‘The Rehearsal’ Season 2 Episode 3 review: “Pilot’s Code”

Admittedly, after watching The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 3, titled “Pilot’s Code,” there’s only one person’s reaction you want to read. And I know it’s not mine. But thank you, nevertheless, for opting to read my thoughts anyway. It means a lot, dear reader. I hope I don’t let you down.

One of the purest joys in watching a Nathan Fielder series is knowing, especially now, that you don’t know where it will go. You just strap yourself in and enjoy the ride. And you know that you are in for a good one when the start of the episode is already pretty weird. We meet the marriage couple Bogdan and Morgan and their three identical terrier dogs at the beginning of “Pilot’s Code.”  And when I say identical, I mean identical.

All three of these pups — Thetis, Apollo, and Zeus — are clones based on their belated and beloved dog, Achilles, who passed away a few years back. A pillar of their relationship, Morgan and Bogdan have never been able to get over the death of their precious pet and resorted to cloning as a way to keep their furry friend in their lives. But there’s a problem: while they all look like Achilles, the dogs don’t have his personality.

However, because the youngest dog, Zeus, is still a puppy and therefore trainable, Fielder goes to extraordinary lengths (as he always does) to recreate the couple’s old apartment, hire three sets of actors to play the couple around the clock and use the classic Fielder Method to see if training Zeus under the same circumstances as Achilles will help the former turn into the latter.

A return to the ‘Nathan For You’ energy.

If last week’s episode, “Star Potential,” felt like Fielder tapping into his old Nathan for You way of show-making, then “Pilot’s Code” continues what we saw of The Rehearsal in Season 1. Fielder and crew go to extraordinary and, of course, quite hilarious lengths to recapture 2011 again, complete with old Subway ads, tech bros mourning the “recent” death of Steve Jobs, and explicit references to The Hangover: Part II. The early 2010s are alive and well!

However, despite Fielder’s laborious efforts, which include taking the eBay-filled air from one city and transporting it to another, Zeus doesn’t have much of a response to the testing. Fielder stresses that he ethically wanted to do this test on an animal before a human. While the host-director has a series of problems getting inside another person’s frame of mind, he’s even more helpless when contorting and configuring the unknowable mind of a cloned, undomesticated pet.

Fielder infuses a lot of aspects from Bogdan/Morgan’s life at the time, including fights about potential children and recreated diabetic attacks, but that doesn’t seem to do the trick. Only when Fielder adds in some copycats of their old cats does the host get any desirable results. When Zeus mimics the cats’ behavior, much like Achilles did while he was alive, Morgan and Bodgan are relieved to see their long-lost friend return to them.

Nathan Fielder once again takes his experiments to the next level.

Chalking this experience as a success, Fielder is ready to take his experiment to the next level — even if we can’t prepare for what’s about to happen. Returning to Season 2’s aviation theme, Fielder talks about the one and only airplane pilot he knows fostered proper communication with a co-pilot during a peril: Captain Sully, i.e., Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger III. The hero pilot of Flight 1549, who successfully landed his plane in the Hudson River after a mid-flight disaster, Captain Sully’s cockpit recorder captured something lost in the other recorded conversations between pilots: the invitation for feedback at a critical moment.

Referring to Captain Sully’s 2009 memoir, Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters, co-authored by Jeffrey Zaslow, which claims that all the elements of the captain’s life led to the life-saving events that prevented that tragedy, Fielder wonders if he can use the Fielder Method once more, particularly with all the information he learned from this recent Zeus experiment, and see if he can similarly train future pilots to become their best, safest selves through Sully’s story. It’s at this point that Fielder says, “What you’re about to see next is going to seem weird,” as we see the host shaving his body and getting into elaborate and horrifying make-up and costuming.

Now, when Fielder says that what you’re about to see “is going to seem weird,” you know that you are in for a world of strangeness truly unlike anything else on television. Sure enough, the host doesn’t disappoint in the least. Coming out to a giant suit dressed as a giant baby, Fielder is about to embark on the journey of a lifetime — literally — as he aims to live Sully’s life story. To try to detail everything that happens in this episode from this point forward would be a fool’s errand. What Fielder accomplishes here is nothing short of remarkable.

Unlike Clint Eastwood’s Sully, which struggled to figure out what was compelling about Sully’s life after his most defining moment, to the point of making fun of fabricated legal problems, Fielder makes a Sullenberger biopic that might not be entirely factual, to put it mildly, but one that gets closer to the heart of what defined this man’s heroic plight.

