Nathan Fielder’s series The Rehearsal — his coping mechanism/social experiment/valiant attempt to bankrupt David Zaslav — premiered its second, six-episode season on April 20. While last season explored Fielder’s anxiety around social interactions and his abilities as a potential parent, this season deals with something more immediately terrifying: plane crashes. In the premiere, Fielder reveals that he’s taken up researching airline disasters “as a hobby” and has stumbled on a grand theory about air-travel safety: The No. 1 contributing factor to plane crashes is first officers who feel too uncomfortable to speak up about the captain’s mistakes in the cockpit.

Now, there’s more context than that, but for those of you who, like me, have burst into panicked tears, thrown up, or fainted in the middle of a flight, having to read phrases like “airline disasters” and “plane crashes” in the same paragraph is already panic-inducing. So if you’re a sufferer of flight anxiety and now scared to watch The Rehearsal’s second season, allow me to walk you through what you’re about to experience (so obviously, spoilers ahead), how to skip what you might not want to deal with, and why you should stick with the show despite your fears.

The Opening Minutes

The premiere opens in a cockpit that’s doomed. If you want to skip over some bad airplane stuff but still catch a cool image of Fielder standing in flames, fast-forward to at least 2:00.

A Few Minutes After the Opening Minutes

After the opening scene, the premiere cuts to a segment where Fielder runs former NTSB board member John J. Goglia through the ill-fated flights he’s researched to lay the groundwork for his theory. One of those flights is Corporate Airlines Flight 5966, from which the premiere gets its title, “Gotta Have Fun.” The NTSB ultimately found the cause of the 2004 crash to be pilot error due to their “failure to establish and maintain a professional demeanor during the flight and their fatigue.” Fielder has actors reenact the pilots’ final moments in a flight simulator, featuring a first officer humoring a pilot who keeps talking about wanting to “have fun” at a critical point during the plane’s final approach. The actors are very skilled at portraying the fear and panic that hits once they realize their fatal error, going so far as to play dead as digital flames surround the cockpit. A similar dynamic plays out in five more reenacted crashes based on real crash reports Fielder reviewed that support his thesis. If you do not want to see reenactments of plane tragedies, skip from 4:30 to 9:53.

A Few Minutes After That

Next up, there’s a brief scene where Fielder walks through the re-created wreckage of a crash, complete with bodies, for seemingly no reason other than to reiterate to himself and the audience that this is serious business. An injured woman still strapped to her seat looks up at Fielder, just barely managing to say the word “help.” If you’d rather not experience this, skip from 11:25 to 12:05.

Clown Alert

This post is a scaredy-cat guide designed mostly for viewers who suffer from flight anxiety, but some people are scared of clowns too. So if you’d rather avoid the clown, skip from 12:16 to 13:17.

The Rest of the Episode

For the bulk of “Gotta Have Fun,” Fielder helps a young first officer deal with a personal relationship and builds a partial replica of Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. You won’t have to watch any more plane crashes, but you will learn a lot about how hard people work to be pilots, which can offer some general air-travel reassurance if you let it.

Final Thoughts

If you accidentally watched the reenacted disasters, maybe this will help: Not everyone on those flights died! Four passengers and a dog survived American Airlines Flight 965, two passengers survived Corporate Airlines Flight 5966, and both pilots survived the passenger-less Empire Airlines Flight 8284. (I looked all that up for you, so now you have no reason to get on Wikipedia and start spiraling.) Another thing to keep in mind is that The Rehearsal’s second season is about so much more than plane crashes, so don’t assume you won’t enjoy the rest of it just because the premiere made you scream out loud in your own home. Besides, learning more about the mundanity of air travel can normalize it in a way that helps. For example, whenever I’m about to fly, instead of picturing a scene from a disaster movie, I pull up an app called FlightRadar24 so I can see that there are thousands of planes in the sky flying around at every given moment, all of them not crashing at all. They just never report that on the news, because it’s boring.

Related

• The Rehearsal Season-Premiere Recap: Up in the Air
• Panic-Calling YouTube’s Favorite Air Traffic Controller

 Don’t let your flight anxiety stop you from watching Nathan Fielder’s show.