Angie​

though still early in the season, we have aleady witnessed kiara having to navigate a multitude of taxting emotional encounters: in episode two, she is positioned as the emotional intermediary between two parents distraught at the prospect of losing care of their child, maintaining composure in the face of the father who is especially aggressive and vulgar with her. in episode three, she speaks with the widow of whitaker's patient, and is further tasked with addressing two parents experiencing the sudden brain death of their child. the expectation that she remain both professional and empathetic whilst absorbing the projections of the grieving and the agitated is profoundly exhausting. thus, much like the group, kiara regards the ambulance theft scenario as a form of diversion, employing dehuminising language toward drug addicts to construct an additional buffer between herself and the patients and families she tends to.

the visuals of the scene further lend to this reading. sticky notes are designed for their disposability, utilising specific adhesives that ensures no residue upon removal. to use this medium to stage bets of ''junkies'', ''meth heads'', and runaway ''psych patients'' is to code these figures as disposable objects of entertainment, whose value is contingent on their brief function as distraction. the absence of residue also mirrors the absence of consequence that often accompanies such acts of dehuminisation. moreover, kiara views the board and its notes through a pane of glass, establishing a physical barrier that reflects the mental once she has cultivated.

an additional line of interpretation concerns the way sanitised, institututionally ratifies terms such as ''unhoused'' tend to operate less in the service of those living the condition than of the structures that authorise the language. later in episode nine, kiara is shown correcting whitaker's use of homeless, proposing ''unhoused'' as the perferable formulation. by the end of the season, it is revealed that whitaker has himself been experiencing homelessness. and although kiara was unaware of this, the narrative decision to position her as correcting the language of someone speaking from within that condition reflects how professional decorum is often priviledged over the bluntness of lived experience. it is also important to recognise the framing of the proposition itself. kiara states that ''we call them unhoused'', with the ''we'' in question being in reference to the street team whitaker is soon to join. though ostensibly innocuous in intent, the refusal to centre those being describes in a manner such as ''they prefer unhoused'' demonstrates the extent to which homeless people are spoken for within these frameworks.

it is clear even from the show's initial scenes that robby is incessantly met with the terms by which the ER's care is appraised, namely, a regime in which the dehumanisation of patients into metrics is conjoined with a concurrent burdening of staff of high patient satisfaction amid conditions of systemic overcrowding and chronic underfunding. robby continuously stresses the contradictions inherent in such expectations and resists them in his own fashion, though he has internalised certain aspects of its logic in order to endure within the system. we observe, in turn, the externalising of these very logics of a broken apparatus onto residents such as samira.

having previously suffered the consequences of this reifying system in relation to her father's misdiagnosis and passing, samira acts in direct opposition to it through her sustained humanisation of patients, a practice also informed by her study of racial disparities. this is most clearly evidenced in her treatment of joyce st. claire, a black woman in the throes of a sickle cell crisis who was assaulted and subsequently dismissed as a drug-seeker upon seeking aid. samira's approach to joyce centres upon a restoration of comfort and safety in the wake of that assault, affirming both the reality of her pain and the injustice of her mistreatment, while cultivating rapport and trust through reference to her studies and to her father's passing. she explicitly draws upon her work on racial disparity to attend to the aspects most excluded from the care of black women within medical practice. alongside correcting whitaker's initial minimisation of her pain severity, by any humane measure samira's care would warrant commendation for its depth and attentiveness. however, once robby becomes aware of the extent of time samira is devoting to joyce's case, she is subjected to reprimand, as within a resource-depleted system that privileges metrics, each moment samira spends humanising joyce is a moment another patient is left unattended.

a line i find particularly germane here is robby's insistance that samira conduct herself not as a ''friend'' to joyce, but as a ''doctor'', for the division between such designations encapsulates the very principles samira, and in a more conflicted manner, robby as well, seek to resist. robby is attempting to enforce a framework of detached concern, wherein one neither lapses into total dispassion nor succumbs to a corrosive empathy. yet the structures within which they are forced to operate do not permit a salutary apportioning of empathy, and such approaches therefore tend to lean toward one extreme or the other. the consequence is a devaluation of the forms of care that are often indispensable to those disproportionately subject to abuse, such as black women. within a system already replete with those such as whitaker, or others whose ill-informed assumptions regarding black people's biology precipitate mistreatment, the reprimanding of figures like samira only serves to deepen the disparity. moreover, there is a note of trivialisation in construing samira's conduct as an attempt to be a friend of joyce; what might be mistakenly dismissed as a luxury of care often proves a diagnostic necessity and should be better understood as an effort to meet disproportionate harm with a commensurate measure of attentiveness. the cultivation of trust also increases the likelihood of securing an accurate patient history, as well as a willingness to consent to invasive procedures such as intubation without incurring the risk of further traumatisation. as such, robby's characterisation of samira's care as existing beyond the parameters of medicine mirrors the real-world undermining, and subsequent denial of funding, afforded to such frameworks. and the insistence that samira conform to a narrowly prescribed, often unattainable division of empathy sustains the logic that any ensuing burnout is to be read as a failure of individual discipline, rather than as a symptom of a perpetually failing structure.

