There’s more than one way to read that ending.

This article contains spoilers for “My Controls,” the Season 2 finale of The Rehearsal.

The underlying joke of Nathan for You, the series in which business-school grad Nathan Fielder offers free advice to struggling businesses, is that most of his advice is terrible. A struggling frozen-yogurt shop, for example, needs to distinguish itself by offering a flavor that none of its competitors carry, and that flavor turns out to be, well, poo. But on the Season 2 finale of The Rehearsal, Nathan really does have a plan, and it’s astonishing.

All season long, Nathan has dedicated himself to the subject of airline safety, reasoning that more plane crashes could be avoided if pilots and co-pilots had healthier interpersonal relationships. But after taking his idea all the way to Washington—first in a simulated congressional hearing, then the office of honest-to-goodness congressman Steve Cohen—Nathan has failed to find any takers. So he decides to take matters into his own hands, slipping behind the pilot’s yoke to show how his method, which uses a brief role-playing exercise to establish a line of communication between a forthright first officer and an open-minded captain, would play out in the context of a real flight. Not just any flight, either, but a commercial 737 at cruising altitude.

Actors fly planes all the time. (Sometimes, they even crash them.) But we’re talking two-seaters, not massive commercial aircraft. That, former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia tells Nathan, takes years to achieve.

Cut to title card: “TWO YEARS EARLIER.”

Not even the Red Wedding made my jaw drop so far. As sharp-eyed Reddit sleuths discovered two weeks ago, Fielder—and here I mean the real Nathan Fielder, not just the version of himself that he plays on television—spent hundreds of hours over multiple years securing the necessary certifications to fly a 737, albeit under extremely limited circumstances. He’s not permitted to take command of a commercial airliner (in any case, no airline would allow him to) and can’t fly paying passengers. But Fielder has also spent years, and a substantial chunk of HBO’s money, learning how to stage elaborate, meticulously detailed re-creations that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

Trying to suss out what’s real and what isn’t is an inevitable response to The Rehearsal, and also, by design, an impossible one. Both as a performer and as a director, Fielder shapes his interactions with his subjects (or, if you like, targets) for maximum unease, sharpening Nathan for You’s comedy of cringe into genuine discomfort, sometimes with a splash of ethical murk. At the end of The Rehearsal’s first season, Nathan played “pretend daddy” to a 6-year-old who seemed to develop a genuine emotional attachment to him, and Lana Love, a contestant on the second season’s airline-themed singing-competition show Wings of Voice, said she’d been duped into spending more than $5,000 traveling to and from its bogus auditions. (The show within a show’s transparently absurd name was not revealed during the early round, and Fielder kept his distance from most of the participants.) But when one episode opened with a genre-mixing medley of the top 50 contestants performing “Amazing Grace,” several of the finalists posted videos of themselves gleefully reacting to their moment in the national spotlight, as fleeting and faintly ridiculous as it was. And Love, who sneered her way through the show’s pop-punk take on the Christian hymn’s chorus, got a glamorous headshot published in a lengthy Variety article as well.

OK, so Wings of Voice isn’t American Idol—or even Canadian Idol, where a young Fielder once worked as an entry-level producer. But that’s not such a bad thing. Fielder’s show never traffics in the wanton cruelty of Idol’s initial rounds, where tuneless warblers with delusions of talent are purposefully held up to national mockery. Indeed, as befits The Rehearsal’s focus on soft-soaping difficult conversations, its judges were instructed to issue their rejections as gently as possible. The counterargument is that Idol’s contestants knew what they were getting into, and Fielder deceived his. But unlike other reality-TV producers, Fielder owns up to his deceptions in the end—or seems to, anyway. (All of The Rehearsal’s participants sign NDAs; Love is, to my knowledge, the first to substantially break one.)

If you’re promised a shot at singing on HBO, and you wind up singing on HBO—more specifically, to sing “a song of our choice on national television with a full backing band in a partial recreation of the Houston airport”—and you get that shot, was the competition really fake? And if you fill a 737 with actors and take it up to 25,000 feet, are they still acting, or are they just people in a plane, being flown by a comedian with a pilot’s license? If, as the cliché has it, everyone is performing all the time, Fielder’s key insight might be that everyone is also not—that no simulation is ever entirely divorced from the thing it’s mimicking. In the second season’s fourth episode, “Kissme,” Nathan asks an actress what it’s like to do a love scene. “It’s not real real,” she tells him. But “it’s happening when it’s happening.”

