HBO's ‘The Rehearsal' concludes with the ultimate simulation

This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of 'The Rehearsal.'
Nathan Fielder did not solve a power imbalance in the cockpits of commercial airlines, or materially improve aviation safety, in the second season of HBO's 'The Rehearsal.'
That anyone thought he might — and many viewers did — proves how unpredictable and philosophically challenging Fielder's mind-bending semireality show has become. 'The Rehearsal' debuted in 2022 with the (comparatively) modest project of helping people 'rehearse' situations that cause them stress or anxiety. Fielder helped Kor Skeete, a trivia-loving teacher, practice telling a longtime friend that he'd lied about having a master's degree. He set out to help Angela, an unmarried Christian woman in her 40s, rehearse the perfect life she had envisioned as a wife and mother.
There was, admittedly, some mission creep. But the show's first season was, at least in theory, and at first, driven by problems with which other people were struggling.
By contrast, Fielder built the show's second season, which concluded Sunday, around his pet issue: plane crashes.
That was the first hint that 'The Rehearsal' was about to get more personal than any of his earlier projects. And that Fielder, who seemed chastened by criticism about how one of his 'rehearsals' affected a child actor in the first season, nevertheless remained determined to steer the production toward sillier scenarios but also bigger risks. The wacky stuff would eventually include a fake 'American Idol'-style contest called 'Wings of Voice,' three cloned dogs, and five copies of a pilot named Colin's studio apartment (populated by five actors playing him and five playing Emma, his date).
There's plenty of funny stuff, in other words. But the new season begins with horror: A tense disagreement between two pilots ends with their plane crashing. As the cockpit is engulfed by flames, the camera pans over to Fielder, who's standing outside the aircraft but apparently inside the fire, watching. He's wearing his trademark laptop harness. He looks … concerned.
This is our official introduction to the problem Fielder wants to address. He has read dozens of transcripts of plane crashes, and his theory is that many appear to be caused by a dynamic in which first officers literally choose to die rather than face the awkwardness of confronting a captain making a mistake.
Awkwardness is Fielder's métier. He's spent decades making extremely funny TV using himself — specifically, what he describes as his 'off-putting' personality — as bait. It's a bit of a misdirect; Fielder's affect on-screen is a little flat, but he's amazing at getting people to open up to him. Still, his narrative is that he's not. And if the first installment of 'The Rehearsal' went haywire devising and revising scenarios designed to help himself and others navigate social difficulties, the show's second season tries to prove why doing so is important: Taken to an extreme, awkwardness kills.
The connection between comedy and plane crashes isn't obvious, but it makes sense for Fielder to make it. As the creator and star of Comedy Central's docu-comedy 'Nathan for You,' wherein he convinced real small-business owners to take his extremely bad advice, he might be the world's greatest expert at engineering situations that prompt people to say and do things that obviously go against their own interests. You know how Montessori theory encourages parents and teachers to 'prepare the environment' and see it as a child's third teacher? What Fielder sees, reading transcripts of what captains and first officers say (and don't say) before a crash, is people responding predictably to their prepared environment. If the context doesn't change, he predicts that bad communication and bad outcomes will continue.
So Fielder started studying pilots. Specifically, how captains and first officers build rapport before flying together.
The show's best joke on this front comes early: Frustrated that he can't access the private lounge where pilots and first mates hang out before boarding, Fielder builds a reproduction of a Houston Airport terminal. When Moody, one of the pilots Fielder is following, walks into the fake lounge, we're as excited as he is to witness what happens in this sacrosanct space. Then Moody sits down and starts scrolling through his iPad.
There's a beat. Then Fielder approaches, asking whether this is all he does. Moody nods. And while I laughed at the comical absurdity of HBO funding the construction of a fake but functional airport terminal — complete with a Panda Express — just to produce this totally deflating moment, the show was also making a serious point. It turns out the answer to how pilots and first mates interact before flying together is: They don't.
'The Rehearsal' develops into a sideways anthropological treatise on pilots, who turn out to be a reserved and lonely bunch. Fielder discovers that repression is a professional requirement for most, because admitting to any mental health issues at all might cost them their license. He shows pilots joking in anonymous online forums about being autistic while agreeing that seeking a diagnosis would be career suicide.