the counter to robby's argument is offered in the form of collins; later in the same episode, samira is apologetic for the length of time she had devoted to joyce, but colins interrupts noting that her standard of care is ''what this is all about''. the phrasing is especially significant, as it fundamentally rejects robby's division between ''friend'' and doctor''. collin's ''this'' instead seeks to define the medical apparatus through the moments of connection and safety samira cultivates. the creation of conditions under which a marginalised patient feels secure enough to offer consent carries just as much, if not greater, value than the routinely coercive mechanisms through which consent is extracted from black women in clinical settings, even if both ultimately amount to ink on paper. the indeterminacy of the word ''this'' further anchors the concept in that which denies quantification, and thus evades corruption, while simultaneously reworking prevailing notions of efficiency. where a figure such as gloria might construe efficiency as the rapid turnover of patients, samira reorients it toward a thorough treatment of a single patient, whereby the cycle of a frequent flyer engendered by the former model might be averted. that collins is positioned as the one to articulate this principle grounds its legitimacy in the recognition of a specific, often unacknowledged labour required to care adequately for a patient such as joyce. navigating the institution of healthcare as both a black doctor and a patient, collins is uniquely equipped to recognise the necessity of samira's approach. additionally, it is all the more imperetive that she refuse robby's definition of the doctor, insofar as his metric frequently depends upon the delegitimisation of patients such as herself.

the framing of both scenes aids in this reorienting of perspective. when robby seeks to define the role of the doctor as something divorced from samira's mode of care, he is positioned as the dominant focus of the shot, while samira remains visible yet withheld from focal primacy. this visual arrangement underscores robby, and the white male dimension of medicine as the dominant and defining institutional identity, while those such as samira, though present within the system, are frequently obscured and effaced. the shot is also composed over samira's shoulder, further defining the asymmetry of power between the two. the absence of joyce from the shot is likewise telling; while it is standard practice to conduct such discussions beyond the patient's presence, her visual omission reflects the dehuminisation inherent to the ''slow-mo'' condlict, wherein joyce remains the subject of discourse yet is reduced to an object of concern. however, in the exchange between collins and samira, the camera adopts a similar over-the-shoulder angle, yet frames them at equal height, thereby introducing a compositional parity suggesting a mentorship marked by power asymmetry but aligned in values. and while joyce remains absent in this scene as well, the visual focal point is afforded to collins, a black woman, as the arbiter of the role of the doctor, and in this way joyce is afforded a form of ''presence'' through her framework.

“everything I’ve done in my career is an effort to improve the system. just because you know it’s broken doesn’t mean you stop trying.”

this is a sentiment shared by baran al-hashimi during the second season, and one i find mirrored in the earlier exchange between collins and samira. samira recognised the institution of medicine as replete with disparities in the provision of adequate care, and utilised that recognition in order to study and effect change within her own practice. she likewise acknowledged the incentive structures favouring expedited workflows, yet remained committed to her ''slow-mo'' approach. establishing a prior history between baran and samira within the VA further reinforces the notion that samira did not cultivate her methodology in isolation; she benefited from mentorship grounded in the belief that one may operate within a dehumanising structure while still resisting its most pernicious impulses. the presence of such a figure, who both holds these values and stands as a peer to robby, holds the promise of durability for the kind of unorthodox care samira champions, and yet it is within this very season that my and many others' grievances with samira's narrative begin.

already having removed one of the few people willing to explicitly affirm the value of samira's work, the narrative introduces her early on as having made plans to depart for jersey with the intention of supporting her mother, though his plan is made redundant by her mother's cruise. in this respect, samira's prospective estrangement from the pitt mirrors robby's own, wherein his proposed sabbatical is repeatedly deferred or placed in jeopardy. however, samira remains amenable to a fellowship, and we learn that the funding for her research into racial disparities has since been withdrawn. while samira's drift away from the pitt can be understood as a familiar byproduct of the system within which she operates, beyond that register of realism, i find myself questioning the narrative impetus behind her removal, particularly in the wake of collins.

langdon's is explicitly endearing, with him recounting a visit to the fort pitt museum with his mother as a form of connective tissue, representing a return to a core identity preceding addiction. whereas with santos, her past functions as the force that isolates and arrests her.