Among the privileged few who got to look at the entirety of The Curse back in November, what happens 28 minutes into the series’ final episode has been a secret more closely guarded than Taylor Swift’s Twitter password. The twist is so audacious you wouldn’t dream of spoiling it, and nobody would imagine you in the event you tried. Last week, I described for the first time what happens in “Green Queen” to someone who hadn’t seen it, and I felt compelled to preface the explanation with a temporary disclaimer: I do know that is going to sound crazy, but I swear it’s true.
What happens is that this: Several months after the end of the previous episode “Young Hearts,” Asher (Nathan Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone) are celebrating the release of their now-completed reality show, which has ditched the cumbersome title Fliplanthropy in favor of one focusing solely on Whitney, the titular green queen. Their show seems to have landed with a thud—it’s only on HGTV’s streaming site, where not even their friends can work out how one can watch it—but they’re already formulating a second season, with a brand new addition to the forged: Whitney, who was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy early in The Curse, is now pregnant and shut to giving birth, and the couple is specially fitting out their pressurized “passive house” for the newborn. Whitney may talk at length about how climate control is environmentally wasteful and other people don’t actually need it, but they’re still clandestinely installing air con in the baby’s room, because they’re not taking that likelihood with their child.
And then, Asher wakes up one morning and finds himself on the ceiling. For reasons that never develop into clear, gravity has abruptly reversed itself, and he’s, as he puts it, “falling up.” Initially, the couple assumes this highly specific inversion of the laws of physics must be an accidental byproduct of their specially constructed house—an air pocket, perhaps? But a freaked-out Whitney manages to make her strategy to the front door without falling prey to the same phenomenon, and once Asher follows her outside, it’s clear that the problem is him. By this point, the stress of seeing her husband wrong-way-up has sent Whitney into labor, and her doula, Moses, arrives to run her to the hospital. But first, he makes a failed attempt at pulling Asher right down to earth, and when that fails, Asher goes hurtling upward, colliding with a tree branch that he clings to for dear life.
What is occurring here? How did The Curse go from an all-too-real satire of white liberalism to a show where bodies suddenly shoot into the stratosphere? It’s as if Curb Your Enthusiasm used its final episode to morph into Twin Peaks. It’s hard to think of a show that has ended on such a deliberately oblique note—especially without giving any advance warning that it was going to. It might well be the most confounding finale in the history of television.
The Curse has not, up until this point, appeared like the kind of show where inexplicably bizarre things simply occur. (My notes from the first time I watched abruptly cut off at the moment Asher wakes up on the ceiling—it took all my energy just to soak up what I used to be seeing.) Although the series’ inciting incident is the curse placed on Asher by a young girl selling sodas in a strip-mall parking zone, she later explains she was just following a TikTok trend, and the worst thing that happens is that Asher’s meal-prepped dinner arrives missing its protein. Nonetheless, the girl’s father warns, it’s not good to discuss curses. “If you put an idea in your head,” he tells Asher, “it can become very real.”
There are so much of ideas in The Curse, some realer than others. There’s Whitney’s dream of constructing environmentally sustainable housing, which tends to crumble anytime it’s forced to interact with reality. (Nine episodes after the premiere, she still hasn’t learned that folks don’t like hearing their prospective home in comparison with a thermos.) There’s the discrepancy between the versions of themselves that Whitney and Asher play for his or her reality show, directed by the amoral and desperately lonely Dougie (Benny Safdie), and the versions they present to one another. Whitney, who sees herself as a morally upstanding liberal trying to higher the community and the world—a self-image that doesn’t rise up to scrutiny—is repulsed by Asher’s spinelessness, and even when he starts attempting to act like a greater person, she’s convinced it’s only for show. “You wouldn’t do anything good if I didn’t force you to,” she yells during one of their increasingly ugly fights.
It’s worse when he tries to act like a person of motion. Fernando, the ex-con Whitney and Asher have hired to protect the strip mall they’re using to showcase their support for local businesses, becomes enraged when he learns that Whitney is incentivizing people to steal from the stores, putting tens of 1000’s of dollars in designer jeans on her bank card slightly than risk the bad press which may result from going after shoplifters. Infuriated that they’re effectively subsidizing a criminal offense spree, a rifle-toting Fernando shows up at Whitney and Asher’s house prepared to take the law into his own hands. Asher puts on a blustering façade, practically butting chests with the much larger man, but slightly than be impressed by his machismo, Whitney viciously mocks him. Asher, who has a micropenis and fantasizes about watching his wife have sex with other men, may have a light humiliation kink, but this isn’t the kind of scorched-earth degradation he’s into.
