The Odyssey, The Pitt, and a reminder that woke can be much worse than casting

On Sunday night, I did what I almost never do:  Shut off the TV midway through an episode of a show, declared it completely dead to me, and began cursing vociferously. Afterwards, I considered the battle still raging over The Odyssey. 

On Sunday night, I did what I almost never do:  Shut off the TV midway through an episode of a show I’ve largely enjoyed for almost two seasons, declared it completely dead to me, leapt from the couch, and began cursing vociferously.  The show in question was HBO’s The Pitt, season two, episode eleven.  Though several people had warned me that the series went “woke,” I figured, how bad could it possibly be?  After all, I had no problem going to see Bruce Springsteen at his most Trump-deranged and generally speaking, believed I’d become accustomed to the entertainment industry’s rather leftward slant, thinking this would be more of the same.  Even if I didn’t love it, I could simply grin and bear it as the old saying goes.  Besides, the show was already pretty woke to begin with.  In the first season, there was an obviously conservative, borderline white nationalist who punched the charge nurse in the face because he was kept waiting for hours, a pro-abortion plotline, a pair of cops that try to arrest one of the doctors for violating bail in the middle of a crisis caused by a shooting rampage, and an anti-vax family that initially refused treatment for their son suffering from the measles.  In the second, there had already been an immigrant family who couldn’t afford healthcare, vaguely attributed to supposed cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill, an inmate who was said to be ill treated by a prison accompanied by a guard who was generally depicted as an asshole, and an immigrant son and daughter whose parents had been deported back to Haiti, leaving the teenage son neglected to the point where he blew off a finger with a firework.  Though I might have taken a different approach if I was tasked with writing the real time medical drama, the healthcare industry as a whole is largely left leaning, suggesting that the characters in the context of the show would behave similarly in a real-world situation and none of it was overwhelming, amounting to the equivalent of a few missed beats in otherwise excellent performance.

If past was prologue, however, episode eleven seemed intentionally designed to amplify those missed beats into the entirety of the show, placing the woke factor in the middle of the action in a way that went beyond the foibles of any character or pitfalls in an individual plotline, and refused to acknowledge any other point of view as morally, spiritually, or otherwise justifiable.  In the offensive sequence which caused me to shut it down entirely, two Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers arrive in the ER with a middle-aged Hispanic woman who appears completely harmless.  One of the officers is unmasked, but the other is a huge, hulking beast of a man who wears a bandana across his face the entire time, presumably because he can and prefers dealing with people in disguise even when not rampaging on the streets.  Upon their arrival, the officers inform the staff that the woman fell while they were conducting a raid at a restaurant, her shoulder appeared to be injured, and they needed to ensure she received proper medical attention before booking her.  Rather than accepting the agents have a job to do – one they are empowered by federal law to do without obstruction – and the reality that the officers could quite easily have pretended they didn’t see the injury in the first place, proceeding to book her without any treatment, meaning they had done the right thing even knowing they were likely to face an investigation into the cause of the injury in the first place, the entire emergency room immediately begins acting as though Darth Vader or the perhaps even the Dark Lord Sauron had entered their domain, an evil completely intolerable to the entire hospital if not the world at large.

Even before treating the woman, the doctors commence interrogating the ICE officers as to the cause of the injury, more than subtly hinting their story about her falling down wasn’t true and they’d likely beaten her themselves.  Outside the ER, patients waiting for treatment begin exiting the building as though a deadly plague had been let loose, and if this weren’t enough of an indication masked devils have entered their domain, the charge nurse Dana Evans, played by Katherine LaNasa, asks the attending physician if they can just tell the agents to “fuck off” and eject them from the premises entirely.  At this point, it seems that only Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Rabinovitch has some understanding of how this works and why it must work that way because the alternative is anarchy.  Though he is not pleased with their presence, he tells everyone there was nothing in their power to change it and the best they could do was treat the woman as quickly as possible so the offending officers would leave.  While this is occurring, the Hispanic woman expresses concern that her family will not know where she was and the ER staff pleads with the officers to allow her to make a phone call.  Perhaps needless to say, the officers refuse – for obvious reasons, as in its the law in every freaking arrest because you can’t have potential criminals calling whoever they like, whenever they like – telling them that she can only make a call after she’s booked, which only serves to make the staff more incensed, even as they too are frequently depicted as being beholden to laws and regulations which might not seem entirely fair or compassionate at times.  In other words, they loathe being bound by procedure, but are unable to acknowledge that different professions, especially those they happen to loathe as well, have the same constraints, Simultaneously, the presence of the officers is so atrocious that word has apparently spread through the entire hospital like the influence of the aforementioned Dark Lord or an actual plague in truth.  A surgeon comes down from another floor, noting with much, much distaste that she heard ICE is there and had lost two nurses who were in the country on Temporary Protected Status.  Though they were legal aliens, the fear is simply too much to bear.

