Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers for “The Pit,” season 2, episode 13, “7:00 p.m.,” now available on HBO Max.
Katherine LaNasa says Dana Evans, who plays the charge nurse on The Pit, never used the word “trigger,” but the Emmy winner can’t help but play with the word as she prepares to wrap up the final 13 hours of Season 2. For the past two episodes, Dana has been at odds with Robbie (Noah Wyle). Robbie is her strongest ally in the ED and is usually the one who levels her, and she also offers his services.
But neither is up and running at its best by July 4th at 7 p.m. In Dana’s case in particular, she’s triggered on two fronts. After student nurse Emma (Letitia Hollard) is attacked by a comatose patient, whom Dana subdues with a punch and a strangely convenient Versed shot, she struggles to find composure while battling PTSD from her own attack last season.
“She’s incredibly off-balance,” LaNasa told Variety. “She’s still really shaken by that punch. She didn’t take care of herself. I think that’s part of why it was so important for her to set herself up so that rape victims could get their own justice if they changed their mind. Because Dana didn’t do that. Dana didn’t press charges. If you want to make that choice, it’s a good one. But I don’t know if it’s working out well for Dana.”
Adding to her defensive behavior is Robbie’s relentless interrogation about the tactics she used to deal with Emma’s attackers. Every time Robbie tries to ask why he had sedatives in his pocket or what really happened, she starts asking her own questions about Robbie’s increasingly worrying mindset as his motorcycle vacation approaches.
By the end of episode 13, she confronts him again about his inability to articulate the true purpose of his trip and his volatile anger at his ED condition in the face of his impending absence. She reminds him that she can live without him until he comes back, just like she did when she quit last season following her assault.
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“What if you don’t come back?” he reacts in the episode’s final exchange, leaving a stunned Dana black in the face.
“I think she’s going to be out there alone even though he’s gone, and Dana is also the one who doesn’t face her own need for help,” says LaNasa. “But more importantly, she’s very organically stressed that he’s not okay and won’t promise to come back. It’s that he won’t answer me, sometimes won’t even look at me. If he… It would be her worst nightmare if something happened to her. They’ve been through this together for decades. In a way, it’s like losing a spouse. I think that’s why she came this far without being able to contact him.”
This isn’t the first shout-out match they’ve had this season or this episode. The last few encounters left Dana on the verge of tears or an angry scream at herself in the bathroom. Robbie isn’t always smiling after the game either. But this final story of the episode is their most honest and disturbing story.
Dana tells Robbie that he is overly confrontational and aggressive and that he needs to go home if that’s what he wants, before admitting that he may not be coming back. Her exact words are that he needs a time-out, just like she used to give her children. He responds by telling her that she doesn’t need a mother. He had one of them, he said, and she walked away from him.
In that moment, Dana learns something deeply personal about her friend and colleague that she never knew before, and she flatly apologizes for stepping on an emotional landmine she didn’t know was there. Robbie replies, “It doesn’t matter. Who cares?”
“I love that moment and I try to justify it to myself,” says LaNasa. “You can think people weren’t close[with their family]and if they didn’t open up about their parents or something, they just let it go. I don’t have much of a relationship with either of my parents, and most people don’t know much about me. It doesn’t really come out, so I can understand why it doesn’t happen for them.”
But for Dana, her maternal instincts towards Robbie come from genuine concern that her friend has decided to take his own life. “There’s a kind of panicky desperation that he evoked in her,” LaNasa said. “I think everything feels horrible, and I think that’s also what’s happening when she doesn’t feel okay. I had a therapist once who said to my husband and I, ‘There’s no way we can both have problems at the same time. Who’s going to listen?’ At this point, Dana and Robbie have no one to listen to. No one is doing well. No one is a pillar.”
Although they spend the episode oscillating between avoiding each other and attacking each other, Dana never loses sight of her bedside manner. Along with Emma, she continues to care for the homeless Digby (Charles Baker) for the season. They gave her a bath and now she offers a haircut. They talk about his family and his daughter’s wedding, gently placating him with the idea of grooming. Emma’s kindness towards him cheers Dana up, and the mentor-mentor relationship is often limited to Robbie and his residents. After worrying about her safety all day, Lanasa says it wasn’t hard to build up a sense of pride for the young woman sitting in front of her.
“It’s easy to feel that,” she says. “I’m really proud of Leticia too. She just graduated from Julliard and came on set. It’s incredible.”
In that scene, Dana pulls back the curtain on her family, but given the series’ four-wall, one-day framework, she doesn’t say much and viewers haven’t seen much. She states that she cut her husband Benji’s hair throughout their marriage. She later told Robbie about her children during a heated conversation with him. Although the series never paints viewers with Dana’s full family tree, LaNasa often reflects on who she is outside of her pressure cooker job. It’s so natural to her understanding of Dana that she can start doing it right away.
“Dana has a daughter in middle school, so it was tough,” she says. “That’s what’s causing her a lot of stress. You’re just doing what you do with your kids. If one of your kids is doing poorly, that’s how well you’re doing. She has a daughter, and that seems to be a little frustrating and I always hope that the child is okay. In my imagination, she is very close to her granddaughter, who is 23 years old and who she looks forward to seeing at some shows.”In the evening, she comes over and we have a movie, we have pizza, we have a little ritual. ”
As Dana’s husband, LaNasa hasn’t fully accepted the little insight the show’s writers have given him thus far.
“I know people say he’s going to fly off the handle, but I think I generally see him as just a big, down-to-earth guy,” she says. “Dana’s house is very clean and minimalistic, and I don’t think she’s in bad taste. She just likes the peace and quiet. I think she likes having her family over. But I think Dana is tired. Dana is really tired. I also think that after she was beaten, she was going to go to a family cabin in the woods somewhere and rest for a while, but it really didn’t work out because she didn’t get any help.” “This isn’t working. Go get help.” So I think she got some help. I don’t think she received enough help. ”
All of this informs the person standing in front of Robbie at the end of episode 13, pleading with him to be honest about what he really envisions on this sabbatical. LaNasa was worried about the writers’ choice to give the stalwart duo of Robbie and Dana so many hurdles this season, but they ultimately succumbed to their free fall.
“Noah was very disappointed that we were going to clash, so I said, ‘Let’s do it,'” she says. “I have a lot of faith in[executive producers]John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill. I didn’t want to give the impression that they were mean to each other. I want the audience to know that they love each other, but they’re human beings and they’re struggling, and I want that to be told in the story as well.”
