No one threads a surreal narrative needle like Nathan Fielder, and The Rehearsal exists to remind us of that every week. Love him or hate him, if you choose to strap into his comedic roller-coaster, at the very least you will be surprised. In “Pilot’s Code,” he takes the audience on a winding path that connects pet cloning, poor pilot communication in the cockpit, the hero pilot Sully Sullenberger, lactating puppets, iPods and the band Evanescence. No, that’s not me just randomly connecting words to make you laugh. That’s literally Fielder’s train of thought. 

Our host opens the episode promising that he really is trying to take the human mind seriously in this series, so he wants to be cognizant of the safety of his pilot and co-pilot subjects. Instead of conducting “unproven testing” on his pilot volunteers, he wants to run some of his risker experimental tests on animals first because “we did evolve from them.” 

He then proceeds to find a married couple, Monique and Bogdan, who cloned their beloved, dead terrier Achilles. Now they have three very expensive, identical terriers—Thetis, Apollo, and Zeus—that don’t match their original dog’s personality at all. Because Zeus is still a puppy and trainable, Fielder has the brilliant idea to exactly reproduce the apartment the couple lived in when they raised Achilles, complete with three sets of “Fielder Method” actors portraying them 24/7. His theory is that if they raise Zeus in those same dynamics, perhaps they could nurture the puppy to be a physical and behavioral clone of their original pet. 

Despite the laugh-out-loud inducing lengths Fielder, the couple, and their very dedicated faux selves go to emulate the life and issues the couple experienced back in the day—like fights about being ready to have a baby, or Monique recreating the kind of diabetic attacks Achilles would help wake her from—Zeus doesn’t respond as hoped. However, several weeks into the daily immersion, Zeus suddenly copies how the family cats and Achilles walked across the back of the couch—and it’s like Fielder has brought about the second coming. Monique and Bogdan are genuinely delighted to see such a specific behavior that harkens back to their preferred pet, and that scrap is all Fielder needs to take the experiment to the next level.

The only pilot that Fielder is aware of bucking the pilot/co-pilot communication curse is Captain Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III, the hero pilot of Flight 1549 who saved his passengers and crew by safely landing in the Hudson River. At the time, the cockpit recorder captured Sully inviting his co-pilot to give him feedback at a critical moment, and while he didn’t, they all survived that harrowing crash. Fielder connects the dots assuming that if he could apply the Zeus nurturing experiment to how Sullenberger describes he was raised in his memoir, maybe he could find a way to raise future pilots in the same way and make this aviation problem vanish forever. 

When Nathan Fielder tells you what you’re about to see next “is going to seem weird,” that should make you pause. And the man delivers as he shaves his body and gets a bald cap professionally placed so he can “live” Sully’s life from an infant to that fateful flight over New York City. Yes, he is going to put himself through the experiment because “if a personality transfer can work on a dog, maybe it could work on a human being.” But he has to put himself through it first before he can ask it of someone else.

Watching a bald, freshly shorn Fielder navigate a nursery built to scale to make it seem like he’s the size of a baby may be peak comedy to some, but in my estimation it was actually the lowest hanging fruit comedy of the season. Fielder getting his nappy changed, or drowning while breastfeeding is too obvious for his kind of elevated comedy stylings. The bit only finds its groove when he shares a frame with a series of freakishly elongated puppets who tend to him as stand-ins for Mr. and Mrs. Sullenberger. They are creatively bizarre and perfect for the surreal nature of this whole digression. Then the highlights from Sully’s adult life has Fielder donning the pilot’s famous mustache and grey-white hair so he can dissect the memoir with such specificity that it’s like he’s trying to find the secrets within the Zapruder film.

Fielder gets so granular that he micro focuses on Sully’s inability to express his feelings in the manuscript until the passing of his emotionally-distant father. Fielder is genuinely bothered by the pilot never admitting to crying, and his repeated hollow mantra of finding ways to “cope” with no expressed methods to do so. But it all comes together at his fake bar when another pilot tells him that their kind don’t talk about their feelings because if they needed help and it got back to the FAA, their medical certificate would be revoked and they’d be grounded. 

With that knowledge, Fielder is able to find the subtext in Sully’s book when he pinpoints that the pilot never once references any music until after his father dies, which is just months before the first Apple iPod is released. Afterwards, Sully brings up the band Evanescence and their song “Bring Me To Life” often. Fielder surmises that the song’s lyrics taught the pilot to ask for help just in time for his fateful flight. And then he makes a persuasive case to prove that theory by pointing out that there’s a 23-second pause in the flight recording which is the exact length of the song’s chorus. Also, Sully’s iPod was found submerged in the cabin. 

The magic of Fielder is that for all the ridiculous material that came before this hypothesis, he connects the evidential pieces together so well. By stitching together the things unsaid in Sully’s memoir, with a cockpit reenactment that feels like it was poached right from Eastwood’s Sully movie and the mic drop revelation that his pilot volunteers have all been the most responsive and personally candid about sharing their personal woes, Fielder has seemingly discovered that pilot repression is really a thing. That he did it by wearing a diaper and getting a dog clone to walk a couch back, is pure Nathan Fielder. And what he does with that knowledge going forward, I can’t even imagine. 

Stray observations

• • The episode opens with Michelle and Bogdan watching President Obama breaking into programming to announce the death of Osama Bin Laden, which happened on May 2, 2011. Then, she quickly switches channels to watch the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton which occurred on Friday, 29 April 2011. A TiVo at play, or is this a Fielder trap?
• • Michelle and Bogdan are Greek mythology nerds! Achilles, their “everything to us” dog is named after the Greek hero who was a mortal warrior and a demigod. His clones are named Thetis after his sea goddess mother, Zeus (who is the king of the gods), and Apollo (who is Achilles’ adversary). 
• • Nathan deadpanned that it was “easy to match” the air in San Jose by actually having someone vacuum capture air in the town and then drive it 300-plus miles down to Los Angeles to have a human being blow it in the face of Zeus during his walks. I almost fell off my couch laughing. 
• • Did you catch the “vintage” Jared Fogle Subway ad at the bus stop?
• • Just how many pilot mixers did Nathan host at his imported airport bar?
• • I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed Fielder as close to breaking as he was with Jeff the pilot explaining his “no T-girls” mandate in his dating app bios. His genuine bemusement was a sight to see. 
• • Fielder starts the episode by shifting his “unproven testing” to animals for safety and then makes himself the subject of his “weird” Sullenberger immersion experiment. Yet both he and Zeus poop themselves on-camera. Extract from that what you will.
• • The earnest score played while Fielder’s “living” highlights from Sullenberger’s memoir was pure cinema. 
• • Those terrifying, child perspective puppets around young Sully were made by the fine craftspeople at L.A.’s Viva La Puppet.
• • Check out the New Invention booth at the fake terminal.