Incredibly, it gets even worse from there.  While Dr. Robby initially appeared to understand ICE had a job to do, the same as them in some ways, this understanding only lasted for a short period.  Once they conclude the woman’s injury isn’t serious and she can be released with a sling, he takes the opportunity to berate the large, hulking monster with a mask, a federal officer depicted as something like Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, practically screaming in his face that ICE’s presence there is unwanted, detailing a litany of horrors – the people and staff who have left – and coming close to outright ejecting them from the ER.  Rather then telling the good doctor to fuck off as I really, really wanted the man to do, he takes the lesson to heart, joins his partner, and attempts to remove the woman as quickly as possible, but the doctors haven’t yet given her the sling, causing the chaos everyone know was coming to ensue.  After essentially being told to take a hike by the person in charge, that their presence wasn’t wanted in the ER under any circumstances, the masked man attempts to escort the woman out by the arm without the sling, prompting one of the nurses to put his hands on the officer to pull him away.  From there, the officer quickly subdues the nurse, binds his wrists, and attempts to escort him along with the woman out while the entire staff follows behind, getting in their faces the entire time.  Though a part of me would like to tell you how the scene ends, the backwards insanity of the sequence was more than I could handle.  Before the ICE agents were out the door, I shut it off, turned to my wife, and said the entire ER should be arrested for obstruction and even the next day, I stand by that statement.  Further, the problems with the sequence run so deep, I cannot continue to watch the show for the sake of my own sanity.

Where to even begin?  Even if you on sets aside the show’s steadfastly ignorant refusal to acknowledge illegal immigration causes any potential harm, viewing it as an entirely positive, victimless occurrence, whether you love the law or hate the law, sympathize with illegal aliens or want all of them deported, ICE is the agency charged with ensuring federal immigration laws are enforced.  The agents and officers in question are not random street thugs in masks, vigilantes, or yahoos out of some Western film to be interfered with and obstructed based on one’s personal opinion of the law.  Despite their caricatured, Darth Vader-like portrayal, they are men and women with thoughts, feelings and opinions of their own charged with executive a dangerous, challenging task.  In a country that is supposedly dedicated to the rule of law, one has two choices:  Either you accept that reality whether you like it or not, or you are an insurrectionist by definition, embracing nullification and mob rule.  It’s not up to the doctors, nurses, or whoever else works in an Emergency Room to make these decisions, anymore than it’s up to me.  Instead, it’s up to them to comply and if they choose to obstruct, they are breaking the law themselves and can be both arrested and tried.  Initially, Dr. Robby seems to understand this and though he isn’t happy, he knows there’s nothing he can do about it despite being urged to intervene by members of his staff, but clearly, the creators simply couldn’t help themselves.  Instead of acknowledging and depicting this reality, that laws are not changed or improved by individuals breaking them because of their own personal opinion, they made it so the heroes where those thwarting the law and the villains were those protecting it, and they made it more than clear no other opinion would be tolerated.  Fairness, justice, truth, decency, and the American way required the entire ER to thwart the operations of law enforcement.  If this isn’t horrifically woke in the year 2026, I don’t know what it is, except it was completely unwatchable, so misguided and inverted as to be nausea-inducing.

Afterwards, I considered the battle still raging over The Odyssey.  For months now, director Christopher Nolan has been accused of being woke because of some admittedly suspect casting choices.  At times, defenders of Mr. Nolan have noted, correctly, that he isn’t the first director to cast actors of different races in roles that have been generally considered “white.”  Indeed, one of my personal heroes, Kenneth Branagh cast Denzel Washington as a prince in 16th century Messina, Italy, in Much Ado About Nothing, his hilarious take on Shakespeare’s classic comedy, as early as 1993, long before the word “woke” entered public discourse.  At the time, it barely registered with me or the general public and while it is true that much of our culture has leaned much further to the left in the more than three decades since, defenders of Mr. Nolan clearly have a point.  Woke is more than, shall we say, unusual casting and though I haven’t seen the film myself, several conservative critics have claimed The Odyssey as a whole is far from woke in any event.  For example, Giancarlo Sopo wrote for National Review, “Grand as the set pieces are, Nolan’s greatest achievement lies in conserving Homer’s vision of our relationship to the eternal and the obligations of home and family.  His film concerns men answerable to an order they did not author and cannot escape, and the reckoning that follows when they pretend otherwise.”  Brian Stewart, a Republican Ohio State Representative claimed, “In the poem, Odysseus is able to go home once the gods take pity on him, barter amongst themselves, & instruct Calypso to free him. Odysseus is a spectator to it; a plaything for the gods.  In the movie, Odysseus is told that the gods will carry him home when he stops trying to control everything himself, trusts in the gods, and he then walks into the ocean in an act of faith.  The movie is vastly more Christian than pagan in its worldview.”

While everyone is certainly free to make up their own minds, Mr. Sopo, Mr. Stewart and other similar thoughts lead to the obvious conclusion there’s more to woke than mere casting, hinting at the truth that perhaps conservatives have been fighting the wrong battle even in what I myself consider a righteous war.  From this perspective, The Pitt is woke beyond redemption – so warped, so political, and so backwards – it simply cannot be taken seriously by any conservative and should not so much as be watched.  The Odyssey, however, is more complicated and might well be something worth conserving.  It would be wise to understand the difference.