How are we still processing The Curse finale?
Season one of the Showtime satire ended more than two weeks ago, but we've yet to come to terms with its nightmarish, surreal sendoff
TV Features Curse
The Curse is gone; long live The Curse. And thanks to the series’ unforgettable ending, it probably will—at least in our minds. As a goodbye present, Showtime’s drama delivered 2024’s first truly petrifying episode of TV with its season-one finale, which dropped on January 14. “Green Queen” leaves a haunting memory in its wake as a WTF-inducing hour of television, which is simultaneously delirious, shocking, and darkly comical. How often do you look at the screen and go, “He what? He clung to a tree branch that was chopped off, thus ejecting him into the goddamn orbit?” How are we expected to process that? It’s exactly the kind of episode that takes up space in your brain long after it’s over. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The first big moment during the finale that made us do a double-take came halfway through the hour. A pregnant Whitney (Emma Stone) wakes up one morning to see her husband, Asher (Nathan Fielder), floating overhead. He’s fast asleep but not next to her in bed. Instead, he’s on the ceiling. The camera slowly, deliberately tilts to him for the reveal. It’s so abrupt and creepy that we had no choice but to rewind and rewatch it twice to ensure we didn’t miss a pivotal explanation for Asher’s ascension. And then we kept watching, realizing with a gnawing sense of horror with each passing minute, asking ourselves if, holy hell, the curse might actually be real.
For its entire first season, the show has been building up to this moment. Yet no amount of cringe or shock value could’ve prepared us for The Curse’s abstract unfolding in its last 30 minutes. Series co-creators and co-stars Benny Safdie and Fielder have aimed for a trippy narrative here—and a divisive one. They likely knew going in that “Green Queen” wouldn’t—and probably didn’t—land well for everyone. It’s too bizarre, with subplots left untied. But it turns out that satirizing white liberalism is a good springboard to (insanely) tackle a surprisingly touching theme.
See, The Curse is a nightmare-inducing examination of commitment—to a person, a career, and even your own belief of who you are. It unpacks the mental toll of what staunch devotion does to you. Whitney knows in her heart she isn’t the giving person she pretends to be, no matter how hard she tries. Her commitment to this notion leads to plenty of selfish behavior. She’s committed to staying with a spouse she despises to feel better about herself, among other reasons. And poor Asher. He’s equally committed to his marriage, unsure of what life without it will be.
Dougie and Flipanthropy become a bizarre conduit for them to revisit this commitment—as does Nala (Hikmah Warsame) when she “curses” Asher for taking the $100 back. But self-reflection and letting go isn’t easy, and neither is fear of the known. So the couple, despite the fights and taunts, doesn’t bother. The Curse then forces them to let go in a sick Lynchian way.
Look no further than the photo above to grasp the jaw-dropping way in which it’s achieved. Were you also screaming and manically pacing here? Whitney and Asher aren’t suddenly yoga experts or performing a bizarre dance. She’s trying her mightiest to pull her husband down but can’t. “Green Queen” picks up on its intensity as soon as we, along with the couple, realize he’s not coming down. The curse—a.k.a. his fears—has manifested in the worst possible way. And it has nothing to do with the passive home’s air pressure.
The subsequent events are wild. Asher is unable to get back on the ground despite his spider-like movements. Whitney shuffles around the house with dread, eventually leaving when she goes into labor. Even then, her call to the doula focuses on her needs and not trying to save her husband. In one sense, it’s a pathologically detailed character study. In another, it’s an ominous thriller. When Asher escapes the roof, he flies onto the tree, inviting neighbors to marvel at the lengths he goes to film an HGTV show. Who’d think any of this is real? No one, not even Dougie, believes his pleas. We were agape when the chainsaw arrived to chop off the branch he was clinging to. For the first time since pressing play on the episode, we knew what was coming next: Asher was going to get sucked into space and die.
It was shocking, sure, but The Curse was never going to go out without pain. Watching it has been a sweet agony from the beginning. Why would the end be different? So Asher is thrust into the cosmos by forces beyond his control, and he’s curled up like a baby while it’s happening. At the same time, his wife is giving birth to his son. Is the cycle of commitment repeating itself? Will Whitney pass on the anxiety she gave Asher to her newborn now? Does the so-called curse apply to their spawn? And what’s the fine line between fantasy and verity?
