This story contains spoilers for the second season of The Pitt, including the most recent episode, “8:00 PM.”

A psychiatrist I know once told me that the two most common diseases in the world are depression and addiction.

When Dr. Frank Langdon emerged from the bathroom at the start of what would be the pivotal scene in “8:00 PM,” last week’s episode of The Pitt, he looked a mess, all sweat and anxiety tics and keyed-up, wide-eyed urgency. Patrick Ball’s dashing baby blues and anime-hero ahoge were doing the lord’s work.

The show’s viewers, particularly those R/ThePitt power users who close-read scenes with the intensity of medieval religious scholars, gamed out two possibilities. Langdon had relapsed offscreen. Or he was struggling mightily to both not relapse, and to discover a confidence in his doctoring separate from pills. Addiction or depression. In either scenario, Langdon as a character, and Ball’s performance last week and across The Pitt’s second season, has titrated these sources and symptoms of human pain to great dramatic effect.

A few reasons to celebrate what a blast of oxygen The Pitt has been across its two seasons: The state-of-the-nation piss-and-shit-and-insurance-perfidy mundanity of American emergency medicine romanticized for a streaming platform’s version of network TV. A public television event to inform and to entertain. A 2.0. version of what Sidney Lumet went after. ER may be The Pitt’s mother, but Lumet’s work on the iconic postwar historical education series You Are There is an auntie.

The introduction of the younger doctors has been smoothly machine-worked. I ride for Trinity Santos (Isa Briones), my queen of useful misanthropy: “I just think of the stupidest possible thing they could have done and assume they did that.” Based on her name and her cultural background—the moment in which she reveals to Princess and Perlah that she speaks Tagalog was my biggest laugh of season 1—I’m going to assume she’s Catholic, but her flinty outlook on our species would be welcome in Calvinism anytime.

A wrong-headed idea taken from the Prestige TV era is the idea that every script needs to be literary, that the voice of Matt Weiner is the goal. As far as The Pitt goes, I’ll happily take a few inelegant PSA-drops about violence against healthcare workers if it means I get the rest of the show’s deep set of virtues.

That first part of my therapist friend’s formulation needs no special highlighting. R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” is the spiritual anthem of this second season. Everyone is down. Everyone has been or is being worked down to a nub. Mel (Taylor Dearden) realizes her social life does not exist. Mohan’s (Supriya Ganesh) plans to return to New Jersey and to care for her mother or to win an elite fellowship evaporate. Robby’s (Noah Wyle) suicidal ideation blossoms.

I’d argue that season 2’s treatment of how addiction works, and how people live with it, reflects The Pitt’s maturation. For our purposes, I’m not thinking about binge eating or gambling addiction or other forms of addiction. I’m focused on the chemicals we drink or smoke or inject or work into pills and powders that allow us to temporarily transcend the prison of being a person.

Season one was blunt about it. I’m thinking of the dad in town for his daughter’s wedding, clearly in opioid withdrawal, drug seeking with a Noo Yawk accent, adamant that he’s not an addict by dint of his social class. Dr. Robbie’s brief monologue to him ends with “anybody can become an addict.” The plot of the parents whose son took a pill laced with a fatal dose of fentanyl was moving, but also right out of an after-school special. The first clue that Santos is right about Langdon in season one is when Princess and Perla describe Langdon as an “adrenaline junkie” and Langdon’s defensiveness goes to 100. The revenant of the “The More You Know” star shoots across the screen.