'The Rehearsal' Season 2 Finale: Did Nathan Fielder Finally Show His True Self?

Nathan Fielder’s mad genius second season of The Rehearsal has come to a close with a colossal finale stunt. While it might not have the wind-blowing-through-his-hair high stakes tone of a Mission: Impossible stunt, there is nothing short of rapid heartbeats when Fielder takes to the sky as the pilot of a full 737.

As the culmination of his season (and years) long exploration of aviation safety, Fielder sits in the captain’s seat of a leased passenger aircraft and takes a plane full of actors on a joyride from the nearest airport and back. It’s breathtaking to imagine the actors being pursued into such a death-defying stunt, but what’s more is how the exercise becomes the pinnacle of Nathan Fielder’s exploration of himself. Yes, his absurdist comedies have almost always been about the character of Nathan Fielder— a perfectionist who takes the wrong lessons from life events then tries to apply them back to the real world— but here, he seems to break down even more walls between himself and his character when the stakes are at cruising altitude. While his latest outing is disguised as a six-episode attempt at analyzing flight safety to solve human interaction causing plane crashes, Fielder ends up not only examining human behavior per usual, but specifically his own, in a way that seems to let his mask slip. In his newest attempt to spend all of HBO’s money, his elaborate stunts become an examination of himself with increasing sincerity.

Fielder’s comedy has always been a study of human behavior, of everyday people, of wacky ones he finds for his wild situations, and of the character he has forged and pretends to be. It’s been about creating larger-than-life scenarios and then observing how people react to them, like suggesting to over a hundred actors that they board his plane as “characters,” while he, a comedian, flies the plane. And like the studies of human behavior from the elevator conformity experiment to the Stanford prison experiment, The Rehearsal sees these regular people unanimously agreeing to board that aircraft.

Nathan Fielder is a character. Yes, he’s a real person and a comedian, but like his predecessors in Rowan Atkinson, early Stephen Colbert, and Larry David, Fielder has created a character so deep into the bit that it’s nearly impossible to know who Fielder would be, say, sitting across from you having a morning coffee. It’s something he examines throughout this season, beginning on a note about how he is viewed as a clown, and later in the penultimate episode of this season remembering how even on talk shows and in interviews, he is doing a bit or playing a character. Wondering if the reason Congress people are hesitant to meet with him is because a quick Google search suggests he’s “a complete fool,” he contemplates how, “every public opportunity I’ve had in my life to convey sincerity, I’ve, instead, turned into a joke.” And it’s true. Fielder has meticulously calculated ways to avoid showing sincerity. Nathan for You fans will specifically remember two talk show appearances that might have seemed sincere to the average viewer but were bits about “dumb Starbucks” or creating the perfect talk-show-anecdote.

Much like the first season, this season of The Rehearsal begins as a larger conversation about something that slowly becomes a deeper exploration of Fielder, the character. Lines were blurred in the first season when Fielder went from supporting Angela in her rehearsal as a mother to standing in as a father who has to contemplate raising his Jewish son with a Christian mother. Even his Comedy Central series, Nathan for You, which ended in a grand finale tour to locate a man’s lost love, finishes with a beat about how Fielder is simply playing a character and doing it for the cameras. While Fielder’s comedy is often about creating authentic situations, they are ultimately about how inauthentic the scenarios and Fielder himself are. And while the stakes of having his parents around while he tries to raise a stand-in son, they’re seemingly higher when he is helming a 737.

When motivated to visit an autism center as part of his ultimate scheme to get in front of congress, Nathan is forced to consider if his behaviors are that of an autistic person. Further blurring and delineating the difference between his schtick and his real self, Nathan visits the center and then a clinic to discuss autism and anxiety, insisting that there is a difference between his work and his real behavior. He learns about masking and how when people can name themselves as autistic, it can be easier to drop the mask. Throughout this more serious examination of his character’s proclivities, Fielder examines the “deficit of credibility” he has created and then considers if by naming himself as a comedian (instead of, say, an expert in business), he can drop his mask.

In my review of this season, I contemplated how we almost never see the real behind the scenes in Fiedler’s complex shows, and just have to accept what sort of work was probably done in preparation for his complex stunts. But in the season finale, we see Fielder training to be a pilot. Flying a full 737 is about as real as it gets, so left alone with instructors and his own study materials, Nathan is about as stripped down as we’ve seen him as he works towards preparing for his ultimate rehearsal. Before this, he notes on his reputation of insincerity that, “now, when lives were on the line, it was coming back to haunt me,” which then ushers in the remainder of the episode wherein he seems to be more himself.

Fielder, the character, ultimately declines to review his test results, which would potentially ground the newly mined pilot, but we’ve no idea if this is a choice the real Nathan would make. What we do know is that the show ends on a note of Fielder examining the slipping of his own mask and considering that remaining undiagnosed and in the sky means he’s “okay.” The second season of The Rehearsal began as an attempt to improve aviation safety, but slowly morphs into a meditation on the sincerity of the comedian. In episode two, the actor playing the Paramount executive tells him, “It is not sincere.” In his finale, his copilot calls him an actor, and Fielder corrects him that he is an actor and a pilot, presumably acting as a pilot in the current circumstance. Most of us probably won’t see the real Nathan Fielder, at least not while he is crafting this kind of media, but for now, his latest stunt has perhaps given us the longest glimpse at the man behind the mask.

All episodes of The Rehearsal are streaming on Max.