The first season of The Pitt on HBO Max had a significant real-life Pittsburgh event hanging over it: the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue. It’s something that the series effectively deployed as a core trauma of the city, one that cropped up both in Dr. Robby’s (Noah Wyle) low-key storyline about being Jewish, and a shooting at a music festival which dominated the latter part of the season. And — spoilers past this point — in this week’s third episode of Season 2, the show laudably remembers to never forget that the Tree of Life massacre happened, and continues to live in the souls of the people of the city.
In the episode, we meet a new patient named Yana Kovalenko (Irina Dubova) who has made the dubious choice to dress her burn wound from dropping a samovar (a Russian hot water boiler usually used for coffee or tea) after some local kids scared her setting off fireworks with a piece of her window curtains, and some honey.
“Robinavitch? Jewish?” asks Yana when Dr. Robby enters the room to attend to her.
“You guessed it,” he answers.
“Oh… Not married?” she asks while Dr. Robby checks out her burn, noticing the lack of ring, and clearly not having watched the previous episode to know things are hot and heavy with Nurse Hastings. “Do you attend synagogue?”
“Uhhh… Not for a while,” Robby says. “I mean… High holidays, mostly.”
“Where?” she asks, though that gets put on hold once Dr. Robby sees the state of her burn. “Where do you go on holy days?”
Robby then reveals that he went with his grandparents to Rodef Shalom, which is a real Reform synagogue in Pittsburgh which has been around since 1856. But when Robby asks the woman where she goes, that’s when the scene changes dramatically as she says: “Tree of Life.”
“They’re rebuilding,” he notes after a pause.
“Yes, something new,” she answers. “Remember. Rebuild. Renew. That’s the slogan.”
Later, while Dr. Robby does some debridement on the lady’s wound, aka removes the dead tissue, they talk more. And likely knowing the answer, Robby asks more about why she dropped the samovar when she heard firecrackers.
“I was on my way inside, October 27, 2018, to the synagogue when the shooting started,” Yana explains. “There’s nothing I could do. I went in, after the police arrived. I felt I had to. I’m better now. But… Fourth of July, when kids have their fireworks, and firecrackers, I–“
She can’t talk any further because she ends up a crying mess, with Dr. Robby explaining, “There is no clock on how long it takes.”
“No clock,” she says. “You must be joking.”
Later, talking to nurse Perlah (Amielynn Abellera) who is helping her out with her bandages, she asks if she’s Muslim, to which Perlah says “I am,” and Yana says, “Thank you.”
But she’s not thanking her for the bandages. “After the shooting, it was the Muslims who came together for us in support and walked with us. You raised money. You paid for all the funerals. Anyway. Thank you.”
That’s pretty much it for the storyline in this episode, but it’s an important one. Mainly because in America we have so many mass shootings that when one happens, we move on to “thoughts and prayers” for the next one, then the next one until it becomes a dull drone in the background of a million other news stories. What The Pitt, in its typical understated manner is expressing is that there is a real, human, long-term cost to these tragedies whether you were directly impacted or not. And even eight years on, the shooting at L’Simcha Congregation continues to impact the Pittsburgh community at large… Something that is simply and purely expressed through this beautiful storyline on the HBO Max series. There is, as Robby explains, no clock on grieving, and it will continue.
The Pitt Season 2 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of The Pitt premiere Thursdays on HBO Max at 9 p.m. ET. While the full episode release schedule has yet to be officially announced, the season will run 15 episodes, and we currently expect it to run straight through without breaks, with one episode premiering per week.
We also expect that it will follow the same real-time format hour by hour as Season 1. While the first nine episode “titles” are confirmed it’s always possible there could be a twist at the end of the season. So full caveat here that this may change, TBA by HBO Max.
Here’s what we expect from the full list of episodes in The Pitt Season 2 with premiere dates.
- Thursday, January 8, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 1 – “7:00 A.M.”
- Thursday, January 15, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 2 – “8:00 A.M.”
- Thursday, January 22, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 3 – “9:00 A.M.”
- Thursday, January 29, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 4 – “10:00 A.M.”
- Thursday, February 5, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 5 – “11:00 A.M.”
- Thursday, February 12, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 6 – “12:00 P.M.”
- Thursday, February 19, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 7 – “1:00 P.M.”
- Thursday, February 26, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 8 – “2:00 P.M.”
- Thursday, March 5, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 9 – “3:00 P.M.”
- Thursday, March 12, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 10 – “4:00 P.M.”
- Thursday, March 19, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 11 – “5:00 P.M.”
- Thursday, March 26, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 12 – “6:00 P.M.”
- Thursday, April 2, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 13 – “7:00 P.M.”
- Thursday, April 9, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 14 – “8:00 P.M.”
- Thursday, April 16, 2026: The Pitt, Season 2, Episode 15 – “9:00 P.M.” *Season Finale*
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