The Rehearsal’s saving grace, amazing or otherwise, is that Fielder makes himself, or rather his on-screen self, the butt of the joke. Nathan goes to elaborate lengths to study other people, and even instructs other actors in “the Fielder Method,” which involves covertly shadowing a subject until you can emulate their every movement. He can’t see, however, what’s obvious to every viewer of the show, which is that the person most in need of Nathan’s help is Nathan himself. Before his trip to Washington, Nathan meets with the head of an autism awareness group, purportedly to burnish his credentials before seeking an audience with lawmakers. But it also serves as a way for the show to acknowledge that, for many viewers of the first season, Nathan bears a striking resemblance to a person on the autism spectrum. The episode directly cites an article whose author describes the process of “masking,” in which “autistic individuals suppress their neurodivergent traits” and mimic the neurotypical people around them, essentially living their public life as a perpetual performance. That’s exactly what Nathan does, watching intently from the corner of a bar as a gregarious co-pilot named Mara’D effortlessly socializes with her colleagues. (Even better, the “bar” is actually a full-scale simulacrum that dates back to the show’s very first episode.)

When Nathan finally goes to fly that 737, he chooses a confident, easygoing co-pilot named Aaron—the kind of person he’s been trying to be all along—as his second in command. But the choice almost breaks the simulation, because Aaron is so relaxed that there’s no conflict for Nathan to resolve. He’s not afraid to raise concerns; he just doesn’t have any. Nathan keeps probing for hidden discomfort, but he can’t find any, so eventually he just gives up. “I didn’t want to make things weird by asking again if everything was OK,” he explains in his usual affectless voice-over, his voice pitched somewhere between deadpan and simply dead. “So we just kept flying.”

At times, the ritualistic back-and-forth between pilot and first officer—“My controls.” “Your controls.” “My controls.”—evokes the mirroring exercises of couples therapy, and it’s clear that Nathan is working out issues that stretch far beyond aviation. As he fills out the application for his pilot’s license, he hesitates over the part where he’s supposed to indicate whether he’s ever had any issues with anxiety or depression. “I’d never been formally diagnosed with anxiety,” he reflects, “but I’ve definitely felt the emotion.” It’s a good joke, capturing Nathan’s inability to distinguish between universal human traits and their more clinically severe manifestations. But then, are we really sure where the line is? What’s the difference between being anxious and “having anxiety,” between feeling socially awkward and being on the autism spectrum? Maybe everyone is faking it, at least a little, so they don’t get caught. As Nathan says to a group of a extras in a mock congressional hearing, “We’re all playing, like, human beings, right?”

Perhaps The Rehearsal is itself a form of masking, a way of channeling Fielder’s actual anxieties (or anxiety) into a commercially viable form of network-funded therapy. Or perhaps that’s just what he wants us to believe. But the more I think about The Rehearsal, the more I suspect the only truly insincere parts of the series are the ones where Fielder tries to pass it off as a joke. He doesn’t really believe that the best way to understand Chesley Sullenberger’s heroic calm in the cockpit is to dress himself up as an adult-sized baby, but he does marvel at how people like that come to be, people so impervious to panic and ego that they can calmly ask their co-pilot for ideas as they’re plummeting toward the Hudson. When he’s playing baby Chesley, Nathan casts Sully’s parents with actors on stilts who tower over him like alien creatures. And even as a grown-up, other people—the ones who seem to effortlessly master all the challenges of adult life—can still seem that way, especially when you’re only looking at them from the outside.

Toward the very end of The Rehearsal, Fielder drops in home movie footage of himself as an awkward apprentice magician, purportedly by way of demonstrating how his off-putting gestures led him to start studying how others moved through the world. But before any young magic obsessive knows how to saw a woman in half, the first thing they study is the art of misdirection. It’s clear enough where Fielder wants us to look, but while our eyes are trained on a jet plane, he’s pulling a fast one, sneaking a deeply personal story into a show about cloned dogs and airport food.

In the season’s final scene, Nathan watches the winner of Wings of Voice perform, just as he promised, a full-band version of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life,” which, according to the show’s not-especially-serious theory, is the song that helped Chesley Sullenberger keep his cool at a pivotal moment. A guy like Aaron, his gregarious co-pilot, would probably just be savoring the moment, rocking out to one of the more cringe-inducing hits of the 21^st century. But Nathan’s attention is elsewhere. He’s staring at his phone, where he’s been told that the results are finally in that will officially tell him whether or not he’s neurotypical. Nathan’s convinced that he’s normal, or at least that he’s able to convince other people that he is, and the fact that he deletes the doctor’s voicemail rather than returning the call can read as a form of simple denial. He’d rather not know, because pretending has worked well enough so far. Or maybe he already knows, and he’d rather do as other pilots have been counseled to do: bury the diagnosis, and his feelings along with it.

And how much difference is there, really? If the winner of a fake singing competition still gets a spot on HBO, then Nathan’s feigned behavior may not be so distinct from anyone else’s. We all learn by copying others, faking it until we make it but never feeling like we’ve made it. One of the final shots returns to a test Nathan took at the autism center, where he was asked to guess a person’s emotions by looking only at their eyes. But this time it’s Nathan’s eyes, and we’re the ones guessing. He’s the one on the inside, and all we can do is stare.