The Pitt as a "woke doctor show", I have to wonder what they would say if they watched New Amsterdam and met Max Goodwin.

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What happened to the mute button that used to exist, most people I block I really just want to mute. Blocking seems unnecessarily intense for most of these cases.

[doctormohansamira]

Honestly, my dream season two would be Samira’s turn to crash out while Robby is remembering why he practices medicine and coming to peace with himself and therefore coming to peace with Samira, culminating in it being his turn to give a pep talk, and it’s to her…

[doctormohansamira]

I saw someone say something about how the writers intend to bring everyone back for season two, but then, if they get more seasons, start to be more realistic about losing characters at different levels of training, which freaks me out specifically because of Samira. After season two, assuming the same time jump, she'll be done with her residency...like, yeah, she's amazing and should go do a cool fellowship, or get a new job somewhere far away from where she was trained and get that clean slate somewhere even compliments aren't grounded in the premise of her being too slow, but I don't want to lose her so fast. You can't send away the narrative heir to your main character!

[doctormohansamira]

Samira and Robby's interactions throughout the last four episodes are everything to me. She's one of the only main characters he doesn't have a lengthy exchange with in those episodes – he talks about religion with Whitaker. He stops to tell Mel that she was awesome and that he's glad she's with them, and he has multiple one on one interactions with her over the course of the treatment of the measles kid. He has that confrontation in the ambulance bay with Langdon. He talks at length to McKay about David and the broader meaning of her actions. He bursts into laughter about how this was Javadi's first shift, then tells her the next one will be easier, a moment very much specific to the two of them, even as there are a bunch of other people around, sharing in the laughter. It's really just Samira and Santos whom he doesn't talk to in any kind of depth.

This is...going to get long, I'm gonna add a read more.

When he tells Samira she's doing a good job, it's casual, in the middle of the chaos, while they're rushing around trying to do their jobs. When he asks if she's hanging in there after the crisis is over, it's not a one on one conversation, it's a general question about both her and Javadi. But even without a conversation, there's so much going on there. They're working so closely the entire time, even when they're on different patients, and as much as I would always want more of them interacting, because they are my favourite dynamic in the show by so much it's not even a contest, I didn't feel the loss of them in the last quarter of the show despite them not really talking about anything!

Before the patients start coming in, she follows him to ask where Collins went. He stops to check in on her, and she's explaining the case without so much as pausing what she's doing. He says, less to her than to the room in general, that she's on fire. Unlike every other time he compliments her, she doesn't stare after him in shock – she's too busy stabilizing the patient. She calls him over and explains another case, but it turns out, she doesn't really need him – he asks her what she's thinking, she tells him, and he confirms she should do what she thought she should. They work on intubating a patient together and he jokes about her having been spoiled by technology – and it's a line that could so easily be a criticism, but clearly isn't. He does not blame her for this in the slightest, because it's so out of the ordinary – the attending anesthesiologist was struggling with the same thing. She asks him about hospital procurement and why they don't stock something. She rushes to his side when Leah comes in, then jumps around to help other patients. He calls for her to go check on Mel when he's busy with Leah. When we're getting shots of pretty much all the residents, making it clear that everyone knows it's going poorly and Robby should be giving up, it's Samira that goes to stand next to Robby and ask if she can help. They do David's neurological workup together. He calls out specifically to her to finish up and go home. When he's yelling at Gloria, she's one of the three characters whose reactions we get a shot of. She's the one that asks what's funny when he's dissolving into laughter and the one that waves goodbye when he leaves.

These are all just brief interactions, spread out across several episodes, but the Robby and Samira dynamic is just this constant presence, and I adore it. There is so much happening in these last four episodes, and in them, as intense as everything is, as much pressure as they're under, Robby and Samira are in a better place than they were all season. Their interactions are lighter. After so many episodes of this lack of trust being a big thing in their relationship – Robby not trusting her clinical judgment, Samira not trusting him to not blow up at her – we get to see that when the chips are down and there's a crisis, there is a lot of trust. They work incredibly well together! He trusts her on the most critical patients and to go help the younger residents when he's otherwise occupied. She calls for his help repeatedly, and he drops whatever he's doing to go to her, knowing it'll be important. She knows pretty much immediately that Leah isn't going to make it, and she steps up to fill in for him elsewhere.