“Green Queen” leaves us with a ton of questions. After distancing from the episode for more than two weeks, we can think about what it means instead of simply freaking out and frantically texting, “jfc has anyone seen The Curse finale yet?” One friend replied to this query, succinctly, “so scary.” And you know what? Commitment is scary. And gravity shouldn’t have to reverse on you and spit you into space just to teach you a lesson about letting go. But it’s incredibly thrilling to watch when it does.
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I dunno, I mean, I’ll give my thoughts on it when prompted, but it sure seems like the hype for this deflated a bit after the ending. Twin Peaks and The Leftovers it ain’t.
I feel like people were immediately delving into what it meant over on Reddit, but maybe that’s just the purpose of Reddit.For my money, what makes it so great is that it’s open to interpretation. There are multiple ways to read character interactions and decisions over all ten episodes, so the ending is really no different. Even on a surface reading, which curse hurled Asher into space? Nala’s, Dougie’s, or did Asher effectively curse himself? I wish more people would watch it, because I’m sure there are all sorts of incredible but plausible theories that haven’t been put into the discourse yet.
Dougie and Flipanthropy become a bizarre conduitPretty much every week, somebody points out that the name of the fake show was FlipLanthropy (cause that sounds funnier), but it never changes.
I only saw the finale a few days ago (mostly unspoiled, aside from seeing the AV Club headline “Oh. My. God.” which was thankfully vague enough) and… yeah I dunno. Still processing. My gut reaction upon watching it was visceral, to be sure, but it also left me with this unpleasant, icky feeling, like I just did not enjoy watching something so surreal and cruel occur out of the blue so suddenly, then unfold so painfully slowly before my eyes. It’s interesting because I love films like 𝐵𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐽𝑜ℎ𝑛 𝑀𝑎𝑙𝑘𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑐ℎ which (slight spoilers) also has a very cruel and unpleasant surreal ending for many of its severely flawed characters, yet doesn’t leave such a bad taste in my mouth. I wonder if time plays a factor. Watching a film with a harsh ending can be a gut punch, for sure, but you’re in and out in an hour or two. This was a slow drip that lasts for approximately ten hours over the course of several episodes, so you become more attached or at least empathetic towards the characters, unlikable as they are. The final few episodes really make you feel bad for Asher, even while he continues to do bad things, or good things for the wrong reasons, because they keep pealing back the layers to reveal what a sad, pathetic, lonely individual he really is. Seeing him suffer such a nightmarish fate just seems way more extreme than what I was expecting from the series. I think it also hurt that the series started to wear a bit thin for me in the final third, probably starting around episode 7. The non-stop onslaught of humiliations, selfishness, and ugliness began to get tiresome and hard to watch, so when it ended in the darkest, harshest way imaginable, I think it just completely broke my ability to enjoy what was transpiring before me. Maybe I would have loved and appreciated the ending more if this was a 6 or 7 episode series rather than 10.On another level I do appreciate and respect the ending, and it is growing in my esteem the more I think about it. It was visually striking and thematically and metaphorically consistent, I’ll give it that. The curse became all too real, and it’s not like the entire series up to this point wasn’t laden with dread and foreboding that something really bad was going to happen. But it was just so, so cruel and bizarre. Hard to love. Hard to recommend.
I guess if people are still talking about it, Nathan Felder and Benny Safdie knew what they were doing after all.
I’ll be buggered before I know what they were doing, but maybe they did.
Personally, I don’t see the point of (fictional characters) having to learn a lesson that kills you in the process. I mean, just what are you going to do with the lesson; you’re dead.
And one last thing; wasn’t “the Curse” started by a young black girl? Did she ever reappear in the series? Did she see him fly into space?
A curse was started by a young black girl. She cursed him to be missing chicken, and then his dinner was missing the chicken. She did reappear several times but I don’t believe she was around when he flew into space. He was later cursed by Dougie, and if a curse caused his death it was probably that one.
The chicken thing was always presented as possibly a curse or possibly a combination of coincidence and paranoia. Perhaps if the consequences of the curse had continued to become less plausible as coincidence or a prank as the season went on and then at some point (maybe at the end of the counting nails scene?) they had given the girl a seemingly throwaway line angrily telling Asher to “go fly away”, the final episode would have fit much better into the overall arc of the show.
Again though I don’t think the little girl had anything to do with it. We have one curse (a “tiny curse” I think she calls it) where we’re told what it was and see that it happened.Then there’s another curse from Dougie and we’re never told what it was, we just see him say “what have I done” at the end.
Good call. I forgot about Dougie’s curse.
