135: February 2026

The Trigun anime reboot is back and I have a lot of thoughts, but most of them are half-baked and I've written about the series a bit for this newsletter before, so I'm going to hold off on going long on Vash the Stampede again, at least this month anyway. (I reserve the right to go absolutely feral about my tall blonde anime son in next month's issue.) Instead, I want to talk a little bit about The Pitt, a show that is ruining my life (complimentary).

My husband and I got hooked on the series early in the year. Normally I'm very bad at TV (it's such a time commitment), but I also always burn out a little on movies right around the new year, and my husband is good at keeping up with interesting TV shows, so when we were looking for something to watch and realized we had the time and the mental space for The Pitt ahead of its second season, we jumped on it.

Both seasons of The Pitt so far are just the worst day of everybody in the ER's life. Individually, each episode has at least one small crisis, some confined to the hour, some threads that go a little longer, spanning multiple episodes. It's a comfort watch because even as everything is going to shit, the hospital staff are doing their best. I've seen the show called "competency porn," although that's a bit of a misnomer. No one character is firing on all cylinders for the entire day. Half the staff are still students, as the ER is part of a teaching hospital. (The writing's very efficient, because half the medical exposition is delivered through the attending physicians quizzing their students on the condition of their patients, a more natural way to give us the "as you know..." kind of dialogue that brings the audience up to speed.)

The show is crisis after crisis, every character fighting for their lives on either a medical or existential level. Sometimes both. Occasionally the educational dialogue gets a bit preachy, especially when the show tries to drive home a point about how nurses are underpaid, but I'll forgive it that issue; it's hard to finesse the point when the problem is very real, and half the country on our plane of existence refuses to acknowledge that it's even a problem.

The thing that gets me about The Pitt is not the idea that there's some team of super-competent doctors out there trying to handle every crisis that walks through their doors. They're not super-competent; they make mistakes, and quite a few of them are jerks. What gets me is the show's humanist streak. It recognizes the humanity of the doctors and patients caught up in the gears of a healthcare system that hasn't been set up to serve everyone equitably, and it argues for the dignity of every doctor, nurse, and patient that walks into that ER. Even when they're having a bad day, and even when they're wrong. (Looking at you and your AI transcription app, Dr. Al-Hashimi.) The show isn't about competency. It's about a group of people who care about making things better with the limited resources they have, even when they can't get it fully right.

What I wrote:

For Seeing & Believing, I wrote reviews of Send Help, Wuthering Heights, How to Make a Killing, and Pillion. It's been a weird month for movies! You're going to get the full spectrum in this selection alone.

What I talked about:

I joined my friends over at Eye of the Duck podcast to talk about the 2005 movie adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. They're currently working through a series on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, working from the movies that influenced them (all the way back to Ray Harryhausen!) through the movies they themselves influenced. You can see Jackson's fingerprints on the mid-aughts Narnia movies, for good and ill; we really get into it in the podcast.