The second season of Nathan Fielder’s bizarre HBO show picks up right where the first one left off: somewhere between psychological experiment, existential theatre, and elaborate prank. But this time, Fielder turns his lens toward a more public space—aviation. What starts as an innocuous dive into flight safety becomes a six-episode odyssey on trust, mental health, human awkwardness, and the strange rituals we accept as normal. Each episode builds on Fielder’s signature style: mixing meticulous reconstructions with emotional discomfort and satire so dry it often feels like sincerity. Season 2 isn't just about flying—it’s about control, risk, and the quietly terrifying idea that none of us are truly ready for takeoff.

Episode 1: Gotta Have Fun

The season opens with what might be Fielder’s most grounded and conventional premise to date: how do we ensure that pilots are equipped to handle high-pressure environments? Naturally, he doesn’t begin with research or expert interviews—instead, he reconstructs an entire airport terminal inside a warehouse. What starts as a straightforward examination of aviation safety quickly morphs into something stranger: a meditation on performance itself. Pilots performing calmness, passengers performing trust, and all of us silently agreeing to a set of rituals every time we board a plane. The premise feels almost reasonable—at least by Fielder’s standards—but the surreal edges slowly start to creep in.

Recent aviation disasters are treated not as cautionary tales, but as metaphors for emotional, psychological, and social collapse. There’s no overt thesis, but one begins to take shape: in high-stakes environments, failure isn’t just possible—it’s inevitable. With his signature deadpan delivery and precise visual style, Fielder turns his faux terminal into a stage for broader anxieties. What seems like an introduction reveals itself as a trapdoor. He’s not really about airplanes; it’s about how we cope with abstract fear. He’s talking about life.

Episode 2: Star Potential

In typical Fielder fashion, episode two takes a simple, even clever idea—pilots should learn to deliver bad news like reality show judges—and builds it into an unhinged spectacle. Drawing on his Canadian Idol days, Nathan stages a full-on singing competition called “Wings of Voice,” complete with judges, lighting design, and over-produced graphics. But it’s not purely satirical; one of the most touching moments of the entire series happens here, when Nathan delivers an earnest pep talk to a nervous teenage contestant, and for once, he plays it completely straight. I was bracing for a misstep, something awkward or cruel, but instead he’s kind, even sincere. After she leaves, though, he rushes to check the judge’s performance review box he’d installed to track the pilot’s progress—only to become fixated on his own low scores. He stares at a 6, his highest rating yet but still disappointing. Then he turns the paper upside down.

That sincerity is quickly complicated by the episode’s more incendiary subplot. After an episode of his previous show, Nathan for You, is removed from Paramount Plus over allegedly antisemitic imagery—despite Nathan being Jewish—he rehearses a confrontation with the company’s executives. In Fielder’s version of events, Paramount is portrayed as a literal Nazi regime, complete with uniformed guards bearing SS-style patches. It’s shocking, aggressive, and unnervingly funny in the way only Nathan can pull off. But the real disruption comes when an actor in the rehearsal calls Nathan out directly. “Look at you trying to be serious. This is not sincere,” he says, cutting through the artifice with brutal clarity. The moment stings—it asks the essential question behind all of Fielder’s work: is he ever truly being earnest, or is it all just another long, cruel joke?

Episode 3: Pilot’s Code

Arguably the most surreal entry of the season—the moment The Rehearsal completely abandons logic and fully embraces speculative psychodrama. It begins oddly enough: a couple believes their three cloned dogs can be trained to behave like their deceased original, Achilles. Nathan, ever the completist, recreates their old apartment circa the Obama administration—down to the snacks, television broadcasts, and furniture—to test if environmental memory can be replicated in animals.

Satisfied enough with the results, it spirals into an elaborate puppet reenactment of Sully Sullenberger’s life. This isn’t parody; it’s speculative biography via diorama. The episode’s thesis emerges slowly: mental health in the cockpit is a ticking clock no one wants to hear. Pilots are discouraged from seeking help for fear of losing their licenses. Sully himself found music quite therapeutic in his own struggles. Nathan approaches this with surprising empathy, culminating in a claim that Sully may have been listening to Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” during his landing on the Hudson. It sounds ridiculous, but compared to everything that came before, it’s entirely too believable.