Asher finally learns just how much Whitney despises him at the end of The Curse’s penultimate episode, when Dougie shows them a piece of their reality show specializing in how dissatisfied Whitney is with their marriage. It’s already been cut from the episode, after the head of the network informed Dougie that viewers prefer loving couples to feuding ones, but Whitney tells him to press play anyway, watching coldly as the TV version of herself rips Asher apart. How can she stick with someone so infatuated with the idea of her that he can’t see the real her? “When you’re bound to someone but deep down you know that you’ll never be satisfied with them,” she asks the camera, “what do you do?”
Rather than see this as his cue to depart, Asher takes it as a call to motion. You’re right, he tells Whitney, I’m exactly as terrible as you think that I’m. “There’s no curse,” he tells her. “I am the problem. It’s not magic. It’s me. I’m a bad person, and I’ve been dragging you down with me.” He’ll be a distinct person from this moment forward—she’ll see. And if she still doesn’t need to be with him, he guarantees, “you wouldn’t have to say it. I would feel it, and I would disappear.”
In a way, The Curse’s finale is solely Asher keeping his promise. It’s clear that, notwithstanding their modest luck, the Siegels aren’t any happier than they were before, and as Whitney, reality-TV star and expectant mother, lies in bed next to Asher, you may see the realization sink in that she’s gotten what she wanted and it’s not nearly enough. The baby’s great, but her husband is just dead weight. Even his grand attempt at proving he’s finally a very good man—extravagantly gifting one of his and Whitney’s properties to the father of the curse-bestowing girl—is a flop. Instead of being grateful, the dad is suspicious, and asks in the event that they also can kick in some money to repay the property taxes.
So as a substitute of dragging Whitney down, Asher flies into the sky, sputtering some tough-guy banter—“If I ever come down …”—until he winds up floating in space, frozen in the fetal position. As the fire department, who imagine Asher is just having a psychotic episode, saws through the tree branch that’s his tether to earth, the show cuts to the surgeon’s scalpel slicing through Whitney’s belly, her plans for natural childbirth forged aside in favor of an epidural and C-section. She’s traded a man-baby for a baby boy.
That doesn’t explain why Asher finally ends up meeting such a surreal end. The turn toward the supernatural could also be the delayed result of Dougie muttering “I curse you” after a tense exchange with Asher a pair of episodes earlier, but there’s no indication he’s more competent at black magic than he’s at the rest. And besides, he’s got his own explanation for what’s happening to Asher, who’s clearly just panicked about becoming a dad. “I get it,” Dougie comforts him from down below. “It’s pretty heavy stuff.” If you’re in search of a concrete explanation, it may also be price taking one other take a look at the show’s title. “The curse” is, amongst other things, an ancient euphemism for menstruation, a subject that comes up several times as Asher and Whitney set themselves to getting pregnant. Asher puts her cycle right into a tracking app, and later remarks that he probably knows more about it than she does. If there’s power in a curse, even when it’s just the power to make the chicken disappear from a prefab entrée, it may be an influence that’s specifically wielded by women. Whitney doesn’t curse Asher, no less than not out loud, but she actually seems to wish he was gone. Of course she’s upset to search out him on their ceiling, but when the nurses offer to fetch the baby’s dad after she’s given birth, she just smiles.
That hypothetical doesn’t necessarily make The Curse’s ending any more satisfying, or justify why it’s such a radical break with all the pieces that got here before it. But if it’s a show built around discomfort, there’s no strategy to leave the audience in a more emphatic state of distress than to suddenly change the rules, and to deliver a finale that deliberately, even aggressively frustrates logical explanation. Some individuals are going to hate it, and I might guess that Fielder and Safdie would be disillusioned if that weren’t the case. But for those willing to stick with The Curse until it exits the exosphere, there’s never been an ending like it.
Credit : slate.com
