Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Rehearsal Season 2 finale.
Throughout The Rehearsal Season 2—and really, throughout the entirety of his career—Nathan Fielder has proven time and again that he always has another trick up his sleeve. So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that Sunday night’s finale of his hit HBO series features what is perhaps his longest and most involved comedy con to date. And yet, it’s still pretty difficult to believe he managed to pull this one off.
After spending the first five episodes of Season 2 building an argument in support of his thesis that many plane crashes are caused by co-pilots facing difficulty speaking up to their captains when they think something is amiss, the finale flashed back two years earlier to show how Fielder spent months obtaining his commercial pilot license in order to be able to captain a real Boeing 737 plane with real passengers onboard at risk of all the real dangers of flying. However, he first had to learn how to do said flying, which he soon discovered required a skillset that didn’t come easily to him.
“When I first began this project, I decided there was no better way to understand pilots than by becoming one myself,” he explained in a voiceover accompanying clips of himself taking flying lessons. “But it became clear very quickly that I was not a natural at this, especially when it came to landing the plane.”
While Fielder was told that most students master landings and are able to fly solo after about 10-30 hours of flight time, he still hadn’t managed to prove his ability to his instructors’ satisfaction by the time he had spent over 120 hours in the air. After witnessing another student pilot and their instructor fatally crash while he was in the sky above an airport for one of his own training sessions, Fielder took a month off to rehearse flying at home as a pilot who wasn’t afraid of anything. Following that break, something clicked, and he was finally allowed to fly solo. But the roadblocks interfering with his plan didn’t stop there.
Considering you need 1,500 hours of flying experience to even be considered as a commercial airline pilot and Fielder had only racked up around 270-280 after two years, he realized he would need to utilize a loophole in the system that would require him to not only complete a FAA-approved 737 training course and obtain his own secondary-market passenger plane (on HBO’s dime, of course), but also convince nearly 150 actors to pose as passengers on the flight to avoid regulations surrounding paying customers.
Noting that, at the time, he was the least experienced person licensed to fly a 737 in North America, Fielder prepared for the big day by recruiting Aaron, one of the pilots he enlisted as a judge for his “Wings of Voice” singing competition earlier this season, as his co-pilot. He then laid out his objectives for the flight, which was set to take off from the San Bernardino airport and fly east to the Nevada border before looping back around to San Bernardino.
“I’m trying to demonstrate how hard it can be for any pilot to say what they’re thinking in a cockpit environment. And this dangerous phenomenon that leads to planes crashing I truly believe happens in some form on every single airline flight,” he said. “Now, obviously with this flight, I don’t want to let anything unsafe happen. So the second I see my co-pilot thinking something that he’s not saying, you’re going to get to see that. And then I’m going to quickly jump in and ask him about how he’s feeling so he can share that with me and be comfortable sharing that. And nothing will be left unspoken.”
In the end, nothing of real consequence occurred in the cockpit during the flight. But after deplaning to applause and cheers from his group of actor-passengers, Fielder came to the conclusion that since no one sees what goes on in the cockpit anyway, “as long as you get everyone down safely, that’s all it takes to be their hero.”
While Fielder is known for always committing to the bit, making the real-life stakes of his stunts truly bonkers, this time, they have never been higher. But he didn’t even stop there, as the closing minutes of the finale revealed that, in his spare time, Fielder has also started working for a company that relocates empty 737s wherever they are around the world.
Turns out, despite being a comedian, Fielder does have the capacity to be taken seriously. Or maybe, it simply all boils down to practice. As he put it earlier in the episode, “I’ve always believed that if you rehearse long enough and hard enough, nothing will be left to chance.”