The second season of “The Rehearsal” is instantly better than the first because it’s about something. In the show’s previous season, Nathan Fielder developed and applied his methodology—the so-called Fielder Method of role-playing amid elaborate simulations—to situations in which the participants’ investment was principally emotional and narrowly personal in scope. The new season starts with a bang: a simulated plane crash, which heralds Fielder’s main idea. He’s been studying the black-box cockpit transcripts that lead up to such disasters, and noticed that, although co-pilots share equal responsibility for flight safety, they often hesitate to clearly express their misgivings to pilots—and that pilots often shut down the doubts and suggestions of those who dare to voice their concerns. Fielder’s conceit is that his Method can be used to improve the training of pilots and co-pilots, helping the former to share power and the latter to assert themselves.

Immediately, the show gains far-reaching stakes and places new demands on Fielder himself, who ironically wonders about the “deficit of credibility” he’ll have to overcome as a comedian entering a domain in which lives hang in the balance. Some of the flaws of the first season are still on full display; despite the inherent fascination of Fielder’s conceptual leap, and the inventiveness of his Rube Goldberg-esque contrivances, his impassively scrutinizing gaze remains as coldly entomological as ever, and the latent cruelty of his manipulations remains as acrid. But, in the new season’s second episode, a shift takes place that proves decisive and, much to my surprise, sublime: he reaches deep into his own experience to find echoes of empathy.

Having worked, early in his career, as a junior producer on “Canadian Idol,” Fielder had the job of saying no, behind the scenes, to many of the singers who auditioned. Recalling that he disliked rejecting singers as much as the singers disliked being rejected, he stages a role-playing simulation of the process, using co-pilots as talent evaluators, because, as he puts it, “The holy grail I was looking for was a method of rejection that left everyone happy.” When one co-pilot, named Mara’D, achieves the results that Fielder seeks, he tries to figure out how to render her ability, which one rejected singer ascribes to her “general aura,” replicable and teachable. The singer is skeptical that such a thing can be done, but, in a voice-over narration, Fielder lays his philosophy on the line: “I disagreed with this man. I believe that any human quality can be learned, or at least emulated.” This time, however, Fielder becomes his own guinea pig; remembering a recent conflict in which he himself didn’t dare speak up against an authority figure, he rehearses an effort to do so in the present tense.

The dispute involves the removal of an episode of his earlier TV series, “Nathan for You,” from the Paramount+ site—a famous episode in which, in order to call attention to an outerwear firm that praised a Holocaust denier, he starts his own outerwear line, expressly intended to support and provide Holocaust education. (Fielder’s proposed in-store display for it features swastikas and a replica of Auschwitz—exactly the sort of sophomoric pseudo-audacity that made me dislike the show.) Now, in “The Rehearsal,” he doubles down: discovering that it was Paramount+ Germany which first removed the episode in the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Fielder simulates a showdown with its boss—and does so by portraying the company headquarters as Nazi headquarters. This mockery is briefly complicated when the actor playing the German executive (whom Fielder has costumed in a Nazi uniform) jumps out of character to challenge him as “not sincere, just a man with a grudge using his television show to smear us instead of trying to understand us.” Yet Fielder’s showy nudging of hot buttons he doesn’t actually risk pressing overshadows what’s of enduring interest in the episode: namely, his questioning of performance and reality, of seeming and being, as it relates to the empathy that Mara’D displays, and to his own inability to do the same.

Though Fielder had asserted his notion that everything can be “learned, or at least emulated,” his staged Paramount+ confrontation leads him to speculate that “some people are born great performers” whose authentic feelings emerge “effortlessly,” whereas “for the rest of us, no matter how sincere we are inside, it will always be a struggle.” That’s the dichotomy he confronts in the third episode, “Pilot’s Code,” and he does it by deft indirection: coyly admitting to being nervous about performing some of his psychological experiments on pilots, he tests one on an animal. Finding a dog who’d recently been cloned from another, Fielder tries to imbue it with the original’s personality by replicating the physical and emotional conditions of the first dog’s early life—and succeeds. This is the springboard from which Fielder takes his leap into the sublime. What comes next is the first thing in “The Rehearsal” that’s more than a stunt, that reaches into the realm of art, precisely because it’s a replica of a work of art.

Having examined the failings of numerous pilots, Fielder recalls an exceptional one who didn’t fail but, instead, “invited feedback at a critical moment”: Chesley Sullenberger, a.k.a. Sully. In 2009, when a collision with a flock of birds damaged both of his plane’s engines, Sullenberger decided to land the crippled craft immediately, in the Hudson River, saving everyone onboard. The incident and its aftermath are dramatized in arresting detail, in Clint Eastwood’s “Sully,” with Tom Hanks in the title role. The movie is a great one, its moment of triumph surprisingly shadowed by tragic overtones; it’s also a story of personality, in which Sully emphasizes how his own character and experience informed his choice to land the plane.

Though Fielder never mentions “Sully,” he in effect recreates it via the Fielder Method, going back to its source—Sullenberger’s memoir, “Highest Duty”—and performing, onscreen, a trenchant critical analysis of the text that informs his simulations. (Even this study, which Fielder does by detaching pages from the book and laying them out on an enormous worktable, with key passages highlighted, delivers an aesthetic jolt.) “My entire life led me safely to that river,” Sullenberger writes, and Fielder, taking that line literally, decides to live Sullenberger’s life as fully as possible. He shaves his body, puts on a bald cap, and—in one of the most astonishing images I’ve lately seen—wears nothing but a diaper as he walks into a room that’s been constructed on a colossal scale, such that he, as faux-infant Chesley, is infant-size in relation to it. (In a majestic bit of comedy, cables descend from the rafters and, when he hooks them to his diaper, he gets hoisted into the crib.) There, he’s visited by Mom Sullenberger, a giant puppet who, to keep proportions right, seems about fifteen feet tall.

Chesley’s childhood whizzes by quickly, and Fielder’s makeup and costumes shift to match. Baby Chesley has his diaper changed, nurses, and spits up; Chesley, in boyhood, plays with his sister and is joined by his parents (played by actors on stilts). Fielder, of course, has only minutes of screen time for the reënactment of the nearly six decades that led Sullenberger up to the fateful flight, and he follows Sullenberger’s memoir in restaging the incidents that the author finds most significant. The adolescent Chesley learns to fly, dates a girl named Carole (played by an actress), takes her up in a small plane, and, while airborne and alone with her, learns to “compartmentalize” the young pilot’s responsibility for flight safety and his feelings of sexual attraction. Fielder takes comic precautions to portray Teen Chesley’s lust explicitly, and explains the procedure—replacing the actress with a robot, sending the crew off the set, and (invisibly) masturbating to give himself an erection—in a line that’s simultaneously a good goof and the very heart of his show: “After all, this wasn’t a performance for you, the viewer—it was an experience for me.”

Fielder is trying to figure out, in a surgically precise sense, whether the personality that enabled Sully to land his plane safely, with the responsiveness to a co-pilot that the maneuver required, could be inculcated in other pilots by some similar role-playing method. But Fielder is doing more than seeing whether a person can be Sullied; he’s Sullying himself, attempting to endow himself with the qualities that he considers essential to that pilot’s heroism. He’s giving himself lessons in listening, in sincerity, in empathy—the very traits that the series itself has, from the start, revealed him (or perhaps merely shown him) to be short of.