The Pitt: Dr. Santos' Fascinating Backstory Explained By Isa Briones

The hit Max medical drama "The Pitt" is an intense ride that follows one day in a fictional hospital's emergency room in pretty close to real time, with each episode comprising a consecutive hour. Season 1 takes place on the first day for new interns and student doctors, but it is incredibly chaotic, so there isn't really time for extended introductions or big monologues to give us character backstory. And aside from Dr. Robby's (Noah Wyle) PTSD flashbacks, the show doesn't use flashbacks to show us the past and fill in the gaps, either, so we have to learn about the characters in little bits. Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones), the intensely competitive fourth year intern who butts heads with some of her superiors, seems like she has a lot more going on than we get to see. She's not just incredibly capable, she's also pretty fierce and has some surprises for the team up her sleeve, like speaking Tagalog with the hospital's Filipino nurses. 

Over the course of the first season, Santos went from being a bit of a heel to the show's unlikely antihero, and hopefully we get to see her grow and subvert expectations even more in season 2. In an interview with GoldDerby, Briones shared a bit of information about her character's backstory that makes her entire season 1 arc make a lot more sense. 

Briones explained that while the showrunners gave her free rein to choose a different sport for Santos' backstory, she felt that gymnastics was perfect because of the extreme competitiveness that can happen in the sport and how it shapes its athletes for life: 

"Especially when often in gymnastics, you're going into it so young, so it's drilled into you. We talked about a lot of her trauma kind of stemming from that part of her life and a big part of why she pivoted so hard to, 'Now I'm gonna focus on medicine. I'm gonna focus on something else, something else that I can try to be the best at.' You definitely you definitely see it in how she interacts with her colleagues because she's like, 'I'm not here to make friends.' Because, clearly, she's been in environments before where that is not the goal. It's to be the best."

Her desire to be the best leads to plenty of conflict, although we see that she's also got a pretty big heart from her interactions with the nurses and taking in the sweet but smart Dr. Whitaker (Gerran Howell), also a fourth year medical student doing his internship at the Pitt, when she discovers he's living on an unused floor of the hospital. 

We know that "The Pitt" season 2 will have a time jump, moving forward to July 4, one of the busiest emergency room days of the year, and there will be plenty more opportunities for Dr. Santos to strive to be the best. Hopefully in the 10 months between the end of season 1 and the beginning of season 2, she will also have stopped trying so hard to show off in front of the other doctors and will have settled into something of a routine, though given how things are in the emergency room, nothing is ever really routine. 

While her gymnastics past has made her a bit more difficult in some ways, it has also primed her for working in the emergency room. Gymnastics can be extremely dangerous, with life-or-death choices made in a matter of mere seconds while one is flipping or spinning in the air, giving her plenty of practice using logic while pumped full of adrenaline. She's going to be an amazing practicing doctor once she gets there, and I look forward to watching her grow in future seasons of Max's breakout hit.