The Rehearsal
Episode List
Nathan Fielder outdoes himself, it’s simply beyond the pale. Nathan for You it’s more direct, this goes deeper and deeper.
S01
Leave it to Nathan to one-up himself. Rehearsing potentially embarrassing situations, doing a flow chart of possible outcomes, he is designing an RPG dialogue tree with real people.
He heard the saying “Never work with kids or animals”, and went “Hold my beer!”. On the way, he reiterates the saying “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”.
Those fucking kids…
S01E01
This starts with a banger: some dude has been pretending he has a master’s degree when he only has a bachelor’s degree. Not fraud in the strict sense, this only applies to his trivia group, for twelve years.
The Plan: create a copy of the bar, fill it with actors, and min-max the best outcome that makes his potential nemesis not hate his guts.
It’s actually the other way around, the woman he was so afraid of is actually very sweet and understanding, even though she is a motor mouth and keeps talking and talking and talking.
S01E02
A fucking rotating cast of babies, ageing from toddler to teenager, fully compliant with Oregon laws. Move over, Boyhood, we got a new game in town.
The “scion” in the title is not a reference to the babies. It’s all about the deadbeat “dad” the “mother” is shopping for, he totalled a Ford Scion at 100 miles per hour. He is a Christian, but drives without a licence plate, and admits on camera he wants to fuck her, drive high and/or drunk.
Yes, she is 44 and is still putting out having kids, is into the whole cellphone causes cancer thing. The deadbeat dude is also very Catholic, extremely into Kabbalah numerology bullshit, and wants to fuck the woman even if she is saving herself for marriage.
The dude wants to score, but can’t even take care of a robot baby during the night, he takes off. What an idiot. Nathan will take his place…
S01E03
My god, the baby bit keep going, and weirder too. The woman has revealed more of her nutter personality, now she doesn’t celebrate Halloween, because it’s a satanic cult. Google is controlled by the devil, and they censored the truth about All Hallow’s Eve. Celtic-pilled nonsense.
The other rehearsal is a white trash dude quarrelling with his brother over inheritance money, the brother says his gold digger girlfriend will piss the money away.
The Plan: engineering the actor to pretend to have a grandfather that is also quarrelling with his grandson, they dig for gold, and the old man likes the guy so much he inherits some of that gold. There’s also some diaper shit too, in the woods.
This experience moves our guy so much, he just disappears. Another warehouse filled with an ersatz Chick-fil-a analogue, down the drain. The guy with a Punisher necklace and knows the girlfriend is not a gold digger, since she is always “being a Jew” about money.
Nathan should have broken out the Summit Ice clothing.
S01E04
A segway from the “family” stuff into some incredible meta-acting class, with Nathan inventing The Fielder Method, then re-living the class as one of the students. That student is not going all in enough, so Nathan invites him to bond even more with his stalker victim, then hires actors to play roommates on a similar house.
Nathan then lives in the guy’s house, filled with nerd shit like giant Pikachu plushies, a Kingdom Hearts key sword. The fake Nathan goes to work in another açaí shop, and moves into another house with other actors. This is outright Synechdoche, New York meta-narrative, but stupid.
Back in the family, the baby is now 15, his dad was “gone” for 9 years, so he is directed to be extremely pissed at him, until he goes into hard drugs and booze, then ODs right in his room. This is too much for Nathan, so they decide he goes back to a 6 years old kid.
S01E05
Nathan goes all in on the “family” stuff, we’re through the looking glass here.
The woman’s favourite movie is Apocalypto, because of Mel Gibson, that anti-semite, but she also knows sketch comedy, “I watched Key and Peele”. Incredible.
Since she is an anti-semite, Nathan goes full crypto-Jew, pretending the (fake) kid goes to swim lessons, when he goes to a synagogue, maybe preparing for a Bar Mitzvah. The chutzpah! There’s a full-on cat fight between a Jewish tutor, and someone who refuses to accept the Holocaust.
“You ate the faeces!”, “Did you know eating faeces is a satanic ritual!”. Nathan is depressed, so he turns his fake bar into a real bar, with a liquor license.
He checks the cameras, and it seems the woman that this while thing was about, the linchpin of the whole thing, is breaking character and treating it as a vacation.
When pressed about it, she complains about lacking direction, and immediately folds, she just leaves. Nathan happily trashes the Tannenbaum and goy shit, and bring up the Hanukkahs and menorahs.
The Jewish tutor is invited, but she is a rabid Zionist, with all the possible talking points.
This is more than one year before October 7 even, it was not a topical way to spice it up. It’s fucking real.
S01E06
The family stuff is growing even worse! Now one of the younger kids, who lives without a father, just spent a week with a preteen dad that loved and cared for him.
Maybe this whole pretend things with kids in the mix as not a great idea.
