“Nathan Fielder Goes Wild in Season 2 Episode 3 of ‘The Rehearsal’: Featuring Captain Sully, Evanescence, and Breastfeeding Puppets”

When you turn on a show written, produced, and starring Nathan Fielder, you can expect to witness something truly unconventional. This weekend’s latest episode of The Rehearsal on HBO took that expectation to a whole new level for me. Season 2 Episode 3 “Pilot’s Code” kicks off with Fielder embarking on a bizarre experiment to imbue a couple’s three cloned dogs with the personality of their original deceased DNA donor dog. What follows goes beyond expectations as Fielder transforms into Captain Sully in a brilliantly unexpected twist that will be remembered for ages.

**Spoilers for The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 3 “Pilot’s Code,” now streaming on MAX**

The Rehearsal Season 2 showcases comic Nathan Fielder’s ambitious goal of leveraging the foundation he built with his quirky HBO series to tackle the grave issue of aviation disasters. Fielder addresses in the Season 2 debut the common thread in every plane crash: a missed opportunity where the First Officer should challenge the pilot but fails to do so, often due to social discomfort. By utilizing the elaborate role-playing framework from Season 1, Fielder aims to train pilots in effective communication to avert future tragedies.

The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 3 “Pilot’s Code” commences with Fielder delving into the study of behavior modification. He encounters a couple who adored their dog Achilles so deeply that they shelled out $50,000 to clone him after his demise. The couple now finds themselves with three canine clones of Achilles who bear a striking resemblance but lack his distinctive behaviors. Fielder highlights the impact of environment on the dogs’ development and stages simulations with actors portraying the couple’s younger selves in a replica of their former living space. Ultimately, one of the clone dogs manages to adopt an old habit of Achilles, demonstrating to Fielder the profound influence of experience on personality.

Okay, so what does this have to do with aviation disasters? Well, Fielder surmises that if he lives life as Captain Chesley Sullenberger, aka Captain Sully, he will understand what it takes to be one of the rare pilots who can respond to a crisis in the air with calm, courage, and heroism. After all, as Fielder points out, Captain Sully was able to pull of the “Miracle on the Hudson” because he did ask his First Officer for feedback.

Because this is The Rehearsal and because Nathan Fielder is a madman, he commits so hard to this bit that he builds an oversized nursery for him to start out as baby Captain Sully. A giant puppet is brought into the room to stand in for Sully’s mother. Fielder literally lets the puppet change his diaper and breastfeed him in a sequence that had me wheezing in laughter. It’s so surreal, so bizarre, and so decidedly Nathan Fielder.

Of course, the absurdity doesn’t stop there. Fielder uses Captain Sully’s own autobiography to chart the trajectory of his entire life. A five-year-old version of the pilot is chastised by his mother for feeding his sister rocks. As a young man, he enters the Army, allowing Fielder to embark on a boot camp segment. But the wildest, most transgressive moment is probably when Fielder picks up on the teenaged Sully’s conflation of a crush with the rush of flying, prompting him to clear the show’s cockpit set to masturbate as the younger version of the Captain.

As if simply watching Nathan Fielder dress up as Captain Sully to re-enact his life story isn’t hilarious enough, the comic comes up with a wild theory about what really went down during the Miracle on the Hudson. Fielder realizes that in 2002, Sully got his first iPod. After that, Sully refers to the music he’s listening to a lot within his memoirs. He associates Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun” with his father and repeatedly refers to listening to Evanescence.

Fielder reveals that Sully is oddly silent for 23 seconds on the black box recording of the Miracle on the Hudson. He suggests that Sully used this time to listen to the ear worm chorus of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” as it is exactly 23 seconds long. Now, I can’t think of one of the most triumphant saves in aviation history without hearing “WAKE ME UP INSIDE!” reverberate in my head.

Like all Nathan Fielder projects, The Rehearsal takes a relatively simple idea and pushes it to the outer ranges of credulity. There’s no reason why delving into aviation safety should lead someone to launching a faux singing competition show or attempting to give cloned dogs a dead dog’s personality. However, The Rehearsal goes there. It gives us Nathan Fielder as baby Sully struggling to slurp up breast milk. It gives us a version of history where Evanescence played a key role in the Miracle of the Hudson.

The Rehearsal is a stunningly insane show and I’m incredibly grateful for it.