Warning: This review of episode 3 of The Rehearsal will contain spoilers.

Here’s what makes The Rehearsal so special and so funny amongst its television peers: episode 3 could have contained the same premise and found ways to tell jokes and get its point across. But in the hands of Nathan Fielder, the episode becomes transcendent in its silliness, willing to go to depths that no other comedian would think to go to. I had written last week that Fielder was painting on an almost entirely new, sillier canvas, but episode 2 feels positively straight-laced in comparison to what we see in “Pilot’s Code.”

What other show besides The Rehearsal could begin an episode ruminating on the “nature versus nurture” debate by following a couple and their cloned dogs (more on that in a minute), and end it by having its star cosplay as hero pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger from infanthood to his present state? It’s utter madness, and only Nathan Fielder could pull it off, creating one of the most thought-provoking yet hilarious episodes of television I’ve ever seen. A case could be made that episode 3 jumps too far into slapstick absurdity, too far away from the grounded existentialism that the show is known for. But it’s in these surreal departures where the magic of the show can be found.

“Pilot’s Code” begins with Nathan shifting his focus from human manipulation to animals, in an unexpected detour from The Rehearsal‘s mission statement of airplane safety. We meet Monique and Bogdan, regular Coloradans who cloned their dog Achilles after he died. Nathan observes that, while the 3 clones share the same DNA as Achilles, their behavior is different because their surroundings aren’t the same. In true Fielder fashion, this prompts him to experiment by trying to replicate the exact same circumstances from Achilles’ life in 2012 to see if their behavior changes.

Not only does Fielder do the “expected” by hiring actors to play Monique and Bogdan and recreating their apartment, he goes so far as to import the San Jose air (cue a shot of a guy vacuuming the air into a tank outside the Ebay headquarters) and inserting period-appropriate cars. There’s some splendid comedy happening on the margins of Fielder’s main focus, mostly from the actors and their soap opera-esque imaginings of Bogdan and Monique’s relationship dramas.

As with last week’s installment, I still don’t totally know how the inspired second half of episode 3 connects to the first, but I won’t complain based on the results. Regardless, Fielder begins to reminisce on Sully Sullenberger’s “Miracle on the Hudson”, and takes excerpts from his memoir to try and understand why he sought his co-pilot’s feedback once they realized what was happening. With this development, every other comedic television show would simply interview Sully to try and understand his mentality. Not The Rehearsal.

The simple image of an adult Nathan Fielder walking into Sully’s oversized childhood bedroom dressed in nothing but a diaper and being hoisted into his crib was enough to elicit a few chuckles, but the scene continues on and on with the disturbing oversized puppet of Sully’s mother, and I was sent into full-on hysterics. I thought the show had peaked with its production design already in season 2 by reconstructing the Houston airport, and with the fake Paramount+ Germany office, but Sully’s bedroom, and the necessary props to go along with it are truly inspired bits of genius. Especially as Nathan/Sully continues to “grow up” and his parents are replaced as adult actors on stilts with comically extended arms.

There’s a crucial fourth-wall break during Fielder’s Sully rehearsal, when he tries to justify masturbating on a plane, as he imagined the real Sully had done while dating: “This wasn’t a performance for you, the viewer. It was an experience for me.” A necessary part of The Rehearsal‘s magic lies in who exactly the show is for – is it for us, to laugh and be entertained, or is it for Nathan to try and relate to his fellow humans? In this instance, it’s pretty clear that it’s the former, but this doesn’t mean that the debate is settled – especially as Nathan/Sully zeroes in on “I want to be left alone now” in order to rehearse away his Southern accent.

For an episode so bombastically silly, the final portions of episode 3 manage to be surprisingly, genuinely heartfelt. This is after Nathan/Sully makes the connection between Evanescence and the 23 seconds of silence in the flight recorder, of course. (Not to be overlooked, but the “Bring Me to Life” lyrics work almost a little too perfectly into the worldview of The Rehearsal: “I’ve been living a lie/ there’s nothing inside.”) Fielder somehow finds a way to bring the topic back on track to how co-pilots can better communicate to pilots, and begins to focus on the mental toll the profession takes on those in the cockpit. We all just want to feel less alone, and the montage of pilots opening up on their various psychological struggles is an encouraging, uplifting place to end the episode. It’s almost enough to forget that we just spent the last 30 minutes following cloned dogs, jump-scare Jared Fogle ads, overgrown babies, and robot girlfriends. Almost.