S02
One of Nathan’s talents is to find absolute nutjobs who don’t have the self-awareness to know they are idiots. Truly bonkers stuff to say out loud, let alone to cameras. To see what was left on the cutting room floor, or outside the purview of release forms…
S02E01
Well, the airplane stuff starts off right away. Can a clown change the world, really?
Nathan goes deep on airplane fatalities, and in many of them, the co-pilot knows they are about to die, but doesn’t want to “kill the mood”. There’s also much sexism, oh my god.
This is just insane, and they even got some NTSB bigwig to complain about the FAA. Not a particularly great time for bureaucratic reforms, most of these people are not the kind of person to kiss Trump’s ass.
At least Nathan can convince some regional co-pilot that his “girlfriend” he doesn’t see for three months is not a real relationship, particularly when she hangs out with guys for hours after work, and she is given flowers and ankle bracelets.
Or his the guy too thick?
S02E02
I was starting to think this was going to be just building a recreation of a airport terminal. The bar came back! Again!
And of course, there’s now a full on fake talent show, with pilots as judges thinning the herd, to see who is better to give bad news to people.
What’s more, decades after talent shows exploded in popularity, random still wait in line for another one of those, with a generic name, for the “possibility of appearing on national television, with a full band backing”.
Singing public domain songs only.
There’s a copilot that is extremely friendly in her rejections, and Nathan tries to mimic her, but falls flat. It’s kike an aura, something innate, you can try to emulate is like a psychopath, but maybe you shouldn’t.
There’s also a weird segway where HBO’s parent company removed the Summit Ice Nathan for You episode (S03E02) from Germany, leading to a cascading banishment from the whole world. Besides some natch Nazi goofing around, this is yet another argument for piracy, what an insane thing to do. What does October 7 have to do with outdoor apparel?
S02E03
Yeah, why not recreate a large part os Sully’s life, from baby, to brat summer kid, to horny teenager, to boomer discover nu-metal and Evanescence, to finally going for the Hudson. Wake me up inside, wake up!
By recreating baby Sully, they mean creating a massive studio (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets King Kong), having a giant mother puppet change his diaper, reading Charlotte’s Web, and also breast feed him with a torrent of milk.
This is a great adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, the Brobdingnag section. As a kid, his parents are on stilts. As a teenager, he takes a plane with his crush and nearly jizzes all over the controls. All experiences are faithfully recreated by Nathan, alongside the iconic Hudson landing.
This is technically an upgrade on the original idea of making a cloned dog live the same life of his original genetic bearer: in a small apartment with an Intel engineer, and his stay at home wife. He is so focused on work, they will not have children, even though she really wants some. Now is too late, but the guy is still touchy about this subject.
S02E04
Captain Powers and Jennifer Kissme, what’s this, James Bond? That whole scene is straight up from Being John Malkovich or something.
He does seem like a nice guy, playing Irish Folk music, knowing about Portugal wines. He’s just shy.
Nathan rehearses bringing his date back to his home by recreating his apartment five times, and have five pairs of actors recreate it. Of course, some just straight up fuck on the couch too. Then the actor’s partners also show up, Jesus fucking Christ.
I’m nor even mentioning the woman having a wet dream about Einstein, but she was awake. Literally became wet by reading an Einstein biography.
Of course, the fake game show still needs to go on.
Besides all this, Nathan rehearses talking to Congress about making pilots establish a rapport before they are together on the cockpit, instead of that being the first time they meet. I’ll be very conscious of that the next time I’m in an airport.
S02E05
Mr Fielder Goes to Washington, and it’s a fuck up. Goes on like a wet blanket, with that guy literally dying, needing a cane and all, while being the ranking member overseeing the FAA for decades. The gerontocracy is too real.
Nathan pulls a fast one because he came for lobbying about autism, and starts proposing crazy shit for aviation. The guy probably wanted twice the campaign contributions in that case.
I can see why the autists would think Nathan is One of Them, his whole shtick is really failing to understand humiliation, cringe, inept social interactions. That lady is some anti-vaxxer nutjob too, she got away scot-free in their interactions. I mean, full on Andrew Wakefield cheerleader, the OG of nutjobbery.
Nathan also plugs The Curse, which has Emma Stone too, that contrast must be freaking insane.
The best footage involving Nathan Fielder and an elected official is still Giuliani in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, but he was just a executive producer, from what I can tell.
S02E06
Yes, Nathan did the loophole in the rules: PPL, then instruments, then multi-engine, then commercial, then plane rating. Fucking hell, he did it! Even the part of lying about mental issues so the FAA has no grounds for revoking the license.
This shit went so well, he even carried Equadorian planes to Brazil, or planes from America to Africa. Since they let him fly, it means he’s not sick…
Ah, I almost forgot, the fake talent show ended too, and the winner got to sing Evanescence on national television, he wasn’t lying. Either it was playback, or the woman singing was incredible.
Either way, that is done now, reliving the Canadian Idol days.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.