When you fire up a show written, produced, and starring Nathan Fielder, you know that you’re about to see something truly wild. However, this weekend’s all new episode of The Rehearsal on HBO truly broke my brain in a way I didn’t think was possible. The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 3 “Pilot’s Code” starts off insane — with Fielder concocting a complex experiment to give a couple’s three cloned dogs the same personality of their original, deceased, DNA donor dog — and then goes completely, brilliantly off the rails. From now until the end of time, The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 3 will be known as the time Nathan Fielder transformed himself into Captain Sully…
**Spoilers for The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 3 “Pilot’s Code,” now streaming on MAX**
The Rehearsal Season 2 is comic Nathan Fielder’s attempt to use the infrastructure he created for his daffy HBO show to solve the very serious and very deadly issue of aviation disasters. Fielder points out in the Season 2 premiere that the one thing every plane crash has in common is a moment where the First Officer should challenge the pilot and either does not, out of social awkwardness, or does, but is nonetheless ignored. Fielder hopes that by using the intense role-playing structure he created for The Rehearsal Season 1, he can help teach pilots how to communicate better, thus preventing future catastrophes.
The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 3 “Pilot’s Code” opens with Fielder researching what it takes to teach behavior. He meets a couple that loved their dog Achilles so much, they paid $50,000 to clone him after he passed. Unfortunately, they’re now stuck with three young dogs who look exactly like Achilles, but none of them behave like him. Fielder points out that these new dogs are being raised in very different circumstances than Achilles was. So he sets up three simulations where actors play the younger versions of the couple in a set made to mimic their original apartment. Eventually, one of the clone dogs actually learns one of Achilles’s old habits, proving to Fielder that experience shapes personality.
Okay, so what does this have to do with aviation disasters? Well, Fielder surmises that if he lives life as Captain Chesley Sullenberger, aka Captain Sully, he will understand what it takes to be one of the rare pilots who can respond to a crisis in the air with calm, courage, and heroism. After all, as Fielder points out, Captain Sully was able to pull of the “Miracle on the Hudson” because he did ask his First Officer for feedback.
Because this is The Rehearsal and because Nathan Fielder is a madman, he commits so hard to this bit that he builds an oversized nursery for him to start out as baby Captain Sully. A giant puppet is brought into the room to stand in for Sully’s mother. Fielder literally lets the puppet change his diaper and breastfeed him in a sequence that had me wheezing in laughter. It’s so surreal, so bizarre, and so decidedly Nathan Fielder.
Of course, the absurdity doesn’t stop there. Fielder uses Captain Sully’s own autobiography to chart the trajectory of his entire life. A five-year-old version of the pilot is chastised by his mother for feeding his sister rocks. As a young man, he enters the Army, allowing Fielder to embark on a boot camp segment. But the wildest, most transgressive moment is probably when Fielder picks up on the teenaged Sully’s conflation of a crush with the rush of flying, prompting him to clear the show’s cockpit set to masturbate as the younger version of the Captain.
As if simply watching Nathan Fielder dress up as Captain Sully to re-enact his life story isn’t hilarious enough, the comic comes up with a wild theory about what really went down during the Miracle on the Hudson. Fielder realizes that in 2002, Sully got his first iPod. After that, Sully refers to the music he’s listening to a lot within his memoirs. He associates Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun” with his father and repeatedly refers to listening to Evanescence.
Fielder reveals that Sully is oddly silent for 23 seconds on the black box recording of the Miracle on the Hudson. He suggests that Sully used this time to listen to the ear worm chorus of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” as it is exactly 23 seconds long. Now, I can’t think of one of the most triumphant saves in aviation history without hearing “WAKE ME UP INSIDE!” reverberate in my head.
Like all Nathan Fielder projects, The Rehearsal takes a relatively simple idea and pushes it to the outer ranges of credulity. There’s no reason why delving into aviation safety should lead someone to launching a faux singing competition show or attempting to give cloned dogs a dead dog’s personality. However, The Rehearsal goes there. It gives us Nathan Fielder as baby Sully struggling to slurp up breast milk. It gives us a version of history where Evanescence played a key role in the Miracle of the Hudson.
The Rehearsal is a stunningly insane show and I’m incredibly grateful for it.
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