Hi!

Even for me, this one is random. Before I get there, though, Monday is Memorial Day here in the U.S., and I’ll be taking the day off — so the next time Now I Know will hit your inbox is next Tuesday.

Earlier this week, I watched the third episode of season 2 (S2E3, in TV-speak) of the HBO show, “The Rehearsal.” It’s one of the best single episodes of TV I’ve ever watched. And when making a quick list of other episodes that would get that acclaim from me, I found a theme. In this episode, and in the other two episodes (of different shows) that easily made the cut, the main character lives the life of someone other than themselves.

Let’s start with S2E3 of The Rehearsal. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, it’s definitely like nothing else you’ve ever seen on TV — and it’s also not for everyone. It’s a docu-comedy series by Nathan Fielder, the guy behind the 2013-2017 Comedy Central show “Nathan For You.” Here’s how Wikipedia describes “The Rehearsal”:

The Rehearsal features Nathan Fielder, as a fictionalized version of himself, helping ordinary people rehearse upcoming difficult conversations or life events through the use of sets and actors hired to recreate real situations. The situations can be trivial, like confessing to a lie about educational history, or more complex, like raising a child. Fielder commissions extravagant sets with every detail recreated, and hires actors to inhabit these sets and practice different dialogue trees with his clients dozens of times to try to prepare them for every variable. Information used to train the actors and build the sets is often collected without the subjects’ knowledge (this aspect, however, is often played with a comedic effect).

I don’t know how to describe S2E3 without ruining it, and while also having it make sense. Don’t watch it if you can’t handle very cringy, sophomoric humor. And don’t watch it until you’ve watched the preceding nine episodes of the show, including all of season 1, either — while the episode itself doesn’t need a ton of setup, the “Rehearsal” premise of the show and how literal-yet-ridiculous Fielder goes with things needs to be experienced fully. What I can tell you, and what I need to for this essay to make sense, is that Fielder reads the memoir of a famous person in painstaking detail, and then goes to even more painstaking lengths to experience life through that famous person’s eyes by reenacting the details captured in the book. While the episode is tongue-in-cheek throughout, if you look past that, you almost believe that Fielder had gained some sort of deep, empathetic insight into the life of the person whose identity he kind of, sort of assumed. What the episode (from a comedy series, to be clear) lacks in introspection is more than made up for by what it gains in laughs.

The other two shows aren’t comedies at all; they’re from sci-fi/fantasy shows. The first is “The Inner Light,” S5E25 of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” That aired in 1992, so I don’t mind sharing some spoilers. Jean-Luc Picard, the captain of the Enterprise, is struck by an alien problem and rendered unconscious for 40 minutes. During that time, he experiences the entire adult life of a scientist from a nearby planet named Kamin. At first, Picard-Kamin is convinced that his existence as Kamin is a fever dream, but over time, he comes to terms with the “fact” that the opposite is true — he is Kamin, and his Picard identity was the fever dream. Over the years, Kamin determines that his people are doomed to extinction, and to preserve their culture, he collects their memories and sends them off into space on a probe. When Picard comes to 40 (real) minutes later, he retains the memories of his “experiences” as Kamin, including a melody that Picard-Kamin played on a flute that he had previously not heard. The impact of the episode on the Star Trek fan base is so deep that in 2021, nearly two decades (and a lot more than 40 minutes) after the episode aired, the prop flute sold at auction for $190,000.

Finally, there’s “A Life in the Day,” S3E5 of “The Magicians.” The Magicians may be the most underrated show in TV history, but it has a lot of very adult themes and isn’t for everyone. (The book series, which I really didn’t like, was described to me as an adult version of Harry Potter and it kind of is. A better description would be “what if Harry and his friends were grad students with a very loose moral code and were obsessed with the Harry Potter series?”) In this episode, the main character, Quentin Coldwater, and his friend Eliot Waugh, end up transported back in time on a magical quest. A book tells the story of a mosiac that, once completed, will lead to the next step of the quest, and they come across that mosiac and get building. But the mosaic has a near infinite number of tile combinations and there are no instructions for how to complete it, so they just keep trying over, and over, and over again, for years. We get to see how they spend a lifetime together, and when they mosaic is finally complete, the timeline reverts to when they were sent back in the first place. But, like Picard, they retain their memories from the experience that never happened.

You can see the common theme in all three episodes. I guess I have a soft spot for this kind of storytelling — if you do as well, you may want to try these shows. (The only one you can watch without binging the series, though, is the Star Trek one.) And if you have reocmmendations for similar episodes I may like, let me know!

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: Why Purple is the Royal Color: Blame snails.

Tuesday: It’s Not Easy Being Clean: Art can be messy. Literally!

Wednesday: How to Buy a House for $7: If you didn’t read this on Wednesday, sorry — you’ve run out of time. (If you did, and you entered, I hope you won!!)

Thursday: The Nose Knows: The Disney smell cannons.

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “My Father Prosecuted History’s Crimes. Then He Died in One.” (New York Times/gift link, 54 minutes, May 2025). This is a long one. The subhead: “He was a Nazi hunter — and was killed in the Lockerbie bombing. What does it mean to seek justice for his death?”

2) ”The Long, Strange Trip of the Titanic Victims Whose Remains Surfaced Hundreds of Miles Away, Weeks After the Ship Sank” (Smithsonian, April 2025). This is morbid (obviously) but still interesting.

3) “The Myth of the Poverty Trap” (The Atlantic/podcast episode with transcript, 51 minutes, May 2025). The subhead: “We know how to end extreme poverty. Why haven’t we done it?” I wasn’t sure if I was going to share this at first — it is political-ish but not about politics in the “left versus right” sense — so I went with it. I also don’t know how The Atlantic treats podcast episodes vis-a-vis their paywall; if you can’t access it via that link, you can listen to it on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Have a great weekend, and here’s a thank you who sacrificed in service. See you on Tuesday.

Dan