Warning: The review of episode 2 of The Rehearsal will contain spoilers.

I can’t remember the last time I laughed as hard as I did during episode 2 of The Rehearsal. Whereas episode 1 set up the stakes and the conceit for season 2 going forward, this week’s installment leans heavily on the comedic potential, while going down Nathan Fielder’s many insane rabbit holes. Nathan doesn’t make much progress with the airline disaster problem he’s set out to solve, but with an episode as funny as “Star Potential”, who’s to argue with the results?

Fielder believes that one of the root causes of airplane crashes concerns first officers and their reluctance to speak up, even when they know something could go wrong. It’s human nature to be afraid to deliver bad news, even in life-or-death scenarios, so Fielder’s natural next step is to stage a fake singing reality show. Fielder got his start in the entertainment business working on Canadian Idol, where he had to pre-screen applicants and determine whether they’d be good enough to put on camera in front of the real judges. So, after recruiting a handful of real first officers from across the country, Fielder sets up “Wings of Voice”, an aviation-themed singing competition (where the contestants can only sing public domain songs), so they can do as he did and get accustomed to giving bad news.

As is the case with most of The Rehearsal, lurking in the background is the question of whether or not the show is setting out to mock the very real people on camera. Indeed, there’s something darkly comedic about setting up a real/fake aviation-themed singing competition show with a name as perfectly dumb as “Wings of Voice” – even if the rest of season 2 is utterly disappointing, it will all be worth it for the gift of this title – where the prize is to perform in a partial reconstruction of the Houston airport. Thankfully these potentially mean-spirited thoughts don’t linger long, and the show starts to focus inward.

Fielder is perhaps the most alien that he’s ever been throughout episode 2, trying his best to relate to what he’s seeing. Of course, it wouldn’t be The Rehearsal if Nathan didn’t somehow try to make any given situation about himself, so his quest this week is to try and make himself more relatable. He sits in on a few auditions and, after implementing a system where the rejected contestants rate their judges, begins to notice his abnormally low scores. This sets off an inspired stretch of episode 2, leading to some of the show’s most hysterical lines of voiceover narration and plot developments.

“I believe any human quality can be learned, or at least emulated” is essentially The Rehearsal in a nutshell, and it comes after Nathan’s one-on-one interrogation with a contestant who rated him low. So Fielder tries to emulate Dara, one of the more successful co-pilots/judges who elicits higher scores from rejects because she finds ways to let them down easily. (Another huge laugh comes from a cutaway to Fielder’s notebook after watching her footage, which includes “holding pen.”) But even after repeating her usage of “fantastic”, like an eighth-grader trying to stretch out a presentation that’s already floundering, Fielder’s efforts go unrewarded. Try as he might, Nathan simply can’t change how people perceive him, which feels about as genuine as anything in The Rehearsal can get.

Even after watching it for a second time, I still don’t know how Fielder connects the dots, but the second half of episode 2 sees Nathan at his most comedically unhinged. It all started in 2023, when Fielder noted an episode from season 3 of Nathan For You, which featured a fake clothing brand, designed to create Holocaust awareness, was taken off the Paramount+ platform. Paramount Germany was “eliminating all Jewish content that made them uncomfortable. This is real, by the way”, Fielder espouses, once again subtly calling our attention to the blatantly fake world he’s constructed through the show. And so, in order to understand his own headspace from what was likely only a year prior, Nathan hires an actor to literally type his own emails and ask how he feels about Paramount’s responses.

Does The Rehearsal need a 15 minute sidebar dedicated to Fielder’s dispute with Paramount, where he depicts them as akin to Nazi Germany – “I didn’t know what the Paramount office looked like, so I had to guess”, Fielder says as he walks into a WWII-style office, complete with a world map and oversized banners – and rehearses with an actor representing the head of Paramount Germany? Do I believe that the same actor went off-script after Nathan’s insistence and delivered exactly what he wanted to hear, and wasn’t simply reciting from yet another pre-written script? Probably not, but it’s an unexpected twist that elicited my biggest laughs and once again showed that Fielder’s genius can’t be easily replicated.

Episode 2 may not have brought back season premiere favorite Moody, but it does introduce the yin (Dara) and yang (Jeff) of airline pilots. Again, is the show laughing at Jeff for his borderline disturbing behavior towards women? Fielder, for all his elaborate table-setting, is great at simply letting his subjects reveal themselves without feeling cruel or needling, and he doesn’t let Jeff off the hook after revealing that he’s been banned from virtually every dating app, plus Instagram. There’s so many more jokes, tossed-off moments, and outright hilarious moments, which I haven’t had space to reference, within these 35 minutes that will surely reward repeat viewings. Last week felt like Fielder carefully constructing the framework for the tapestry that is The Rehearsal season 2, and this week feels like Fielder has created an almost entirely new, sillier canvas entirely.