In the third episode of the sophomore season of “The Pitt,” a real-world tragedy becomes part of the narrative. As fans already know, the show is set in a fictional Pittsburgh hospital’s emergency department — and in October 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue in central Pittsburgh was the site of a horrific mass shooting. 11 people were killed, and six were wounded. The show works in this very real horror by having Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch treat a patient who was present during the shooting and is now in the ER with a different ailment, and who finds herself comforted by a nurse of Muslim faith in the process.

“That being such a significant event in the city of Pittsburgh, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity,” Wyle, who wrote the episode as well, told Variety. “When I started researching it, the aspects of it that moved me the most were the community outcry afterward from the Muslim community and the solidarity with the Jewish community of Pittsburgh working together to grieve and mourn the loss. It was the most underreported aspect of the story, and perhaps the most hopeful moving forward.”

The patient in question, an older woman named Yana (Irina Dubova), suffered a severe burn from dropping a hot samovar after being startled by fireworks because they sounded like gunshots. While Robby treats her burn, Yana speaks directly to the nurse helping him, Amielynn Abellera’s Nurse Perlah Alawi (who wears a hijab), and notes that Muslims allied with Jewish people in Pittsburgh after the attack and helped them pay for memorial services, which is true.

Robby’s faith is frequently tested on The Pitt

As showrunner R. Scott Gemmill — who worked with Noah Wyle on “ER” — told Variety, because Robby is canonically Jewish and the show is set in Pittsburgh, it felt extremely necessary to include something regarding the Tree of Life shooting. “It felt like a very important story to tell. There are important elements of that, that hadn’t been told, or hadn’t really made the news cycle,” he explained, saying they were able to share those elements through Yana and Perlah’s discussion. “The fact that the Muslim community came together and paid for all the funerals, that’s the kind of information that needed to be out there. We wanted to tell that part of the story, and address the story itself,” Gemmill said.

Wyle spoke to the fact that even though we don’t know much about Robby’s home life — for example, we haven’t met or even heard about Robby’s parents — we learned throughout season 1 that his grandparents helped raise him. So Wyle pointed out that Yana is a rare patient who puts him at ease. Not only that, but because they’re both Jewish, they share the same faith. “Their interaction allows you to see a degree of relaxation and familiarity that you rarely ever see him share with anybody else, because there’s such a cultural affinity, sense of humor, sarcasm, cynicism,” Wyle shared. “All of that is shared, and because his guard is down with her, when she pokes holes in his trip and questions whether or not this is a midlife crisis or a cry for help, it’s the first in a series of earthquakes that he experiences that begin to make him question his resolve.” This makes sense after Robby’s ordeal in season 1.

The Tree of Life shooting is particularly relevant to The Pitt

In the first season of “The Pitt,” Robby and his colleagues learn of a mass violence event that happens in their proverbial backyard — a shooting at PittFest, a heavily attended local festival. As Robby, his loyal friend and charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa), and several other doctors, nurses, residents, and med students brace for an onslaught of patients, Robby starts worrying on his own, knowing that his surrogate son Jake (Taj Speights) was actually at the festival with his girlfriend.

Jake, as it turns out, is unharmed; by the time he gets his girlfriend Leah (Sloan Mannino) to Robby’s ER, she has no chance of making it due to a devastating gunshot wound to the chest. Despite all of Robby’s best efforts, he can’t save Leah, which triggers his PTSD from the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic … during which he was unable to save his mentor, a senior attending physician who died from the devastating disease. The full mental breakdown that Robby experiences — which becomes all the more macabre because it happens in the ER’s pediatrics wing, which was hastily turned into a morgue as shooting victims overwhelm the ER — is gutting, heart-wrenching, and all too real, especially in a world where these events really happen, including at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. “The Pitt” honored the memory of those victims of that tragedy in this recent episode, and they did it in a truly beautiful, perfect way.