The Rehearsal

None of us could've anticipated that the season finale of Nathan Fielder's increasingly deranged series The Rehearsal would hinge on a line as terrifyingly ...

My head hurt by the end of the episode, which is, arguably, a testament to Nathan Fielder’s entire project. As a way to understand what happened and to forgive himself, Nathan decides the best way to do so is to see himself from the outside. You can try to pretend to be a good father but all you’ll ever do unless you actually become a father is be a great scene partner. A probing examination of the scripts and strictures we’re called to adhere to as part of our social contract? But they’ve become so increasingly deranged (note how even the rhythm of this episode was faster and more repetitive than usual) that you start to wonder how much of Nathan’s breadcrumbs you’re being led to follow. A six year old named Remy, to be exact, who not only can’t handle not play acting as six year old Adam any more but who refuses to acknowledge that Nathan is not his “Daddy.” In a series that’s probed the blurred lines between fiction and reality, constantly shuffling between the two often within the same scene, it was only a matter of time until one of Nathan’s actors would lose the plot this way. I myself talked about him hijacking Angela’s “rehearsal.” But to end on such a note is also to open us to the possibility that he’s (obviously) always been in control, nudging us toward examining why we may feel comforted or uncomfortable about his every move. After realizing the play-acting as Adam’s dad was a puzzle he was well-equipped to solve because he’d created it himself, he turns his attention to Remy because it’s a problem that forces him to think outside himself. And, as with everything in The Rehearsal, the line between its comedy (their conversation around clarifying how Remy should be happy he’s Christian) and tragedy (the later distinction between Nathan being a “friend” and not a “daddy”) got murkier and murkier as the episode went along. (HBO announced a [sophomore season](https://www.avclub.com/hbo-renews-nathan-fielder-the-rehearsal-second-season-1849434498) ahead of the finale’s airing.) As to what that second season will look like is probably still up for grabs: Will Nathan continue his fatherhood rehearsals or might he return to the initial pitch of helping others rehearse life changing situations? He has a hard time bonding with new nine year old Adam, a fact that yanks him out of the experiment altogether. [The Rehearsal](https://www.avclub.com/tv/reviews/the-rehearsal-2022) would hinge on a line as terrifyingly delivered as “No, I’m your Dad.” And yet, that’s where we were led in the final installment of what’s now officially season one of the show.

The season finale of Nathan Fielder's brilliant The Rehearsal may be a commentary on Fielder's past work. Read our recap here.

Whether any of the people who take part in these shows are happy about what they see isn’t something the creators of the series seem particularly concerned with. He continues to call Nathan “daddy” even when he’s off the clock and refuses to leave the set of the rehearsal. At the behest of the Christian parent of one of the rehearsal’s many Adams, Nathan has to cheerfully explain that he’s going to hell because he’s Jewish.

Nathan Fielder goes to some darkly brilliant but heartbreaking places in the season finale of HBO's The Rehearsal, some of which is hard to justify.

[has already been](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-cruel-and-arrogant-gaze-of-nathan-fielders-the-rehearsal)) tried in the court of public opinion – by this point, he is probably aware of that, and perhaps he has been since the beginning. [Fielder’s season finale](https://movieweb.com/nathan-for-yous-finale-documentary-masterpiece/) proved a further blurring of the line between Nathan The Creator and Nathan The Character. What can be ascertained is the audience’s role in this whole dialogue and how the unsafe, unreliable Nathan The Character is the one ushering us through it. There is much here to be mined, criticized, and questioned, and audiences have the right to be disgusted, and perhaps they should (even Nathan seems to be, questioning how he can even forgive himself). After Painting With John, How To With John Wilson, and The Rehearsal, nobody can say that HBO does not fully support the niche creative dreams of great artists. The first six chapters of this saga were already so ambitious and out-there, that one can only imagine what The Rehearsal will be like with more money and resources poured into it.

After weeks of painstaking preparation for every possible outcome, Fielder realizes that “life's better with surprises.” A recap of “Pretend Daddy,” episode ...

• I don’t think it’s the point of the whole thing that Fielder is only able to fully achieve the kind of transcendent absorption he’s been questing after this whole time when he’s in character as a woman, but I don’t know that it’s merely incidental either. I don’t have any big insights or theories about this beyond the fact that it’s there, and as this season has made clear to us, nothing is included in this show by accident. It was that exact look that led him to design Patrick’s rehearsal with an elaborate set of extra emotional stakes, and that addition led Patrick to a revelation about his grief. When they arrive at the part of the simulation after Fake Nathan has come over to their apartment and attempted to correct his mistakes, Fake Remy starts to cry and Fielder, in character, begins to comfort him. But the next face he makes, before he moves back into character and hugs his son, is harder to interpret; something about his expression seems almost sinister. The final moment — where he reassures Fake Remy that he’s his dad, and the kid breaks character to whisper that he thought he was his mom — contains a whole universe of meaning. She tapes his audition, goes to set, watches the Fake Nathan from the Fielder Method episode act out these scenes with her fake son, and feels the dawning realization that she might have made a mistake. But when Fielder asks her where she got her sweatshirt, I felt a pit open up in my stomach; when he and the child actor get back in the car, and Fielder asks him if he “[got] enough,” I felt the same free-falling, boundary-less blend of thrill and terror I remembered from the very first episode of the show. When he returns home, Fielder tries several rehearsal-based solutions to the situation, re-running his relationship with Adam using an increasingly creepy series of techniques, including a dummy and an adult man dressed as a child. When the two of them perform a scene Fielder designed to simulate the experience of counseling his son through an episode of bullying, it feels flat, not just because Fielder’s “solving a puzzle of [his] own design,” but because he’s getting his fake son to rehearse the same patterns that got him here in the first place. The sentiment is funny, but it’s also a gorgeous inversion; he’s feeling the same kind of amazement we feel when we see how meticulously he’s been able to recreate real places. As Nathan tries and fails to comfort him, he explains in a voiceover that Remy was one of his favorite fake sons.

The rehearsal worked a little too well for Remy and Nathan. Nathan now has trouble bonding with the new Adam (real name, Liam). Remy, without a father of his ...

Remy greets him not as “daddy,” but as “Nathan.” He says he wants to call Nathan “daddy” again, but this doesn’t worry Amber. A kind reading of this ending would be that Nathan is still acting as Amber at this moment, insisting she can be both mom and dad to Remy. In this episode, it’s when Nathan pretends to be Amber, watching fake Nathan from the monitors. The whole series has been a reflection for Nathan, about learning perfection–maybe because he thinks everyone views him as someone who can’t get it “right.” “Life’s better with surprises,” Nathan says as Amber. “No, ” he sticks his ground. Nathan has dinner with Liam, but their interaction as “dad” and “Adam” is tense and awkward. As he conflates Remy with Liam, it again seems Nathan is struggling to separate the roles from the real people and individualities behind them. “But how does a person actually do that?” “What else can you do when you’re trying your best?” Nathan wonders. “You’re a great scene partner,” he says. But parting with his “pretend daddy” is still hard.