Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for The Rehearsal S2E2, “Star Potential” (written by Nathan Fielder & Carrie Kemper & Adam Locke-Norton & Eric Notarnicola and directed by Nathan Fielder)
As we enter The Rehearsal S2E2, Nathan has landed on the idea that co-pilots aren’t more assertive in the cockpit because they don’t see a way for the conversation to go well. That’s likely true, and it occurs to me that there is also a counterfactual element at play. Namely, if we can point to plane crash instances in which the first officer expressed concerns but didn’t push them hard enough, we’re led to conclude that the crash would have been avoided if they had been more adamant. Further, there are surely instances where this has happened, but the plane that didn’t crash doesn’t make the news.
Fielder recognizes this in his dry voiceover, as he notes that all of the first officers he’s enlisted for the next stage of his project share the special quality of not having died in a plane crash. So, maybe one of them has cracked the code already, in which case it would simply be a matter of teaching others to emulate how they behave.
The setup for “Star Potential” is a singing competition that isn’t exactly fake—Nathan tells the contestants that the winner will get to sing a song on a national TV show in a partial recreation of the Houston airport—but is definitely a knockoff of American Canadian Idol, where Fielder got his start as a junior producer.
As you can imagine, not every contestant who shows up for that kind of reality competition gets on TV. Nathan’s job was to thin the field by weeding out those who lacked star potential, and in The Rehearsal S2E2, he asks the group of co-pilots he’s assembled to do the same thing.
If someone is good enough, they will receive a ticket to move on in the Wings of Voice competition, but the point of the exercise lies in the rejections. Nathan is interested in the ability of first officers to reject people, even though they might cry and so on. He also wants the opinions of the rejected contestants when it comes to their judges.
To that end, he asks each rejected contestant to rate their judge via a feedback box, and is stunned to discover that Mara D. is getting an average score above 9 out of 10 from the contestants she is rejecting.
Watching the video, Fielder struggles to find anything distinctive about what Mara D. is doing, though he does notice that she says “fantastic” a lot. So he tries that himself, but still gets a low feedback score. Then, he notices that she will say that the contestant’s name is beautiful, so he tries that, but it doesn’t help.
He shows video of Mara D. to one of the rejected contestants and asks him why he thinks her feedback score is so good, but the man has a hard time putting his finger on it. Finally, he just says something about Mara’s aura, which he doesn’t think you can teach. Of course, that’s a premise that Nathan totally rejects—every human behavior can be learned, or at least emulated, and that’s good enough. Sincerity is overrated.
Meanwhile, since he found it helpful to converse with his peers when he worked on Canadian Idol, Fielder has moved his replica bar across the country again to give the first officers he’s working with a place to mingle. Later, realizing that he still hasn’t seen real interactions between first officers and captains, he invites some pilots to the bar.
Nathan talks to one of these pilots, Jeff, who claims that he’s the one who often feels pressure when it comes to talking with his first officer, particularly when that co-pilot is a woman. He worries about his jokes being taken the wrong way and notes that he has been banned from five dating sites, along with Instagram. They won’t even explain why!
It’s a classic Nathan Fielder moment when he doesn’t push back to insist that Jeff must have offended some people (which, I mean, c’mon!) and instead does his “oh, OK” routine. This allows him to get Jeff into a cockpit simulator with Mara D., where we can see how much Jeff does not hold back from saying potentially offensive things. I don’t know if anything he says is too terribly bad, but he definitely doesn’t take any hints, either.
Summit Ice
At this point, Nathan draws a parallel to something in his own recent experience, and The Rehearsal S2E2 gets diverted along these lines—something that probably works better within the context of the episode than it may seem if you are, for some reason, just reading a recap of the episode.
Back in 2015, when he was making Nathan for You, Fielder created an entirely real company called Summit Ice Apparel in order to compete with Vancouver-based jacket company Taiga, because Taiga praised Holocaust denier Doug Collins in their winter catalogue. Summit Ice Apparel is a not-for-profit company, with all of its profits going to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Fielder notes his pride in the venture as proof that you can use a stupid TV show to do something good.
However, Nathan has discovered that the episode of Nathan for You that features the creation of Summit Ice has been removed from Paramount+ globally, after concerns were raised in their Germany division about sensitivities pertaining to antisemitism sometime after October 7, 2023.
Fielder sent an email to Paramount+ about the issue, but has also been concerned about the prospects for renewal for The Curse, so in The Rehearsal S2E2, he brings in Fake Nathan (Alexander Leiss) to revisit the email exchange. In retrospect, Fielder is struck by how cordial he was. He remembered being worried about being too pushy, but he wasn’t pushy at all. It’s not clear he even got his point across.
He proceeds to rehearse a face-to-face confrontation with the Paramount+ Germany office, but since he doesn’t know what their office looks like, he has to work from his imagination. Honestly, nothing about this rehearsal goes well, and it left me wondering if The Rehearsal will follow this line further in Season 2, or if S2E2 is Fielder’s message to Paramount+ on the matter. I can confirm that Nathan for You S3E2 is not available to stream on the service at the time of writing.
Star Potential
We close out “Star Potential” by returning to the Wings of Voice competition, with Nathan serving as judge for a 15-year-old girl named Sophia. He tells her that her performance wasn’t good enough for what they’re looking for, but proceeds to give a little speech that I, for one, found inspiring.
Lots of people want what you want, but they didn’t show up and try. Don’t give up.
She rates him 6 out of 10, but the episode ends with Nathan flipping the piece of paper around, seemingly convincing himself that the number written on it is a 9.
See you next week.
