Nathan Fielder Might Actually Make Flying Safer With 'The Rehearsal'

If you ever needed proof that we live in a simulation controlled by Nathan Fielder, just look at the timeline for The Rehearsal Season 2. Following a brief spate of aircraft disasters prompting concerns over the current administration’s handling of the FAA, the Season 2 trailer revealed that Fielder’s attention would be fully focused on plane crashes. Keep in mind, Fielder had been working on this season for at least two years, if not more, judging by his new side gig that I won’t spoil. There’s absolutely no way he could’ve predicted that the nation would be in the grips of an aviation panic. Unless, of course, Nathan Fielder is the dark master of our reality, which is a theory I believe as strongly as The Batman Part II will never see the inside of a movie theater. (Will I shoehorn that into every article? Maybe!)

With The Rehearsal Season 2 racking up Emmy nominations, thanks in no small part to the absolutely genius Evanescence episode, Fielder is working the interview circuit, where he recently revealed that the show may have actually sparked government action. After the finale, he went on CNN and called out the current FAA training methods that don’t encourage communication between pilots and co-pilots, a factor that Fielder believes causes most crashes. The show also highlighted how pilots are discouraged from discussing mental health, and that’s about to change.

According to Deadline, the House passed the Mental Health in Aviation Act in June, and The Rehearsal may have been the nudge the bill needed.

“But actually, after the show aired, John [Goglia, former National Transportation Safety Board member] texted me and said that a bill that’s been stuck in the House for years about pilot mental health finally went through and was passed, and went to the Senate, and he was talking to the young staffers, and he said, ‘I think the show pushed them to [do it]’. I guess the young people make all the decisions. He’s like, ‘That’s how it works’. Anyway, I don’t know if it did anything, but it was nice to hear. That’s the most recent update,” he said.

As for the central thesis of the show, it turns out Fielder has been noodling on his co-pilot theory for over a decade, thanks to a Canadian documentary series.

“I noticed this thing that would happen in [Mayday] a lot,” Fielder said. “They reenact plane crashes and talk about why they happened. I started to notice this thing that was always happening, where the co-pilot would know what the issue was, but would be too afraid to or intimidated to speak up to the captain or take over the controls. For like 10 years, I was just telling people this at parties.”

Thanks to Fielder turning his obsession into a second season of The Rehearsal, he’s seen into Congress’s eyes like open doors and woke them up inside. He called America’s name and saved us from the dark.