Warning: This review of episode 6 of The Rehearsal will contain spoilers.

Episode 6 of The Rehearsal is the most audacious episode of television I’ve ever seen, transcending its premise to become a profound meditation on loneliness, while also being hysterically funny. I did not always view the season 2 finale this way; my first reaction was more apprehensive, more confused about what Nathan Fielder was trying to achieve. But after reading reviews, and listening to a podcast or two, of last week’s episode, I saw it from a different perspective.

Would it be accurate to call The Rehearsal a prank show? Like virtually everything around the show, the answer isn’t quite cut and dry. It may be a prank to the “Wings of Voice” contestants (or at least one of them) who were mostly used as background fodder for an incredibly elaborate, and hysterical, joke. It may be a prank to all the people wondering how Fielder could possibly try to solve aviation safety in six episodes, including the unwitting pilots and first officers he’s met throughout season 2.

Episode 6 ventures off-course almost immediately, after Fielder recruits a number of actors (including some favorites from episode 4) and presents them with their “script”: they’ll be passengers tasked with memorizing their character’s drink and snack order, while Fielder himself flies the plane. A real plane.

It’s an insane reveal that Fielder has spent the last two years getting his pilot’s license, and it re-contextualizes the entirety of season 2 overall. Of course, it wouldn’t be The Rehearsal if Fielder just revealed this information and then moved on. Fielder shows his training schedule, and shows how he had so much trouble that the flight instructors starting passing him around because they simply couldn’t get through to him (“don’t do it like such a robot,” one of them recommends). Surely we’re not watching the elaborate set-up to comedian Nathan Fielder putting the lives of almost 150 actors at risk, are we?

Truly, if anyone is getting pranked by The Rehearsal, it’s the actors who sign up to be Nathan’s passengers with next to no recognition as a reward. I’ve written plenty about how Fielder is a doctorate-level expert at understanding reality television, and the lengths people will go to be famous, and there’s perhaps no greater length than putting your life in the hands of a comedian. One actor even thinks to ask how many other actors have turned down Fielder’s proposition, and it probably shouldn’t surprise us that the answer is none. Apparently the thin benefit of being featured on an HBO show is greater than the very real detriment of, you know, dying. I should probably mention the real reason Nathan wants to fly this plane, and it’s so that he can be the pilot who’s open to feedback from the first officer, causing them to feel more comfortable and open. No, this doesn’t make much sense, but I don’t think anyone is coming to watch The Rehearsal because of its air-tight logic.

Believe it or not, most commercial airlines aren’t jumping in line to let Nathan fly himself and a plane full of actors as he pleases – and he needs more flight hours logged in order to be a commercially certified pilot anyway. So Nathan ventures off into the funniest stretch of episode 6, as he kicks the tires on a few planes being sold through airline brokers – a term which was completely new to me until this episode, and gives me zero confidence in the state of the world, given that they’re essentially hawking the most run-down, unfit used planes you’ve ever seen and passing them off as safe. It was at this point where I thought, “OK, Nathan’s had his fun, but he’ll have to pivot and find some other way to end this season without putting so many lives in mortal danger.” What a fool I was.

Thanks to another broker, Nathan is able to find a reputable plane suitable for his purposes, and the flight can begin. For his first officer and test subject, he chooses Aaron, a sturdy but closed-off judge from “Wings of Voice” (who also happens to want to get into the entertainment industry). The actual flight itself doesn’t provide much fodder, beyond the near-constant terror that something could go wrong with the plane; Aaron is almost as un-willing to speak his mind as Collin, even after Nathan’s prompting and the return of “Captain All-ears”. Thankfully the flight goes off without a hitch – with the exception of the aerial photography plane’s brief incursion – and we can return to what really matters: crowning the winner of “Wings of Voice” (congrats Isabella!).

I watched episode 6 more than a week ago, and the final moments have stuck with me in a way I was not expecting. Fielder’s fans have thrown around the notion that he’s on the autistic spectrum for so much of his career, and it’s an interesting turn to see him almost teasing them for this in the past few weeks. Crucially, he’s not mocking autism, or the idea that he might be autistic, but it feels like poking the eyes of those who have become so fascinated by the idea. Does season 2 really need this subplot? I think the answer can mostly depend on how invested you are in Nathan as a person, rather than his comedic output. The final shot of Nathan’s close-up eyes, after deleting the voicemail with his MRI results, which could have diagnosed him as autistic and mirrored the test images we saw when he visited CARD last week, is a genius flourish. His final narration, stating that, no matter what you’re going through, everything will be OK, is a surprisingly effective sentimental closer for such a demented show.

So what have we learned, now that The Rehearsal has closed out season 2? How can this batch of episodes compare to season 1? There’s been a fair share of bizarrely delightful detours, but it’s stuck with Fielder’s core mission of trying to understand humanity on an almost molecular level. And it’s showcased Fielder’s unique sense of humor and dedication at every turn, leading to truly inspired bits of comedy. It should come as no surprise to anyone that he’s no closer by the end than when we started, but perhaps we’ve come a little closer to understanding him. The Rehearsal often swerved wildly off-course and introduced even more wildly unpredictable people, showing it could be anything that Fielder became obsessed with, making the possibilities for a potential season 3 virtually limitless. At the very least, I don’t think I’ll be able to hear Evanescene’s “Bring Me to Life” in the same way again.