The Pitt: Noah Wyle Explains Why Dr. Collins Was Absent For So Long

Do not keep reading if you haven't watched all of season 1 of "The Pitt" — spoilers for the entire season lie ahead.

Season 1 of "The Pitt" has come to an excellent and satisfying conclusion, but there is one thing some fans might be wondering about: what happened to Tracy Ifeachor's senior ER resident Dr. Heather Collins? In the season's 11th episode, "5:00 P.M." — the show, like "24," is told using a "real-time" conceit in which each episode is one hour of an emergency room shift — Collins faces a massive personal loss and is comforted by Noah Wyle's lead character Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch before he tells her she should go home, turn her phone off, and get some rest. Ifeachor's Collins does not appear for the rest of the season ... so what happened?

Wyle appeared on The Ringer's pop culture podcast "The Watch" with Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald the day after the finale, "9:00 P.M.," aired to explain why the show strategically kept Collins out of the action, which included a devastating mass casualty event after an active shooter attacks an event called PittFest. (In the finale, Robby tells his staff that 112 injured people came into their ER, and they were able to save 106 of them.) 

After Greenwald joked about Collins' particularly strong "do not disturb" setting on her phone, Wyle said that, due to Robby's connection to Collins — which I'll circle back to in just a moment–— she would be able to help him through the breakdown he experiences during the show's toughest episode, "7:00 P.M.," but Robby needed the breakdown.

"That's an interesting choice, because her character made such an impact, it's a beautiful performance, the relationships she has with Robby, with everyone, and she's very, very good," Greenwald remarked to Wyle of the decision to sideline Collins past episode 11. "And then she really doesn't come back."

"Well, the whole end of the season is just removing bearing walls from Robby's life," Wyle replied. "You know, he leans so heavily on Collins and Langdon [a resident played by Patrick Ball], and then you take them both away from him."

Wyle continued, "He leans so heavily on Dana [Evans, a charge nurse of 33 years played by Katherine LaNasa], and then she becomes compromised. His one last relationship to Jake [Robby's surrogate son played by Taj Speights] is severed when he can't save [Jake's] girlfriend. So really it was more ... let's take away all this guy's support systems and have him out there. If she had been there, I think she would have been maybe one of those voices that could have reached him, and we didn't want him to be reachable."

To quickly speak to Noah Wyle's comments about removing other important people from Robby's orbit during the day seen in "The Pitt" season 1, let's back up for one second and talk about Dana and Dr. Frank Langdon. In the season's 9th episode, "3:00 P.M.," a disgruntled patient named Doug Driscoll (Drew Powell) sucker-punches Dana while she's outside having a cigarette, leaving her with a black eye for the remainder of the shift (and, honestly, leaving her shaken up enough that she seems to consider quitting her job in the season finale). As for Langdon, after intern Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) noticed that Librium, a drug that helps with alcohol withdrawal, was missing from the hospital's inventory, she notified Robby ... who was able to trace the theft to Langdon, who Robby clearly considered to be his protégé.

Robby did have to lose everyone in his support system to have his gut-wrenching breakdown in "7:00 P.M.," and that includes Collins, who experiences a miscarriage in episode 7, "1:00 P.M." In a particularly tender scene in an empty ambulance, Collins tells Robby what happened ... and also reveals that she terminated a pregnancy years prior, with both Noah Wyle and Tracy Ifeachor performing the scene to clearly indicate that the pregnancy she ended was during her romantic relationship with Robby. Wyle and Ifeachor handle this incredibly sensitive scene so beautifully, and without spelling everything out for the audience, we immediately understand the bond between these two, as well as everything they've lost in the time they've known each other. That's why Robby tells Collins to go home and turn off her phone. So will we see her again when "The Pitt" returns for season 2?

Aside from Noah Wyle — who helped create the show with fellow "ER" veterans R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells — we don't know a lot of concrete details about which actors from "The Pitt" will come back for season 2. (Taylor Dearden, who plays fan favorite and standout Dr. Mel King, did confirm to Vulture in late March that she's returning, and she told Vanity Fair after the season 1 finale aired that they start "bootcamp" on June 1 of this year to train to be on-screen doctors.) As creator R. Scott Gemmill discussed with Kathryn VanArendonk in a Vulture interview that also ran after the finale, hospitals do experience a normal amount of turnover as new interns and residents enter and others leave, but Gemmill hopes that this might be an issue they can address a little further down the line.

"We've been grappling with that," Gemmill said to VanArendonk's query about whether or not it would make sense for everyone to come back. "Some of them are still med students, so they'll be here for a little while, and some can make decisions. But some people will have to move on, and that's counterintuitive to a successful TV show where people start to really like characters. Hopefully that's a problem we have to deal with two or three seasons from now. For the moment, we're just dealing with it season by season."

Gemmill didn't address Heather Collins' future, and actress Tracy Ifeachor hasn't weighed in as of this writing ... but since Collins is a senior resident, it stands to reason that she'll be working her same job at the same hospital in season 2, which will canonically take place 10 months after season 1's events on the Fourth of July. 

The first season of "The Pitt" is streaming in full on Max now.