The Pitt Season 2's Most Intense Moment Feels Like A Secret ER Sequel

This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of "The Pitt."

If you're a fan of "The Pitt," the HBO Max medical drama created by R. Scott Gemmill alongside collaborators Noah Wyle and John Wells, you might also be a fan of "ER." If that's the case, you might have caught a major parallel between these two beloved shows during the Season 2 finale of "The Pitt."

In "9:00 P.M.," the season finale of the massively successful second season of "The Pitt," Wyle's protagonist Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch is all set to leave for a three-month sabbatical when an ambulance arrives at the end of his shift. Fresh off an intense argument with his best friend and night-shift counterpart, Dr. Jack Abbot (Shawn Hatosy), Robby snaps back into work mode when he hears that the woman in the ambulance, Nicole Wolf's Judith Lastrade, is experiencing blurred vision, high blood pressure, and swelling in her legs. She thinks she's having a stroke, but Robby correctly diagnoses her with preeclampsia — a condition that might have been caught sooner if Judith weren't committed to a "free" and "natural" birth with zero medical intervention.

So how does this connect to "ER?" Real fans of that series may have immediately connected this moment to "Love's Labor's Lost," a Season 1 episode of "ER" that took the show from good to great. In that episode, Anthony Edwards' lead character, Dr. Mark Greene, treats a pregnant woman named Jodi O'Brien (Colleen Wolf) and fails to diagnose her with full-blown eclampsia, and this failure to diagnose leads to her tragic death. In both shows, the patients are experiencing high blood pressure but meet two different fates ... and in both shows, the danger of a condition like preeclampsia challenges a devoted doctor.

Okay, so first of all: what is preeclampsia? Essentially, it's a condition — according to the Mayo Clinic — that can cause high blood pressure and "high levels of protein in [the patient's] urine that indicate kidney damage," among other issues. The complications are numerous and extremely serious. As you probably figured from the "pre" part of "preeclampsia," one of those complications is eclampsia itself, which can cause seizures and even put the patient into a coma. On "ER," because Dr. Mark Greene doesn't correctly diagnose his pregnant patient, she moves past the "pre" period and develops full-blown eclampsia, and that leads to her death. (Other complications are just as serious and include a premature birth, fetal growth restrictions, issues with the placenta, and even "damage to other organs" that can manifest in crises like strokes.)

The patients in these scenarios on "ER" and "The Pitt" are quite different; Mark assumes that his pregnant patient has a urinary tract infection and doesn't treat her for preeclampsia or eclampsia, whereas Robby immediately clocks that his patient — who hasn't seen a single doctor throughout her nearly full-term pregnancy — is suffering from the condition due to a number of immediate factors. Still, something I want to stress here is that this in no way means that Robby is a better doctor than Mark or anything like that; excellent physicians can misdiagnose or make a perfect and immediate diagnosis based on any number of factors, and Mark's incorrect diagnosis of a urinary tract infection is a fairly understandable mistake. Another important thing to note is that, despite this apparent connection, "The Pitt" is not meant to be a sequel to "ER." Not even close.

"The Pitt" premiered in January of 2025, and when it did, "ER" fans were pretty excited; after all, R. Scott Gemmill, John Wells, and Noah Wyle all worked together on "ER." In fact, Wyle appears in "Love's Labor's Lost" as medical student John Carter, who eventually becomes a doctor and, after working closely with Dr. Mark Greene, becomes a senior trauma attending at the show's fictional County General Hospital. Still, I need to say quite plainly that there's no narrative overlap between "ER" and "The Pitt," and I say this for very real legal reasons.

After "The Pitt" premiered, the estate of "Jurassic Park" author Michael Crichton raised some concerns about similarities between this new series and "ER." There are some major similarities and differences right off the bat: both shows are set in an emergency department and feature Wyle as a beleaguered doctor, but "ER" offers a fuller look at the lives of its physicians and surgeons because it doesn't take place in a real-time conceit, which "The Pitt" does. This resulted in a lawsuit spearheaded by Sherri Crichton, the late writer's widow.

In any case, the lawsuit over whether "The Pitt" is an unauthorized spin-off of "ER" is still ongoing as of this writing, but I want to stress that these two shows are not the same; the people involved with both remained friends and found another way to work together. Still, it's fascinating that, in both of these impactful medical shows, a physician is shown dealing with a really dangerous condition for pregnant women ... and we see the results of their split-second decisions. "ER" is streaming on Hulu now, and "The Pitt" is available on HBO Max.