I want to hear your thoughts on this. I still don't know what was fake and real, but this episode made me feel extremely uncomfortable.
spoiler
However, it's clear that the show recognized and tried to address what was clearly the exploitation of a fatherless child. I haven't fully formed my thoughts on this yet, but I feel like this show was a critique of reality TV and how it exploits the raw emotions of its participants for cheap entertainment. When shown with an innocent child who can't necessarily differentiate between what is real and what isn't, it becomes very obvious and very disturbing.
All in all this show was a work of art regardless, I can't tell if Nathan is a complete sociopath or was actually speaking to us when he was saying that it was all pretend. What a wild ride Jesus christ
I think that's part of the beauty of the show. We can't know. Maybe the show itself was all scripted, who knows? That's another level of meta to an already meta enterprise. My honest answer is that it was not planned, he was presented with this problem, and legitimately did not know what to do with it. That's the vibe I get, but we can't know for sure.