It means so much to me that Samira is the first person to indicate that she knows Leah's not going to make it, very shortly after she's brought in, and that while all the residents later are glancing over at Robby, very much aware that it's going poorly and he should have given up, Samira is the one resident to actually say something to him. They are constantly talking past each other. They are both trying to solve different systemic issues that, given the resources they have, are almost impossible to reconcile by a single person, and the fact of the matter is, the ER needs both of them, because it matters that people are trying to address both these problems, but it still is a huge strain on their relationship, not helped by how Robby lashes out at her when he's angry at himself. But when it’s Robby in distress, when it’s Robby doing what he accused her of doing all day...she has so much empathy and concern for him.

She's not Abbot, a peer that can straight up tell him that it's time to give up, that they're going to lose ten others if he keeps trying to save Leah. Not yet. What she is someone that deeply understands the impulse and the hard time he's having, who will step up when he can't. It's just such a phenomenal series of interactions to get across with so little conversation.

[doctormohansamira]

I like that the patients Samira and Javadi work on together are the "haven't you ever done anything stupid?" frat boy and the "I don't have friends" influencer. Man, these two are having a time.

[doctormohansamira]

I have very clear boundaries on what I consider canon, and while I think what the writers and actors think often informs canon, it's not actually canon unless it's textual. That being said, the idea that Samira is from New Jersey is a) extremely believable, given New Jersey's high percentage of Indian Americans, and b) gives me an unexpectedly strong idea of how she might relate to her cultural and ethnic background.

[doctormohansamira]

What do you think Bob from 2022 did that convinced someone he would steal an ambulance?

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Every time I see someone refer to Langdon as Frank, I have to stop and remind myself who the hell Frank is.

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Samira, the only character whom Robby asks how she did something, rather than the other way around. Love that for her.

[doctormohansamira]

So we (okay, I) talk a lot about the similarities between Robby and Samira, and how because of them, he's projecting his own issues and self loathing onto her in a way that is close to but not exactly what her actual problems are, and how that culminates in him continuing to try to save Leah after everyone else in the room knows it's a lost cause. But I think it's also worth noting that while Robby is expressing those same tendencies he was trying to stamp out of Samira, Samira is taking on the Robby role.

Robby starts off the mass casualty response as the one checking in on other people and zones – he's primarily in the red zone with Samira and Abbot, but he's moving around to where he's most needed at a given time – he starts off in triage with Shen, he helps McKay in pink, etc. But while Robby is working on Leah, entirely focused on her, Samira fills in for what he was doing before. She helps Abbot, Langdon, and Mel with their patients; she goes out to check on Shen and Ellis in triage. She's running around and slotting in everywhere she's needed.

There are no two characters more alike than the two of them. It's perfect. I love it.

[doctormohansamira]

Both Shamsi and Javadi asking about who needs something and being told everyone is cute. Sure, they have a deeply complicated relationship and poor Javadi needs a gap year at the very least, not to mention doing anything that's not medicine anywhere that's not where her parents work, but we really can see the similarities beween them.

[doctormohansamira]

If you like Robby, but hate Samira, hate to break it to you, you don't actually like Robby!

I got an alert from a reply to one of my posts where someone was saying that if there's one Samira Mohan hater alive, they're alive? I already had them blocked, but clearly not from my sideblog, now I have to go figure out who the hell this person is so I can block them again from here.

[doctormohansamira]

I got an alert from a reply to one of my posts where someone was saying that if there's one Samira Mohan hater alive, they're alive? I already had them blocked, but clearly not from my sideblog, now I have to go figure out who the hell this person is so I can block them again from here.

[doctormohansamira]

Actually, maybe that's why I'm misaligned with a lot of people...because I think these disparate readings can both be believable in different contexts, I'm just never going to be aligned with people firmly in one camp or the other.

I feel like I have such a specific read of the Robby Samira dynamic that I'm always just a little bit misaligned with the way most people talk about it, which feels very weird, because I also think part of what's appealing about their dynamic is that there are a lot of different angles through which their relationship can be viewed while maintaining the "he sees himself in her and it drives him nuts" element that I feel is at the core of it that I think can be made very believable.