SPOILER ALERT: The following piece contains spoilers from “My Controls,” the Season 2 finale of “The Rehearsal.”
The difference between “The Rehearsal” and prior Nathan Fielder works is that it’s explicitly about himself. The idea that “Nathan for You” was really about helping small businesses may have been a joke, but one the Comedy Central series told with a straight face. “The Rehearsal” started with a similar concept, helping volunteers navigate personal relationships rather than professional problems via obsessive preparation. But over the course of Season 1, Fielder — or rather, his stilted on-screen persona — went from applying his methods on others to using them himself in a desperate, doomed attempt to prove the validity of his approach. Which should have been a clue that the entire premise of Season 2 is an extended feint.
Ostensibly, the second edition of “The Rehearsal” is Fielder’s sincere attempt to use rehearsals as a means of improving communication among airline pilots, thus (he hopes) preventing deadly crashes. The path to achieving this goal was already a digressive one, weaving together singing competitions, cloned dogs and a bald-capped Fielder breastfeeding from a giant puppet. (It made a certain sense in the moment.) But Sunday’s finale began by revealing Fielder had been withholding a crucial piece of information throughout the prior episodes, one that reframes his entire undertaking. The entire time, Fielder was learning to fly a plane himself, eventually obtaining a commercial pilot’s license. In other words, Fielder isn’t assisting pilots; he is one. And by trying to help them, he’s really trying to help himself.
Fielder had begun to move his own arc into the foreground in the previous episode, which addressed how his work has resonated with autistic fans who see themselves in his eternal awkwardness. In theory, these armchair diagnoses were an oblique means for Fielder to gain an audience with Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee who’s both a member of the House’s aviation subcommittee and an advocate for the neurodivergent. But they also lead Fielder to finally flirt with a clinical explanation for his chronic inability to connect easily with other people, the defining condition of his in-show character.
In the brain-bending world of Fielder’s work, where the line between reality and performance is in the eye of the beholder, “The Rehearsal” breaking the fourth wall to incorporate the response to Season 1 is the most marginal of expansions. The autism storyline does, however, provide Season 2 with what it previously lacked: an explanation for why Fielder is so preoccupied with the captain-first officer relationship. The implication was already there — Fielder modeled one exercise to test pilots’ candor on his own experience producing “Canadian Idol” — but was now explicit. Fielder sees aviation professionals’ problems speaking freely as a version of his own, so he makes them his own by joining their brethren.
This project opens up new comic frontiers for “The Rehearsal”; Fielder slyly observes in the final episode of the season that he’s uniquely bad at landing the literal plane. It also (pun once again intended) elevates Fielder’s full-commitment stunts to new extremes. When a slightly manic-sounding Fielder pitches a “loophole” in regulations that allows him to co-pilot an actual jet so long as his passengers aren’t paying, it’s a marriage of “Nathan for You”-style scheming — remember when he revived the smoking bar by staging a play? — with HBO resources. Even without music to ratchet up the tension of an ultimately uneventful flight, the sight of Fielder in the cockpit at cruising altitude is jaw-dropping in a way TV rarely has the capacity to be.
But there’s also a narrative logic at work here. Fielder’s nagging concerns about his own potential autism run headfirst into his airborne ambitions when he has to fill out an FAA disclosure form. Against Reddit’s advice, Fielder solicits a formal diagnosis, including an fMRI, to ensure there’s nothing so off about him that he can’t be trusted with others’ lives. The results aren’t ready in time for his maiden voyage, which proceeds; instead, he gets an ominous voicemail from the doctor’s office while he lurks in the shadows, watching the final performance of pseudo-reality show “Wings of Voice.” And in a coda with a staggering scale belied by its tossed-off delivery, Fielder says he’s started shutting empty jets between remote corners of the world to cope with his insecurities. “They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size,” his voiceover says over an aerial view of the African desert. “No one is allowed in the cockpit if there’s something wrong with them. So if you’re here, you must be fine.”
These closing lines pack a punch, even if the season’s intentionally ambling structure meant they came with less lead-up that could enhance their impact even further. Fielder began Season 2 by framing his mission as an altruistic exercise, intended to help the people who drive and use air travel. (Judging by recent headlines, it seems like they need it.) The finale makes clear this retooled rehearsal practice, just like the original, is first and foremost about Fielder — and not just in the sense that Fielder, like everyone, has his issues with saying what he feels. In fact, it’s one of precious few times “The Rehearsal” has hinted that the events of Season 1, including a disastrous experiment in simulated parenthood, have weighed on the protagonist. What if Fielder is so disturbed by his own dysfunction, and outside observers’ attempt to taxonomize it, that disproving their analysis drives him to increasingly over-the-top acts of one-upsmanship? Could an irredeemable loner doomed to a life peering from the outside in do this?
In the finale, Fielder seems both impressed and reassured to learn that rehearsal is already an integral part of pilots’ learning process. Trainees go directly from a high-tech simulator, like the one Fielder visits outside Las Vegas, to ferrying passengers. He’s not alone in his dependency on obsessively detailed practice, nor his belief that these rituals really do leave him prepared for real life. And in the end, nothing matters except the results. When Fielder (successfully) lands the plane, he’s greeted by a cheering crowd of actors he’s worked with throughout the season. “All this applause made me feel like I had done something important,” he narrates. These people don’t know about his inner turmoil, nor the pains he’s taken to overcome it: “As long as you get everyone down safely, that’s all it takes to be a hero.”
By hiding his true efforts until the very end, Fielder gives Season 2 of “The Rehearsal” a less cohesive throughline, and perhaps a more blunted final impact, than the show’s first run. Yet he also pulls off the kind of magic trick that’s fascinated Fielder since he was a teenager. (Fielder pinpoints his early attempts at magicianhood as the first time he realized his poor social skills could be a real impediment.) The tradeoff has its own benefits, and comes with a fusion of form and function. Fielder has concealed what he’s actually up to — which, for all he professes to want more emotional transparency, is what he concludes he actually needs to get through the day. If you stick the landing, no one cares how you did it.