I agree with much of the commentary I’ve seen, which is a deflating disappointment with a completely out-of-the-blue, unearned supernatural cop-out ending (even knowing that this was always the planned ending). I’ve loved Fielder’s other work, but this makes his next *scripted* project more of a wait-and-see proposition for me. Safdie hasn’t impressed me in anything but ‘Oppenheimer’ so far, including his own stuff.
I’m a bit mixed on the reputation this left. I might be a bit more hesitant, but I thought Fielder generally did very well acting-wise.
I had no issues with Nathan the actor. It’s with Nathan/Safdie as writers of the narrative, largely due to this ending.
The one thing I learned from The Curse is always have small bills.
For a moment there, I thought this comment said, “always have small balls.”
Cherry tomato boys
It was a bold choice, and, unequivocally, a bad choice.9 episodes of expert tension-building, more or less grounded in the “real” world, only to squander it all with a literal flight of fancy? I’ve seen Twin Peaks comparisons elsewhere, but they’re misguided. TP played with magic from the outset. This is just the lazy contrivance of writers who couldn’t cross the finish line.Ep. 1-9 best series of the year though, not sarcastic I loved it.
I have the opposite opinion.This should have been the first or second episode, not the last. Imagine the entire season either about a series of ever more surreal and unpredictable events, or about him having to deal with his antigravity curse.
(That’s not “the opposite opinion” at all. You are saying the same thing, albeit in a more confused, clumsy way.)
The supernatural stuff in Twin Peaks isn’t presented as supernatural until either the end of the first season or the beginning of the second. It’s all referred to as dreams
It’s not really an issue of whether or not it’s supernatural so much as how these events fit into the rest of the show. In Twin Peaks, things like accepting dream logic, identical cousins, visions, etc. are all treated as just another quirk among many quirks, so there’s less of a leap of logic needed when some batshit stuff happens later.The Curse was mostly grounded throughout. Sometimes the show even went out of its way to logically explain some of the things (i.e., the initial curse itself having more to do with Asher’s superstitions and coincidence). When it throws all that out the window at the end, it felt like the ending wasn’t something set up beforehand.
I think the mistake was not allowing the original chicken-based curse to grow from something explainable by coincidence (the missing chicken from a ready meal), through something explainable by a prank (the raw chicken left in the bathroom) into something that is almost impossible to explain naturally as a prank, coincidence, or paranoia, but not quite — slowly open the door to the curse being real but leave but only to the point where you can look back on events at the end of the season to see that it must have been real.Then, just chuck in a throwaway line for the girl to say to Asher when he’s pestering her about the chicken curse, something like “Go fly away!” and you have all you need to earn the ending.
I feel like when the power at the fire station went out *just* as Asher was about to see whether Dougie handed Tonya something in the CC video was supernatural. Yes, one of the firefighters threw out a line blaming it on the solar power generator, but at that moment?I know I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, but to me it all comes back to how the whole show was shot like a horror movie, with creepy shots and unsettling sound design (especially the scene where a chiropractor worked on Bashir). All of that primed me as a viewer to expect something weird to happen at any time.I’ve never seen Twin Peaks, but I know that it ran for multiple seasons (including the revival on Showtime), whereas I don’t get the impression The Curse was intended to last for more than one season. Twin Peaks was also from a very different era of television, where it wasn’t easy to rewatch previous episodes, but the network still wanted viewers who hadn’t seen earlier episodes to jump onboard anyway. I don’t think The Curse is the kind of show you could start halfway through and watch until the end, and I think the way it’s written and paced reflects that it’s a limited series in the streaming age.
I get what you mean in terms of the show having horror-like shots, I just think that approach was consistently undercut that intention by basically giving alternate explanations. Or if not “undercut”, at least presented the ideas in a way that was much more grounded while still adding tension to the scenes. Like there’s consistent themes of putting on a face for others for personal gain, even when couched as altruistic intentions, yet also fearing losing control and being the manipulated person. This shows up in all the “curse” scenes and more explicitly in the Whitney/Cara scenes. But where all this is grounded, the ending felt like it leaned too hard into metaphorical territory.. Twin Peaks may not have been written as a limited series (though its revival was), but it was still largely a serialized show that’s not much different from most modern shows. Twin Peaks having consistent moments of absurdity meant the show worked better when it really went off the deep end, where The Curse’s last hour mostly felt like a totally different show.
