Near the end of Mission: Impossible—Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes full Tom Cruise mode. Thousands of feet above the hills and canyons of South Africa, he dangles from a biplane, withstands 145 mile-per-hour airflow, floats between the wings in zero gravity, and maneuvers his way to the cockpit to take out an enemy pilot. Then he does it all over again on a second plane, battling propeller pressure and hanging on for dear life in between rolls, loops, and hammerhead plunges. It’s a breathtaking, palm sweat-inducing thrill ride that requires spatial awareness and split-second precision. It’s the pinnacle of the franchise’s unrelenting, boundary-pushing maxim and Cruise’s death-defying need for speed—all in service of cinema.
It’s also the second-biggest aerial stunt of the weekend.
That’s because, on Sunday night, to conclude the second season of The Rehearsal, deadpan comedian and series creator Nathan Fielder climbs into the cockpit of a real Boeing 737 and safely flies 150 people for two hours and 21 minutes. Nothing out of the ordinary happens on this trip from the San Bernardino airport and back—wheels go up, flight attendants serve snacks and drinks, and wheels go down. Except that the person manning the controls is not a certified commercial airline pilot. He’s amassed 20 percent of the flight hours required to be one. And his only experience operating a plane that size is through a simulator. This wasn’t just a flight—it was an unprecedented commitment to a bit nobody else could have imagined.
That’s probably the best way to describe the entirety of The Rehearsal, an absurdist docu-comedy series about Fielder helping people tackle life’s biggest social challenges through elaborate role-play. But in its sophomore season, the show graduated into something more profound and deeply surreal. Over the course of its six ambitious and eerily relevant episodes, Fielder turned a baseline theory (that cockpit miscommunication is responsible for the vast majority of airline crashes) into an all-out mission to revolutionize the aviation industry. Along the way, he created a fake singing competition (which finally crowned a winner this week), cosplayed as Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, and attempted to kindle romance between a pilot and a paid actor. In other words, normal stuff.
But even his half-sincere theory that Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” played a role in Sully landing that plane on the Hudson has nothing on the finale’s final twist: the reveal that Fielder has spent two years in flight school chasing a pilot’s license—not to change careers, exactly, but to better understand (and maybe fix) the social hierarchy between captains and first officers in high-stakes situations. It’s the kind of revelation that prompts a head-shaking cackle before realizing, of course he did. And of course he had to. Despite Fielder’s best efforts to find real pilots, mimic their rituals, and stage a believable cockpit emergency, he ran up against the FAA’s rulebook and its very real consequences for insubordination. So, like always, he went all in. If no one else could give him the authenticity he needed to make a case to Congress, he’d have to become the case himself.
On its surface, this compelling season of television was a valid and serious endeavor, and Fielder makes a real effort to understand the pressures and challenges that pilots face every day. And yet, as he admits in his signature monotone, “Every public opportunity I’ve had in my life to convey sincerity I instead turned into a joke.” That realization makes it hard to tell whether his actions—and interactions—are genuine attempts for connection and change, or staged machinations for the sake of comedy and his own self-understanding. If the goal was really to make aviation safer, wouldn’t there be a better way than by exposing a loophole within the airline system, renting a privately-owned 737 from a broker on the secondary market, and putting an entire plane of paid actors 30,000 feet into the sky?
