The Pitt Season 2's Mohan Storyline Has A Yellowjackets Problem

Spoilers for "The Pitt" Season 2 and "Yellowjackets" Season 2 ahead.

After two extremely trying day shifts at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center's emergency room that we've been privy to (and who knows how many others like them off-screen), Supriya Ganesh's Dr. Samira Mohan is leaving "The Pitt" ahead of the hit medical drama's third season. To say that fans have been taking this hard would be an understatement, and it's no mystery why. A damn good doctor, the compassionate Mohan spends Season 2 of "The Pitt" dealing with nonstop stressful cases, including an especially heartbreaking one involving a patient with diabetes. All the while, her world seems to be crumbling around her, even as her boss, Noah Wyle's Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch, abrasively pressures her to embrace a different specialty (namely, geriatrics).

Now, Robby is a complicated, flawed individual by design, and Season 2 makes no effort to excuse his bad behavior toward Mohan, even as it takes steps to help us, as viewers, understand it. (There's a reason Mohan calls Robby a "d**k" to his face not once but twice this season.) At the same time, Mohan's Season 2 storyline is messy in ways that feel unintentional. Perhaps tellingly, showrunner R. Scott Gemmill has confirmed to Vulture that he didn't enter Season 2 expecting to write Mohan out of the series.

In addition to all that, I suspect that Season 2's Mohan problem also stems from Tracy Ifeachor's Dr. Heather Collins departing before "The Pit" Season 2, which was clearly not what the show's creators initially had in mind. Moreover, this entire situation reminds me of what happened just a few years ago when "Yellowjackets" star Juliette Lewis left the series, a creative decision that was quite transparently not part of the original vision for that show.

To bring those who are not already members of "The Hive" up to speed: "Yellowjackets" Seasons 1 and 2 star Juliette Lewis as Natalie Scatorccio, one of many former high school girls' soccer players who, in the present, are still reeling from being stranded in a vast wilderness after a plane crash 25 years prior. As one of the show's most sympathetic leads, Natalie's accidental death at the end of Season 2 is obviously meant to be a real kick to the gut. Yet, it's a narrative twist that feels more random than carefully conceived. Indeed, there's enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that Lewis may have forced the "Yellowjackets" showrunners' hands when it came to writing adult Natalie out.

Dr. Collins, meanwhile, is absent for the final (and most intense) episodes of "The Pitt" Season 1, although the show doesn't really hint at her not returning in the future. Because of this, folks were pretty gobsmacked when it was announced that Tracy Ifeachor's character was being written out of "The Pitt" ahead of Season 2. Rumors thereafter began to circulate that this was related to Ifeachor's ties to the UK-based Jesus House, whose senior pastor, Agu Irukwu, has publicly opposed same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ equality legislation, and is known for being staunchly anti-abortion. (Notably, "The Pitt" Season 1 features a subplot where Collins and Robby help a 17-year-old girl secure an abortion.)

Now, Ifeachor's rep has denied the rumors, although Ifeachor does, in fact, have some kind of relationship with Jesus House (as you can see in this video on its Instagram account). The point being, there's nothing about Ifeachor or Collins' abrupt exit on "The Pitt" that implies it was all "part of the plan."

"Yellowjackets" has a bad time after Juliette Lewis bows out. With adult Natalie having been crucial to the show up to then, Season 3 is left scrambling to overhaul its character dynamics and interpersonal conflicts. It eventually gets where it needs to (setting the stage for "Yellowjackets" to finish strongly in its fourth and final season), though it's fairly rough for a while.

"The Pitt," by comparison, gets through Tracy Ifeachor's sudden absence mostly unharmed ... except when it comes to Dr. Mohan. In her Girl Culture piece "'The Pitt' failed Dr. Samira Mohan," writer Caroline Siede deftly explains how Season 2 flattens Mohan as a character, playing down the ways she improved her time management in Season 1 (a source of friction between Robby and her), ignoring her previously-established professional strengths, and contriving drama in her personal life to justify her taking a job at another hospital. After Dr. Collins served as a vital buffer between Mohan and Robby in Season 1, this comes across as the show's clumsy attempt to hurriedly account for Collins' absence in Season 2.

Robby no longer having someone to tell him off, or to stop him from projecting his baggage onto Mohan, as Collins did, is a fine idea, but the execution is simply lacking in Season 2 upon closer inspection. That's probably because, again, it appears Collins was still supposed to be around before that changed, and Mohan is the character most directly impacted by her absence. In the end, "The Pitt" is arguably guilty of doing the same thing to Mohan as Robby: pushing her in a direction that they, not she, have decided is appropriate without fully realizing that's what they're even doing.

"The Pitt" is currently streaming on HBO Max.