As a story of cradle-to-uhh-flight tale, Fielder immerses himself with 20-foot marionettes and actors walking around on stilts to replicate the feeling of being a small child in a world much larger and much more mysterious than the one the host is used to. He adapts Sully’s life story over 20-ish minutes, as we see him realize his love of flying, fall in love, marry, lose his father, and several other key pivotal life moments, all captured with Fielder donning a fake mustache and a light blonde wig.

Fielder earns the Charlie Kaufman comparisons.

These truly bizarre, brilliant sequences have a hysterical potency, which goes so far as to see Fielder dressed as a baby and breastfed by a giant overmilking breast. Fielder’s work typically gets comparisons to the work of screenwriter-filmmaker Charlie Kaufman. They are probably at their most earned here. The host-director finds himself dissecting another person’s life in a meticulously minutiae fashion. In it he relieves one’s key life experiences while also, throughout dissecting and re-dissecting Sully’s memoir, trying to gain a better understanding of what it is that made Sully the man and pilot that he is seen as today.

In typical celebrity memoir fashion, large sections of the book gloss over key segments of his life, favoring more winsome or likable sections while ignoring large swaths of details, particularly Sully’s “brief, childless” first marriage. Fielder’s inability to grapple with these lost details makes for a deliberate, fragmented, but keenly self-explorative journey that is as uncannily probing and unsettling as it is funny.

One particular aspect of Sully’s life that is unexplored in the author’s book to Fielder’s immense frustration is his father’s aforementioned death. Sully admits to “never crying” and only using a variety of ways to “cope” to guard, suppress, and/or modulate his darker feelings. This is something that understandably troubles even a socially and emotionally constipated person like Fielder. That is until he remembers that pilots often won’t seek help for their mental health due to the stern possibility of the FAA removing their medical certificate. Something which prevents pilots from flying. Even the possibility of writing about these moody and grieving feelings could possibly linger in Sully’s deeply professional head as the author revisits key low-life points.

But in his attempt to explore the subtext of Sully’s source material, Fielder discovers the airplane pilot’s seemingly late-in-life music discovery. Various musical references sprinkle their way into the book following Sully’s father’s death. This timeline correlates around when the iPod was released and it suggests that Sully was using music from various genres and bands to privately grieve and articulate his feelings. And it’s one particular band mentioned throughout the book that Fielder latches onto with great, uproarious, and surprisingly compelling results: Evanescence.

The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 3 spotlights an unlikely source of inspiration.

Particularly in Sully’s surprise love of their hit single, “Bring Me to Life,” referenced throughout the memoir, Fielder theorizes that the movie’s souring lyrics helped Sully grapple with feelings he couldn’t properly express in any professional or personal context.

In a bit of pensive exploration that is as delightfully unexpected as it is sneakingly convincing, Fielder goes to elaborate, theorizing that it’s possible that, in the 23 seconds that Sully was silent in the air, deciding what to do with his falling plane before he finally consults his copilot, he could have listened to the thunderous chorus of this 2003 megahit song. By Fielder’s admissions, the chorus is exactly 23 seconds long, and they found Sully’s water-sunken iPod in the wreckage of Flight 1549’s cockpit. As such, we get a glorious score from Evanescence’s over the climax that only Fielder could provide with such riotous and righteous power. It’s as ridiculous as it is rigid in its research.

Also contained in this episode’s final moments are real testimonials (seemingly, that is … though who knows for sure with Fielder) from various pilots who auditioned for The Rehearsal’s second season and felt liberated enough, even just speaking on their laptops, to discuss their lives with an openness that seems sincerely liberating. Fielder’s ability to explore the repressed hearts of these emotionally-guarded pilots, all while tackling Sully’s life story with vigorous attention and unwavering commitment (I didn’t even get into a particularly lewd excursion that Fielder enacts in the cockpit with a robot midway through, and that’s probably for the best, honestly), all while giving us a tribute to Evanescence’s musical prowess that most viewers probably wouldn’t ever expect, nor knew they wanted, or maybe needed — like these psychologically blocked pilots.

Fielder’s desire to explore what makes people tick comes with a resounding resolution. These pilots might need more psychological copping than these high-pressure jobs frequently allow. Who knows if Fielder will continue to explore this through the season or the series in general. Maybe this is just meant to be a cathartic button for this especially eventful episode. In either case, “Pilot’s Code” is a clear high point for this season and this excellent show.

But, as alluded to earlier, I have to wonder: what the hell does Captain Sully think about all this? That’s the one reaction that everyone is likely dying to know, and who knows if we’ll ever get it. Perhaps, though, much like Sully’s love of music, it is not something meant to be said, but felt.

The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 3 is out now on HBO.

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Images courtesy of HBO / Max.