Autism first appears as a joke, then as a pretext. But its explanatory possibilities loom large as Fielder invents increasingly baroque and invasive techniques aimed at boosting the social confidence of timid first mates so they'll feel capable of engaging and challenging people, even captains who could professionally penalize them. He also gets slowly derailed by a sense of kinship he seems to feel with this group he's trying to mentor. 'When I began this project, I had decided there was no better way to understand pilots than to become one myself,' he says in the finale.
It's an extraordinary, powerful, transformative twist.
Fielder has never been easy to read. He has described his on-screen persona as a heightened (and more clueless) but not fundamentally different version of his real self. 'The Rehearsal' plays up Fielder's discomfort, formally acknowledging his possible neurodivergence. Fielder himself remains in denial, getting increasingly defensive in the fifth episode as evidence mounts that he might be on the spectrum.
While his denials are played for laughs, Fielder has a real-life track record of dismissing the idea. 'There's a lot of social disconnects that people experience all the time that have nothing to do with autism or anything,' he told Rolling Stone's Andy Greene back in 2017. 'When I ask if he's ever wondered whether he has a developmental disorder, he's genuinely horrified,' Greene writes. 'Please don't tell me this is the angle of your piece,' he says.
Little did that iteration of Fielder suspect that the angle in question might drive the second season of his own show.
Fielder finally considers the possibility in the finale. 'When I was 13, I became interested in magic,' he says in voice-over. 'But people would always be suspicious of my performance because they said the way I moved and gestured didn't look right to them, that there was something off about me. So I studied how other people would move, regular people on the street, and started copying them, and it helped me become a better magician. But when you practice being other people for long enough, you can forget to learn about yourself.'
Some might call that acting.
Fielder, oddly enough, sees a distinction. 'I didn't understand how an actor could be feeling real love in a completely fake relationship,' he says at one point in the show. It's a remarkable declaration given how many of his 'rehearsals' rely on the idea that people can get something true out of pretending.
In any event, Fielder's willingness to consider that he might be autistic coincides with his confession — which, had he led with it, would have substantially changed our understanding of the show — that he has spent the past two years learning how to fly, and has become a real-life pilot because that's what the project of understanding pilots requires.
He's right; that isn't acting. That's something else. Fielder's 'method' starts to approach that of Borges's Pierre Menard, who wished to write — not copy — Miguel de Cervantes's novel 'Don Quixote.' (He considers trying to learn Spanish, become Catholic and forget the past three centuries of European history to effectively be Cervantes, but dismisses this method as 'too easy.')
If fans have struggled over how seriously to take Fielder's intentions in 'The Rehearsal,' so have some people in the show. In the first season, an actress role-playing as Angela, Fielder's fake co-parent (it's complicated), asks him straight out: 'So is this silly, or is this something that I should take seriously?'
'It's silly and serious,' Fielder says. 'I mean, it's complicated. Life can be more than one thing, right? Life's complicated.' And when she asks, angrily, whether her life is the joke, he replies. 'No, you're not the joke, not at all. No one's the joke. The situations are funny, but interesting, too.'
'The Rehearsal' revels in those productive contradictions. While Fielder insists on making perfect reproductions of various physical environments, his scenarios are in other ways designed to shake the subject out of any possible immersion. Getting waterboarded (milkboarded?) by a giant doll's breast milk seems unlikely to help Fielder experience the close relationship heroic pilot Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger had with his mother. But that silly sequence wasn't a signal meant to undermine the project's more serious aims. It was a joke version of something he was genuinely attempting: trying to understand what it's like to be a pilot.
Fielder, who facetiously leans into comparisons to Willy Wonka, offers his subjects the opposite of a chocolate factory. The fantasies he indulges are decidedly pedestrian. Instead of an escapist wonderland, he uses the magic of his production to make exact copies of people's homes, transforming their lives into sets. The expense alone makes it outrageous. Who would spend this much money on such a thing? Why? One of Fielder's answers is: It's funny!
But there are others who probably connect with his long-running quest to understand people. 'It was strange being in a real child's home after being in a fake one for so long,' he said at the end of the first season, staring at the messy closet of the little boy who'd so enjoyed pretending Fielder was his father for the show that he didn't want to stop. 'I wasn't used to this level of detail. Every object was perfectly placed, but nothing was by design. It was a work of art, and it was just real life.'
The Rehearsal is available for streaming on Max.

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