Episode 4: Kissme

This episode cuts close to the bone. Colin, a soft-spoken pilot-in-training, becomes the unwitting subject of a romantic social experiment orchestrated by Nathan. What begins as a simple attempt to help Colin improve his social skills quickly turns ethically murky—and hilarious—when Nathan gathers 100 actors and bluntly asks them, “Do you like Colin?” Only three raise their hands. From there, the scene shifts to the Lizard Lounge, a painstaking reconstruction of a bar Fielder frequented during his Canadian Idol days. This nostalgic, artfully fabricated setting becomes the stage for one of the most unhinged conversations ever filmed, where emotional honesty and sheer awkwardness collide.

A standout moment comes when an actress delivers a monologue revealing that Einstein “turns her on,” a line that perfectly captures the strange, intimate truths that surface in Nathan’s presence. In his world, people often reveal far more than they intend—leaving the viewer to wonder: are we complicit in this manipulation, or is Nathan simply holding up a mirror? Walking a razor-thin ethical line throughout, the episode never lets you look away. If previous installments explored institutional failure, this one dives into personal fragility, making it possibly the most emotionally raw and relatable entry of the season.

Episode 5: Washington

By the time Fielder attempts to present his pilot training theories before the U.S. Congress, the season has long since shed any pretense of restraint. “Washington” is pure bureaucratic satire, a biting send-up of empty pageantry and institutional indifference. Nathan discovers that his show has a surprising cult following within the autism community, prompting him to pursue a self-styled role as an ambassador for the group to bolster his credibility. This leads to some quietly humorous moments as he fumbles through diagnostic tests himself, but also to a genuinely touching scene where children from an autism advocacy organization visit his airport reconstruction to practice managing the stresses of travel.

The episode shifts to political theater, with Fielder rehearsing a congressional hearing featuring actors as committee members, only to later meet with a real subcommittee representative. The encounter is brief and stinging, made even more poignant by the garish office adorned with kitschy Kennedy memorabilia and Nathan’s increasingly frantic justifications. Though he never achieves the legitimacy he craves, the episode reveals the hollow performance behind our systems of authority. “Washington” underscores a core truth of The Rehearsal: the quest isn’t changing the system, but about uncovering how credibility itself is a staged performance—and how even the institutions we trust are just another act.

Episode 6: My Controls

The season finale opens with a moment of pure dread: Nathan telling his actors that they’ll be passengers on a plane flown by him. They laugh, assuming it’s a bit. It’s not. Fielder has actually earned his pilot’s license. What follows is a high-wire act—literally and thematically—about trust, mental health, and the performance of competence, asking one final question: would you let Nathan Fielder fly your plane?

A required medical check-up ties back to episode three’s focus on pilot mental health, as Nathan grapples with his own anxiety and the murky ethics of self-disclosure. Is transparency a virtue—or a liability? The season’s final moments offer no easy answers. Instead, delivering something eerily profound: the Wings of Voice winner (yes, that subplot returns) performs “Bring Me to Life,” the Evanescence anthem Nathan previously claimed was Sully Sullenberger’s favorite. As the music swells, the camera slowly zooms in on Nathan’s eyes, his expression unreadable—mirroring the autism diagnosis test from last episode. There’s no triumph, only turbulence. The season lands not with certainty, but with a quiet, unsettling confrontation between Nathan’s chaos and his desperate need for control.

Conclusion

The Rehearsal is many things: an absurdist comedy, a performance piece, a media critique, and—perhaps most unsettlingly—a window into our own delusions of control. What makes Fielder’s work resonate is his ability to stage artificial situations that somehow surface real emotions. This season, he turns his awkward charisma and obsessive attention to detail toward an industry built on trust and simulation: aviation. The results are consistently strange, occasionally disturbing, and often beautiful. Whether he’s recreating a congressional office, staging a singing competition, or speculating about Sully’s iPod playlist, Fielder finds plausibility in the absurd. Or maybe it’s the other way around.