If someone said that we would get to see Nathan Fielder dressed as an infant Sully Sullenberger getting breastfed from a massive puppet mother, I would say "oh yeah, that tracks". What a joy to live in a time when a man of such complete and utter lunacy is putting out such absurd content on television.
It is time to discuss Season 2/Episode 3 of The Rehearsal, entitled "Pilot's Code".
When the episode begins, we don't even delve into the theme of pilots and flights right away. Instead, we meet a couple named Bogdan and Monique. When their dog Achilles passed away, they chose to get him cloned on multiple occasions (must be nice to be able to have that kind of expendable income...) but found that the results were lackluster as the clones don't share the same personality at all.
Enter Nathan Fielder!
Fielder re-creates the house layout that Bogdan and Monique had when they lived in San Jose back in 2011...and even though they live outside of LA now, it doesn't matter. Fielder has tanks full of air transported down from San Jose to blow onto the dog to try to create a similar environment. Honestly, it was THIS bit early on that had me sold. The idea of pumping air from San Jose out on a dog in LA to try to get it to take on the personality of the OG version of Achilles is one of the most Nathan Fielder-based ideas that I can't help but just fall in love with the surreal genius of this man all over again.
As is his won't, Fielder finds a way to tie this back to his theme of airline pilots and what conditions them to act the way that they do. He becomes drawn to perhaps the most famous pilot of them all: Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the man behind the iconic crash landing known as the "Miracle on the Hudson" here in New York.
Using his autobiography as a guide, Fielder wants to act out various key moments from Sully's life which does include acting as Sully in his infancy/toddler years on a set that could be on the verge of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids complete with a mom played by a massive puppet and a father who walks on stilts. He even acts out a bit from Sully's life where he took a girl up in a plane and how he referred to it as a "sensual experience". In order to truly experience this, Fielder can't feel aroused with the actress playing the girl, so he has her and the crew all leave the simulation room so he can watch porn to achieve the level of horniness he deems appropriate.
The little details when it comes to the sexual humor makes me think back to Nathan for You, particularly the episode in which he has a robot claw arm programmed to pull down his pants at the expense of exposing himself to young children (you had to be there...). He is willing to put himself in ridiculous and embarrassing situations all for the sake of comedy, and while that is a point I have made before, I am still impressed by it time and time again.
The culmination of the episode delves into how Fielder notices certain words like "cope" or "deal" within Sully's autobiography and how he tends to avoid discussing his emotions too deeply, if at all. One method he brings up to try to work through these repressed emotions is listening to music on his iPod. Sully had said he had a particular fondness for Evanescence, who are most known for the song "Bring Me to Life".
While going through the simulation of the Miracle on the Hudson landing, Fielder noticed there was a 23-second gap on the recording where Sully remains silent while the control tower tries to communicate with him. He makes the connection that the chorus to "Bring Me to Life" is exactly 23 seconds long and imagines that Sully listened to this to build him up in the moment before tackling a landing that could've gone horrendously.
If you read my first two-episode reviews (Episode 1 and Episode 2), you will know that my response to this season begin with a mix of bemused optimism and uncertainty. I had faith in Nathan Fielder that he would be able to stick the landing...which is the easiest pun I can possibly imagine but I am not here to try to win brownie points for witticisms...and sure, maybe I won't like the direction the next 3 episodes will take.
Somehow, I doubt that. Maybe it'll not end up being the success that the first season was for me, or maybe it will blow me away. All I know is that THIS was the episode that I needed to truly embrace the concept at hand.
Nathan Fielder essentially created a mini-Sully biopic that had more life and creativity in it than the 2016 Clint Eastwood film starring Tom Hanks. This seemed so apparent that even Vulture's review called it out, and the final result is one of my favorite episodes of TV that Fielder has produced.
Everything about "Pilot's Code" is a microcosm of what makes Nathan Fielder one of the greatest minds in the entertainment world. It is smart, it is subversive, it is surreal and somehow turns out to be incredibly earnest in its thinking even with it coming across as positively bonkers. He poses theories and analysis on the behaviors of others and in the lunacy of it all, he makes it feel believable at the same time.
Truly quite the accomplishment.
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