I interpreted all of the grounded/alternate explanations as the characters reassuring themselves, not the writers telling the audience that the grounded explanation was always right. In real life, there is no non-diegetic music telling us how to feel, and everything we see is from our own perspective, and that’s how I thought all of the characters behaved throughout the show. Everyone is constantly explaining away things that might be supernatural to themselves. That continues all the way to the last episode, where Asher at first thinks the air pressure in the house is to blame, and later when he’s finally hurled into the sky, onlookers dismiss it as, “It’s for TV.” I think Fielder & Safdie withheld things that were overtly and unquestionably supernatural until the end because it was more interesting to watch the characters grapple with not knowing for sure. I enjoyed not knowing for sure.I’m sure there was a way for Fielder/Safdie to get their points across without literally reversing gravity, so I’m not saying, “If you didn’t like the ending, it’s because you didn’t get it!!!” Maybe Fielder/Safdie should have communicated to the audience that the supernatural was real before the characters knew so that the ending would not feel like a totally different show. Maybe Asher should have delivered the line (paraphrasing), “Sometimes you have to go extreme with your art to make your point” in an earlier episode. All this to say, the finale worked for me, but I do understand where you’re coming from, and why it didn’t work for you and other people. I just enjoy talking about it; not trying to start an argument (which I feel like is an unfortunately necessary disclaimer for the AV Club comments section these days *sigh*).Fair point about Twin Peaks. It says a lot about me that I enjoyed The Curse for exactly what it is, but I generally don’t enjoy David Lynch’s dream logic. Severance was another recent show that had moments of absurdism and non-sequitors that ended up frustrating me more than intriguing me. (I loved Atlanta though)
To me it the whole thing was somewhat ruined by Asher’s inability to save himself. He could have demonstrated to the rescuers that he was being pulled upward. Let go with your legs/arms and show them that something weird was happening when his body went up, not down? I mean I KNOW that it’s not the point of this madly surreal scene but it was so illogical. Two rescuers saw him with his body up in the air, not touching the branch, his arms and legs holding on below it, and they’re just “OK buddy whatevs”? Just write the scene differently and the problem goes away. They pull the branch from below or chop it off much further away and can’t hear him. The branch cracks under the weight of him and their ladder. He gets tied so tightly to the branch that they can’t clearly see that he’s floating above it. Anything.
Asher’s inability to save himself.I’ve not seen the show, but maybe that’s the point? I know some people who have easily recognizable issues that even they are aware of, but they just can’t fix them.
The firefighters conducting the final rescue would rightly have dismissed any chance that what Asher or the witnesses told them about him flying upwards into the air as impossible, and would have completely ignore it as crazy talk.
I’ve thought about that, and I’m not convinced that it would have been worth it. Asher would be sacrificing his firm grip on the branch to show his legs dangle in the air, and run the risk that the firefighters dismiss it as him just stretching his lower body into the sky. To really show that gravity is pulling him into the sky, he would have to almost let go of the branch. I know the stakes are absurdly high for Asher, so it’s easy to say, “Well he should have done that then” but he had been up in that tree for a while. If I was in the same situation, I don’t know that I would’ve risked my grasp on the branch.(I know I wouldn’t, because I have basically no upper body strength and am sure I wouldn’t have been able to pull my legs back to the branch)
In a series that was so often cruel to its characters, the finale was simply cruel to the audience.
How are we still processing The Curse finale?Just repeat to yourself it’s just a show, I should really just relax.
Sure, but the most memorable movies I have seen over the last few years were the ones that elicited the most interesting conversations with the friends I saw them with. One such movie was Aronofsky Mother! which made very little sense to me as I watched it, but figuring it out afterwards with my friends was a lot of fun. And just last week we saw The Zone of Interest which, again, prompted a long discussion over dinner after.I don’t think this episode is worthy of such discussion, but processing a movie or show after the fact can sometimes be more fun than watching it.
Commenters have compared the episode with Twin Peaks and The Leftovers, but as others have pointed out, they were shows that incorporated a fantastical element from the outset, and subsequently developed it.I would argue that a comparison with Fargo (especially the latest season) and Atlanta was more appropriate, and frankly, while I’m very much a fan of bizarre, fantastical twists, I don’t think this one landed as well as those shows did it.Fargo’s are background elements that, in the end, do not significantly affect the plot or fate of the main characters. Atlanta used theirs to skewer audience’s expectations and for the purpose of biting political satire. I don’t think The Curse did anything like that.
