The Rehearsal season 2 finale review: Nathan Fielder drops the act

Editor’s note: This contains spoilers for the entirety of The Rehearsal season 2.

Since watching the final episode of this season of The Rehearsal, every time I’ve seen a plane flying overhead I’ve wondered, “Is Nathan Fielder flying that thing?” It would’ve been crazy to think such a thing a few weeks ago but now, with the season’s finale episode revealing that Fielder spent hundreds of hours training to be a pilot and used his license to fly a Boeing 737 filled with actors to prove a wider point about aviation safety, well, it’s not impossible.

The Rehearsal had been building toward a big finale, but nobody could’ve predicted what it ended up delivering. Throughout the second season Fielder has diligently plugged away at his belief that unspoken tension between pilots, or at least an awkwardness in raising potential issues while in the air, could be at the root of airborne disaster. In his own inimitable way, including staging a fake TV talent show and making a biopic of the heroic pilot “Sully” Sullenberger, he sought solutions for making pilots more comfortable in raising issues with one another. His goal was to speak in front of Congress to raise his concerns to a panel with the authority to implement major changes.

Along the way Fielder created singular television, both through his own orchestrations — I’ll never shake the image of him dressed as a young Sullenberger on his mother’s breast — and that of others. Moments like a pilot admitting to being thrown off of five dating apps for his robust approach to pick-up lines and an actress saying she had a wet dream of Einstein are the kind of non-scriptable gold most comedians only dream of capturing. Luckily, Fielder and his team have become experts at putting these characters in front of a camera and creating the space to coax out these moments.

That space often comes through silence, a tool nobody on television has utilized like Fielder since the faux-polite documentarian Louis Theroux. But The Rehearsal suggests that Fielder doesn’t deploy these gaps purely to make people speak; when you spend as much time trying to understand how people think and operate as he does, it’s inevitable for there to be lulls between sentences. While on that altruistic path this season, Fielder quietly revealed more about himself than any of his previous projects, too. He divulged small personal details like the fact he worked on Canadian Idol, and that due to an administrative error his green card lists his gender as female. In the season finale, Fielder reveals he once struggled with a gambling problem and that he may well be autistic.

The question of whether Fielder is on or not on the spectrum has always felt like the subtext to The Rehearsal and his work in general, but this second season is the first time he’s ever grappled with the subject explicitly. Autistic writers have broken down how his methods on the show mirror the ways in which they navigate life, and in the show’s finale it seems Fielder might finally face the question of whether or not he’s actually autistic as he gets a complete brain MRI scan done. But at the critical moment, in which a lesser comedian would lean into the cliche of mental health’s importance, Fielder goes the opposite direction and shows us him rejecting the gentle suggestion of experts and burying his head in the sand; we never see the results of the MRI or hear his diagnosis. No medical professional would advise it, but on a human level his avoidance is relatable.

Instead, Fielder makes his final bit for The Rehearsal season two a convoluted plot to prove his neurotypicality wrapped in the guise of furthering aviation safety: he becomes a pilot himself. “They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size,” he says in the final minutes of the show after the audience has spent the last hour watching him go to unbelievable lengths to achieve a commercial pilot’s license. “And it feels good to know that.”

Trying to establish how real The Rehearsal is versus its artificial elements feels like asking a magician for the truth to his tricks; the gamble is that once you know the truth, the illusion loses everything that made it so great. Fielder’s words from the cockpit ring true in a way that feels hard to fake. Learning to fly a jet plane as part of your TV show is inherently performative, but the reasons why you’re compelled to do so are much less easy to manufacture. Thousands of feet in the air, alone with nothing but his thoughts, Fielder might’ve gotten the closest to finally letting us in on his act.