‘The Pitt’ Star Isa Briones Breaks Down Dr. Santos’s Mortifying Chest Tube Gone Wrong: “Begins Her Humbling”

In The Pitt Episode 6 “12 PM,” eager intern Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) finally gets her chance to attempt a chest tube. The most ambitious and ruthless character in the new MAX medical drama basically begs newfound friend and mentor (and potential love interest) Dr. Yolanda Garcia (Alexandra Metz) if she can do the procedure like she’s a kid asking their parents if they can hop on an amusement park ride. Garcia happily offers to guide Santos. She takes the scalpel, successfully makes the incision, and then, like a klutz, drops the sharp blade. The scalpel lands on Dr. Garcia’s foot, piercing through her shoe, and resulting in massive embarrassment for the junior doctor.

“I think that Santos kind of had it coming,” The Pitt star Isa Briones said, with a laugh, when DECIDER asked her about it over Zoom earlier this week. “She’s been, uh, doing a little too much.”

“Too much” includes mocking medical students Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) and Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell), “gifting” them nicknames like “Crash” and “Huckleberry.” “Too much” also covers going behind residents’ backs when caring for patients, specifically sparking friction between Santos and Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball), and projecting her own coping mechanisms onto a young patient to Dr. Mohan’s (Supriya Ganesh) horror.

All of which is to say that viewers of The Pitt might have been waiting for Dr. Santos to eat a huge serving of humble pie.

“Fom an actor point of view, it’s a fun moment for this character because it, in my opinion, really kind of begins her humbling and her kind of emotional growth,” Briones told DECIDER, teasing more stumbles for Santos ahead.

“Keep in mind, this is Episode 6. We are entering the sixth hour of a shift — and there’s fifteen episodes — it’s just going to keep on getting longer,” she said. “When you’re working in the ED, like you are being weighed down with the hours, with the standing on your feet all day, with the horrible cases that are coming in. It just keeps on getting more and more tiring.”

“I think the walls that Santos has built up are, of course, just naturally, like any human, going to start to break down in a fifteen hour shift.”

It’s potentially ironic that the person on the receiving end of Santos’s mistake was already the one person who could pierce through those walls. Dr. Garcia is a surgeon in the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital and she’s often on tap to tackle the trickier cases that come into the ER. From the moment Santos and Garcia meet, the older surgeon takes a shine to the younger trainee.

Briones was quick to reiterate that Season 1 of The Pitt takes place over just one day, and “there’s not so much that can happen” during someone’s first day. Still, she admitted that there’s already a “connection” between the two doctors thanks to their similar personalities.

“Like, obviously off the bat, people are not super in love with Santos, with the way that she operates, and it’s clear when Garcia comes in, too, that people have the same reaction to her,” Briones said. “[Garcia] pokes at people and she is making jabs and stuff. So I think we have a similar energy.”

Briones also copped to the fact that there’s “a bit of a flirtation” between the two, “that kind of tension and connection,” but that for Santos, Garcia is more of a much-needed ally than anything else.

“She’s not out here to make friends. She’s just here to get ahead. But she sees someone who is taking an interest in her and it’s like, “‘ll right, well, that’s an ally. That’s kind of a friend that I have here. There’s someone that I can be like, “Hey, can I do this?” And she’ll let me,’” Briones said.

Which is leads us back to how Santos wound up stabbing her one ally in the first place; Garcia let her.

“It was a really fun scene to do,” Briones said, noting that the situation was also karma of a different kind for Gerran Howell’s Whitaker.

“He’s someone that I’m always like picking on and dressing down. All of a sudden, I make a mistake and he was there for it,” she said, recollecting Howell’s larger than life “Oh My God!” reaction with a grin. “Yeah, it was really fun, and I think it’s a great beginning to kind of her growth as a character.“

The Pitt returns to MAX next Thursday, February 13.