The Rehearsal slams on the brakes following its invigorating first episode
Season 1, Episode 2: "Scion"
What, in your opinion, is the most disappointing thing in the world? Yeah, that’s a sudden, broad question, (one of those things I’d like to think I do best in these reviews) but I’d like you to think about it for a moment. Seriously, what is it? Maybe it’s something specific to your interests, related to a hobby you have that only you would get. Maybe it’s something broader—being let down, being lied to. Or maybe it’s something most of us go through, like having a kid and realizing you weren’t ready for it. Maybe at that point, you’re more disappointed in yourself than anything else.
For me, the most disappointing thing in the world is a series with an absolutely stellar pilot—one that knows what it’s all about and wants its audience to know it too—having a real clunker of a second episode, especially one that wastes a concept as good as the one “Scion” puts forth. Nathan Fielder has always taken risks and pushed himself when it comes to his precious television shows, and this episode’s concept is somehow even more ambitious than the thousands upon thousands of dollars that must have gone into the spectacular “Orange Juice, No Pulp”—what if you could test out if you liked having a kid on the off chance that you didn’t? It’s an opportunity bestowed upon Angela, yet another person perfect for Nathan to run his weird little experiments on, a religious woman that immediately starts to give aromatherapy to the infant actors she takes on as stand-ins for a hypothetical son.
“Scion” opens with an opening that immediately had me invested in it with how striking it was. Nathan is in some sort of control room with a mother and her baby. “What’s his real name again?” he asks, perfectly illustrating Nathan’s relationship with the people he has on his shows. There’s a myriad of screens before him, all monitoring a house, and as a timer runs down, he has the baby inside the house switched out with the baby in the control room. Without context, it’s utterly bizarre and almost seems like a kidnapping, and it’s just as strange in context. For about a month, Angela will live in a house out in the woods with a series of child actors (there are multiple for each stage of child because of labor laws) representing three year portions of a child’s life, changing every few days. It’s a fantastic concept, right?
Except they don’t deliver. “Scion” only covers the infantry portion of the life of “Adam”, (as Angela names him) instead choosing to focus on Angela and the equally odd (if not more so) man she picks up in hopes of raising the baby with her, and that’s fine. I guess. Nathan For You was also more about the people the schemes brought into Nathan’s orbit than the schemes itself, but both Nathan For You and “Orange Juice, No Pulp” still delivered on their promises of whatever weird shit Nathan dreamed up. “Scion” comes off as unbalanced by not devoting enough time to this, (and considering this episode has only a thirty minute runtime for whatever reason, I really don’t understand why this is, although I suspect it was out of Nathan’s hands) and as such, we get maybe the most off-kilter, wandering product Nathan has ever delivered us.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, of course. On top of the various Nathan-isms present throughout the episode, (“Never changed a diaper before.” “How’d it go?” “Pretty good.”) both Angela and her prospective partner Robin are remarkably fun to watch, bizarre Christian devotees who don’t seem like they would make very conventional parents. Robin in particular is a real character (something Nathan clearly recognizes) and gets a significant amount of time in the episode spent on him, something I feel both helps and hurts it.
If I can again make a comparison to How To with John Wilson, it almost feels like that’s what Nathan is trying to do with Robin here. Part of the magic of How To is how John will just find these random people somehow related to the theme of whatever the episode is about and create entertainment out of them just by talking long enough. Robin is, of course, entertaining on his own, and the utterly insane scene in his apartment with his roommate who doesn’t understand his use of “you’re stepping to me” is one of my favorites of the episode, combined with my absolute favorite, Nathan trying to backseat drive him and holding his phone for him in the car. Nathan clearly has a similar eye for these people—he has for years, as he’s proven to us time and time again—but I don’t know. It feels out of place in this episode, when the focus should really be Angela. It comes across as distracted and a result of some really strange choices, and honestly, maybe it is.
But at the very least, we get some good Nathan stuff near the end of the episode. While Angela and Robin go out on a date, he takes care of the baby and finds himself rather enjoying it. It’s probably the most jovial we’ve ever seen Nathan as he lifts it up and babbles to it. At the same time, we see him mirroring the action with one of his cats that he brought along with him for the trip, in the same cheerful state that we saw him in with the baby. Nathan has always been defined by his awkward presence around adults, that very idea of a man so stilted providing half the comedy for these shows, so to see him so comfortable is sweet and just a little sad. Are cats and babies truly all there is for Nathan?
Well, they’re not. After Robin ditches the incessantly crying robot baby Nathan had brought in for nighttimes, Nathan calls Angela to a bar to talk letting him stand in as a rehearsal father for Adam, and after an awkward exchange, she accepts. It’s worth noting here that they’re in the replica bar he created in “Orange Juice, No Pulp”, and Nathan muses that, despite it not fitting in the warehouse, he had trouble letting it go. When Nathan succeeds—makes a friend, for instance—it’s a win to him, like everyone else, but his keeping of the bar as some sort of souvenir indicates that perhaps Nathan doesn’t succeed, or not often. Either way, he contacts every actor’s parents to let them know that he’ll be stepping in to act in the project personally, and in an odd but funny (and a little creepy) reveal, he’s shown to be reading every phone call off of a dialogue tree, similar to the one he had made for Kor. (There’s even a note to add a “friendly chuckle” into one of his options.)
But still, I don’t know about “Scion”, and I wish I did. I was wanting for so much more out of The Rehearsal this week, but a little disappointment is healthy, I suppose. It’s clear that Nathan put a ludicrous amount of effort into this episode as well, and I don’t want to feel as though it was wasted—but damn if I wasn’t hurting for just a little more time to really bring everything home.
Rating: 6/10 (B-)
I’ve considered that this could be the first part of a two-parter episode, but even then, the experience of this one as a whole didn’t resonate with me as much as I hoped it would.
Check out this interview Vice did with Robin following the episode’s release. Quite illuminating. A couple of quotes from it are worth putting in this section.
The title of this episode comes from Robin’s model of former car, which he totaled at a hundred miles an hour while intoxicated.
I love that the guy Nathan hired to watch the cameras at night because he claimed he could handle it fell asleep not once, but twice.
“Do you use condoms?” “Uhhh...not really.”
“They absorb wireless radiation a lot more than we do, into their brains.”
“So God, like, pursued me, though.”