SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1 of “The Rehearsal,” now streaming on Max.
Two pilots passive aggressively bicker in the cockpit of a plane, just moments before landing. There’s an issue with the aircraft, and an even bigger issue with the communication between the two men, who can’t seem to agree on how to land the bird. The co-pilot says to the captain, “I don’t like this,” but he’s too bashful to grab his controls and take over. The plane nosedives into a field and explodes in a fiery crash. Nathan Fielder stands just a few feet beyond the windshield, enveloped by the flames of a 180-degree LED screen. It’s just another simulation.
In Season 1 of “The Rehearsal,” Fielder helped people prepare for personal challenges — confessing to a lie, raising a child — by placing them in elaborate simulations of everyday life. In Season 2 of the HBO social experiment, the comedian raises the stakes, aiming to solve the life-or-death dilemma of aviation disasters.
The season opens with a series of reenactments of real-life plane crashes from the perspective of the pilots. Actors recite the actual transcripts of the conversations between captain and first officer (co-pilot), moments before a deadly crash. Each simulation ends in a swarm of digital fire.
“The captain has made a decision, the first officer understands it’s wrong, but the first officer doesn’t have the ability to speak up about it,” Fielder tells former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia as he flips through thousands of pages of paperwork. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to be the No. 1 contributing factor to aviation crashes in history, and it’s not solved.”
Goglia was turned down by the Federal Aviation Administration after he recommended the agency require role-playing exercises to strengthen communication between pilots. Now, with an HBO budget behind him, Fielder vows to bring Goglia’s vision to life. There’s only one problem: He promised to deliver HBO a comedy series, and there’s nothing funny about plane crashes.
To begin his experiment to “revolutionize aviation safety,” Fielder recruits a first officer named Moody, who flies for a subsidiary of United Airlines. Fielder observes his daily routine — creepily sitting on the toilet as Moody brushes his teeth and witnessing an awkward conversation with his girlfriend on the phone.
Moody lives a couple hours away from his girlfriend, who works as a barista at Starbucks, and they don’t see each other too often. Eventually, he wants to move in with her and start a family, but he’s preoccupied with the seemingly random concern that she might fall in love with one of her customers and dump him. Fielder asks why Moody doesn’t bring up this concern with his girlfriend, but he shrugs and says, “If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen.”
In other words, Moody is a co-pilot in his own life.
As Fielder hypothesizes that improving communication between pilots could reduce plane crashes, he’s curious about the first interaction between the captain and first officer. Moody tells him he almost never works with the same captain twice, so Fielder follows him to the airport to witness their first encounter. Of course, it all happens behind closed doors, in private pilot lounges. So, naturally, Fielder pivots to Plan B: constructing an exact replica of Moody’s home airport and filling it with dozens of actors to play travelers, airport staffers and pilots. In the replica pilot lounge, Fielder observes Moody’s interaction (or lack thereof) with his captain, who is, of course, played by an actor. The two men sit a few seats over from each other, and yet they don’t exchange even one word. According to Moody, this is standard protocol, as the two pilots typically meet once inside the cockpit.
“Talking to other people is never easy, no matter how close you get to them,” Fielder narrates. He pops into an “intervention” training, a short presentation required by the FAA that instructs co-pilots to “speak up when uncomfortable.” He realizes that what’s missing in the training is an emotional connection. “Maybe the answers I was seeking weren’t in Moody’s airport. They were in Moody’s heart,” Fielder says.
So, he brings Moody’s girlfriend to the fake airport and spells out his experiment without subtlety: “I’ve always found that the relationships where I avoided talking about my true feelings were the ones that crashed the hardest.”
Fielder believes Moody’s inability to voice his concerns to his girlfriend is a microcosm of the broader, sometimes fatal issue of co-pilots failing to confront their captain during a flight. So he dresses Moody’s girlfriend in a pilot uniform and puts her in the captain’s seat. Before the flight simulation starts, he tells Moody to grab the controls whenever he feels his concerns are being ignored. “Maybe this is something that the FAA never considered: that you could use the emotions from pilots’ personal relationships to train them for the cockpit,” Fielder says.
While “in the air,” Moody finally breaches the topic and asks his girlfriend about potential suitors at Starbucks. It turns out she has a recurring customer named Angel, who bought her an anklet and other gifts. Moody asks her if she gets “hit on a lot” at work, and when she dismissively says yes, he grabs the controls. It’s an awkward conversation — Moody says Angel is trying to steal his girl, but she insists the flowers he bought her were nothing but a “friend gift.”
After a few excruciating minutes, the simulation ends. But has Moody actually landed the proverbial plane? “That was a great conversation,” he says to Fielder, but his girlfriend’s face tells a different story. In a tense chat outside the plane, the young couple don’t smile for the cameras. Something has ruptured in their relationship. Seatbelts on: there’s more turbulence ahead.