There’s also the problem that Whitney and Asher are fundamentally unlikeable characters with few redeeming qualities. That works for the rest of the season, but since we’re not supposed to care what happens to them, I found myself not caring what happens to them as a result of this bizarre twist.In the end, all I could think was “Hey, they stole my idea!” but that’s because, perhaps thirty years ago I had the idea for a children’s episodic novel where a young boy buys candy from a mysterious candy store he’s never noticed before and after trying the first piece at bedtime, he — you guessed it — wakes up on the ceiling! Just like for Asher, gravity is reversed for him and the rest of the chapter is about what happens before the effect of the candy wears off.The rest of the book would have been about the other bizarrely wonderous but inconvenient things that happened to him after eating the rest of the candy, but I never developed the idea beyond that first “upside down” chapter. Ah well, I had my chance…
Whitney was pretty unlikable, but in the end Asher felt like a very tragic character. He’s clearly been bullied and struggled to fit in his entire life (judging from his dialogue with Dougie) and he struck me as the only character committed to changing himself. I’ve seen some people criticize him for only trying to be a better person to please his wife, which overlooks the fact that he is trying to be a better spouse. And in the second to last episode, he admits that his efforts to be a good person have been hollow, identifies why, and reaffirms his commitment to being a better person. And Abshir got a house out of it.There’s plenty to criticize Whitney’s self-serving altruism for, but I feel like Asher manages to do some genuinely good things out of his devotion for her. I’m not sure what makes him a fundamentally unlikable character.
I don’t think the ending existed to teach Asher a lesson, but was to portray co-dependancy & the effects it has when someone losses their identity by being dependant on someone else & how the other person doesn’t really care or respect their co-dependant half, but more enjoys holding court over them until they run out of use for this person.Whitney made it clear she didn’t respect Asher & didn’t love him. She even went as far as having him watch the deleted cuts of “Green Queen” to really cut him deep believing it was the only way to get to him in order to divorce. The issue is he doubled down proving he has no self worth. He’s like a jester living solely to serve his Queen. It’s SIMPly who Asher is. The same reason he is a cuck invisioning other men sleeping with his wife. Asher gets off on feeling he is better looking & better in general than these men he imagines with his wife. This is based purely off his self created ideolgy that Whitney is a Goddess among us & if she married him he MUST be better than others. It’s why Asher is so dedicated to keep his marriage & why he always shows a blind eye towards anything which clearly would prove Whitney is not the most beautiful, kind, loving & caring person. If Whitney isn’t this archetype of an amazing superior Queen who Asher feels blessed to SIMPly be with her than Asher is nothing at all. It’s the same reason why he was in denial about Dougie bullying him as a child. To Asher he HAD to view being a bullied loser w/ no friends as being the fun guy busting balls WITH his FRIENDS because he can’t accept reality. Asher chooses to live in denial over confronting reality where he can change himself or his situation for the better. Asher confirmed this is who he is now multiple times: ¹when Dougie spoke to him about their show & how Whitney controlling it essentially was making it solely her show, Ash SIMPly said get use to it, ²Dougie had a heart to heart w/ Ash saying to him how he knows the real Ash isn’t this super nice caring guy, but Asher distanced himself from Dougie ruining their fun night out together by insinuating Dougie got his wife killed, ³In a mental breakdown type reaction Asher pleadged to Whitney how he will serve her perfectly better than anyone ever could or he would disappear without her even having to tell him to leave. Asher grounded himself by holding onto all the facades he created clinging to his lies. The one time he was truly not delusinal by truthfully explaining he is holding on to a branch as the only means to stay grounded to Earth it was too late. No one believed the baby man constantly crying wolf. Everyone felt Asher was lying as usual, until he literally was cut from the branch he clung onto & disappeared into oblivion. Ironically, it was the same time his baby was being cut out of his wives belly by C-section. Whitney constantly sought approval from complete strangers obsessively attempting to portray a false image of herself. She usually came up short being unsuccessful in portraying her persona to everyone except to her husband. Talk about irony, one of the few people who she didn’t want to see her as her televised persona was Asher, so Whitney ended up dreading him for not knowing who she really was. She even snapped because of this mocking him for being such a good guy leaving Asher looking shocked & dumbfounded. In the end Whitney had no use for Asher as a husband after stabalizing her TV series & ultimately her baby being born. Her baby boy can now fill the role Asher had in being dependant off of her which gives Whitney the power to feel like a Queen.
Thought this show was so stupid. Did not hold your interest.