Spoilers ahead for The Pitt season one.
The Pitt took over my life for six days straight. Set in the emergency department of a fictional hospital, HBO’s latest medical drama takes place over the course of a single 15-hour shift. Even though I was late to The Pitt party, my Twitter (now X) feed has been consumed by Pitt fans since it first aired in January. Online discourse surrounding the show followed a typical track—shipping wars, fancams set to Brat songs, viral out-of-context clips—but during and after its run, one discourse rose above the rest: people really, really hate Dr. Santos.
An ambitious medical intern with a dry sense of humor, Dr. Trinity Santos (played with equal parts charm and menace by Isa Briones) is only the latest addition to a roster of female characters that the internet can’t stand. She’s brash, sarcastic, and bordering on egotistical—and from the moment she graced my screen, I knew she would be my favorite.
Here are five reasons why Dr. Santos is my new favorite character of all time.
1. If The Internet Hates a Female Character, I’m Going to Like Her
If you’re as chronically online as I am, you’ve definitely seen your fair share of hated female characters. Sometimes, she’s an actual villain (see Cersei Lannister), or maybe a woman who gets in the way of a popular male protagonist (see Skyler White). More often than not, she’s just a complex character with flaws who happens to be a woman, like Industry’s Harper Stern or Succession’s Shiv Roy. Before I tuned into The Pitt, I saw everyone hating on Santos hard, and I knew I would do my best to like her anyway. After all, I had no problem defending Cersei Lannister. How bad could Dr. Santos be?
2. Who Doesn’t Love a Diva?
Once I started watching, I accepted that Dr. Santos deserves some of the audience’s resentment. She comes out the gate with an attitude and an arrogance she probably shouldn’t have as a medical intern. She bestows the nickname “Crash” onto fellow first-day intern Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) and then discovers Javadi’s mother is a senior attending, at which point she asks Javadi to talk her up. She cherry-picks cases that seem most interesting to her and ignores those that don’t. She fails to comfort a patient and gets defensive when Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) rightfully criticizes her. When Javadi asks her to stop calling her “Crash,” she refuses and says that sarcasm is just her defensive mechanism, a pretty poor excuse for bullying.
Honestly, Santos hardly does or says a single redeeming thing until episode seven, “1:00 P.M.,” when she threatens a patient who she believes to be a sex offender—and turns out to be right. Since going behind the backs of her superiors hasn’t worked out for her so far, it’s a major relief.
This is going to diminish a bit of my credibility, but I loved Santos through all of it. I didn’t tune into The Pitt to watch everyone get along and have a good time. Santos is overbearing, overconfident, and mean. For those first seven episodes, I honestly looked forward to seeing the next irresponsible thing she would do. I reveled whenever she correctly performed a procedure or successfully went behind her superior’s back, even though I knew it fueled her ego. I probably would’ve liked her even if she didn’t grow at all, and the fact that she does just makes it easier for me. What can I say? I like a diva on screen.
3. She Set Off My Gaydar and She’s a Scorpio
Talk about a character made for me! In episode two, “8:00 A.M.,” Santos quickly develops a rapport with Dr. Yolanda Garcia (Alexandra Metz), a resident surgeon who takes a liking to Santos. It’s not the only mentor-mentee relationship that develops unusually fast, but Dr. Garcia’s bias towards Santos seems pretty out of place. Even after Santos drops a scalpel on her foot, Dr. Garcia tells her she can make it up to her with a cocktail. They share lots of sideways glances and smile at each other far too much for two doctors cutting into human skin together.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Well, you’re not alone.
When Garcia asked Santos her star sign—I know, I know—and Santos replied “Scorpio,” it felt like a puzzle piece falling into place. As a fellow Scorpio, I probably would have headcanonned Santos as one anyway, but the confirmation almost made too much sense. There’s no doubt in my mind that Santos is more than queer-coded. Fingers crossed that season two picks up on whatever she’s got going on with Garcia.
4. She Pushes Dr. Langdon’s Buttons
While Dr. Garcia takes an immediate liking to Santos, Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) does the opposite. In an interview with Vulture, Ball confirmed that Langdon sees Santos as a projection of himself, so it’s no surprise that he doesn’t warm up to her. Since Santos is basically a carbon copy of young Langdon in an Urban Outfitters baby tee, I’m willing to bet that Langdon arrived for his first day with a similar hotshot attitude to Santos’—and since he’s a man, he probably would have been given a lot more grace.
My favorite part of their fraught relationship is that neither of them are in the right. No, Santos shouldn’t have been giving orders without the approval of her superiors, and no, Langdon shouldn’t have screamed at her. Putting Santos directly at odds with Langdon was meant to challenge the audience, and their major storyline only works if they’re at odds with each other. If Santos was any less proud, she wouldn’t have investigated Langdon just because she couldn’t open a vial of lorazepam. If the audience found Santos any less unbearable, the ultimate reveal that she was right about Langdon’s medical malpractice wouldn’t have carried the same weight. We were meant to dismiss Santos and favor Langdon, which made the twist work. As a Santos defender, I’m glad she was right in the end, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had been dead wrong.
5. She’s Willing to Learn, And She Does
In the age of binge-watching, a weekly-release requires patience. The Pitt’s 15-hour premise means that almost every storyline stretches over multiple episodes. Santos arrives for the start of the shift eager and excited, and while her cherry-picking of cases is annoying, it’s clear she wants to learn. Santos’ cruelty is a clear defense mechanism (she says so herself, when she’s being defensive), but while she takes criticism hard, she also takes it to heart.
By the time the last hour of the longest shift of all time commences, Santos has eaten several slices of humble pie and managed to learn a lot in the process. Her arc culminates in her committing one final act of insubordination: opening up to a patient about her own struggles, which Dr. Mohan told her not to do, and probably saving his life by doing it. As Dr. Mohan said, every doctor in The Pitt has a “special sauce.” Dr. Santos’ is that she stands her ground, even if no one else is on her side.
In The Pitt, you don’t pick your favorite doctor—they pick you. Dr. Santos isn’t always easy to defend, but her brash personality and numerous clashes with her superiors is an irreplaceable component of the show. While the hate her character receives isn’t necessarily forced, her arc is not unlike the others. The Pitt asks us to focus on the details, but to not let those details define them. I’m excited to see where they take her in season two, especially the high jinks she and Whitaker (Gerran Howell) might get up to as new roomies. As Dr. Garcia puts it, Trinity Santos is trouble—and though that may be true, she’s going to get the job done.