The Curse season 1 finale: Oh. My. God.
Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie cook up a masterful, jaw-dropping ending
TV Reviews The Curse
Let me get this out of the way first: OMG!
I know I’m supposed to offer cogent if not outright literate reactions to what happens in every episode of Showtime’s most deliriously absurd home-reno satire but there really are no words to describe the way my jaw dropped to the floor when… okay, maybe I should recap the start of the episode a bit before we dig into THAT moment—even if said moment all but took over the very course of the series’ entire sensibility, archly amplifying its blunt metaphors, and thrusting us into that rare supernatural territory we kept being told would be kept at bay by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s discomfiting comedy chops.
Okay, so where to begin if not with the absurdity that is Asher being pulled by a force that sucks him upwards?
Well, with the absurdity that is daytime television, of course. Which is where “Green Queen” begins, with Whitney and Asher remotely being interviewed about the first season of their show. It’s a rather muted and uneventful appearance—proof, perhaps, that their show hasn’t quite hit zeitgeist status. And that their on-camera appearances have, maybe, been hampered by Whitney’s pregnancy. Oh yeah, surprise! We’ve clearly flash forwarded and now live in a world where all the season has been shot, produced, and aired but also one where (mid-pandemic, it seems, to gather from those masked audience and crew members) Whitney and Asher (Emma Stone and Fielder) are ready to welcome a new addition to the Siegel family.
In the meantime, it sounds like Questa Lane has finally been finished, and, rather than sell it to another interested buyer in passive homes or the like, Asher has decided (in true Asher form) to gift it to Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) and his two daughters…as a gift, really, for Whitney (namely as a token of his goodness and his generosity). She loves it, of course—though, maybe a tad less when, in giving Abshir the keys to the house (and some clay nesting dolls from the Pueblo people, obviously), the Siegels don’t get the effusive, video-ready reaction they’d hoped for. Instead, they get very pragmatic (if slightly sketchy) questions about property taxes and fund-transfers queries. As ever with these two, their own good intentions are colored by a misguided narcissism that makes even their good deeds feel fueled by a sense of self-satisfaction more than anything else.
Which is to say: One season in and neither has learned much about themselves. Or, maybe Asher has? He does seem to be a devoted father-to-be. But Whitney? Jury’s still out. Seeing her exasperation at Asher and her indecipherable Mona Lisa-like visage as he lays alongside her reveals little about how she’s feeling about this life she’s created for herself—which has required, apparently, retrofitting certain parts of the house lest the changes in air pressure proof fatal for their soon-to-be-born child.
And it’s that air-pressure foible which initially seems to concern the two of them when they awake to find…Asher sleeping in the ceiling. Yes. You read that right. “Ash, why are you up there?” is almost much too quaint of a question but that’s the only thing a very visibly pregnant Whitney asks as she awakes to find him asleep right above her.
The issue does not, of course, have anything to do with the house’s air pressure. It’s something much more elemental. Or maybe supernatural. Is it the curse again? Or some other nightmarish circumstance coming to haunt the Siegels?
The eeriness of this entire situation is tempered by the very matter-of-fact way Fielder directs these scenes. There’s a magical realism to how Asher and Whitney both tackle this problem. Both remain remarkably calm about it even when it soon dawns on them that there is something pulling Asher upwards—an anti-gravitational force that will require him to stay tethered to the ground unless he floats away into the atmosphere.
To top it all of (and following the TV rule wherein any visibly pregnant woman will undoubtedly give birth on a season finale), Whitney goes into labor as she tries to help Asher get down from their ceiling. It’s why it all comes down to Dougie as Asher, now stuck clinging to a tree following an unsuccessful help from Whitney’s doula, tries desperately to get the fire department to believe that he’s not afraid he’ll fall down but that, instead, he’ll fall up. That no one takes him seriously—and that Dougie tries to milk this for season-two production—is not surprising but not for that any less terrifying. We know he’s not lying but neither Dougie nor the firefighters take him at his word. It makes those final minutes, especially when a firefighter starts off sawing off the branch he’s clinging to for dear life, feel excruciating.
For much of The Curse, we’ve been conditioned to see Asher’s anxiety about that titular “curse” as absurd. And here now, when a force bigger than him is clearly putting him in danger, we cannot help but be aghast, unclear what has happened to this world we thought we knew the rules to. And so we watch, almost in real time, as it slowly dawns on him that he has no way of clinging to what he knows and loves. Not to his home nor to his wife. Not to the house he’s built with Whitney nor to the life he’s created with and for her. Fielder’s cringey desperation, so often used for comedic purposes for much of The Curse, here becomes tragically tinged. The inevitability of what’s going to happen is enough to finally make us root for a guy who would, perhaps, make a great and doting father.
As the montage that closes the episode cuts between Asher falling upwards right out into space, Whitney giving birth to a healthy baby, and Dougie at a loss for what he just witnessed, The Curse goes out not with a bang, but with a whimper. Still, it’s one that feels so weighted with emotion that it’s hard to ignore—and harder still to shake off. What a masterful ending, truly. One that equally exaggerated the surreal world Safdie and Fielder (and Stone, in turn) had created and yet stayed true to it. All of Asher’s anxieties seemed to materialize into the kind of fear he could feel yet couldn’t very well convince anyone else was actually there. In the end, he was a tragic figure trapped in a comedy whose sense of humor he could never grasp.
Where does The Curse go from here? I have no idea and for that I’m thrillingly thankful. At every turn the show has zagged where I expected it to zig, and I would love nothing more than to be rewarded with another similarly bonkers season two as the “Green Queen” tackles its own season-two production. Asher-less, of course.
Stray observations
- Rachael Ray! Even while going out on a surrealist high, The Curse saw fit to open its final season-one episode with an ode to the absurdity that is daytime television. Where else do you see such tonal whiplash as you move from cringe eco-friendly banter (“I don’t know if I could live in a thermos!” is just a perfect line, no?) to talk of meatballs and right back around?
- Cara being profiled in The New York Times for “quitting art” (or, more likely, for getting fed up with the art world) is a perfect throwaway moment—especially as delivered by Whitney who says it with jealousy with no sense of irony.
- Fielder’s Asher trying to give a home-made TED talk on comedy, The Producers, and trauma-in-art (“art is about, really art is about, um, I mean sometimes you have to go to extreme lengths to make your point”) was amazing to witness, if only for the ridiculousness of his inability to string any one sentence (or thought!) together for Whitney’s benefit.
- Can we talk about the “Made in China” dreamcatcher Whitney almost gets gifted? Perfection.
- Best line of the episode: Dougie’s nonsensical “My dad did the same thing. I mean he didn’t climb up a tree. He just left” or Abshir’s deadpan response to whether he’s crying, “No, it’s dust”?
- Watching this episode made me think of a short film titled “The Karman Line” (starring none other than Olivia Colman) about a woman who very slowly starts floating upwards toward that moment when she’ll no longer survive high up above. It’s a lovely complement to Asher’s more violent and desperate flight (and fight) but a curious companion piece nonetheless.
- Speaking of: Let’s give a hand to Fielder, who directed this episode and who truly grounded this high-concept conceit and kept it focused on the interpersonal anxieties that have characterized The Curse’s entire first season. I particularly love the way he shot the Asher/Abshir/Whitney interaction, using framing to constantly show the chasm between these characters, with doorframes constantly severing whatever visual connections we could make between couple and tenant. But the entire latter part of the episode felt play-like, what with its focus on one location and one disconcerting Sartrean premise. In that way, “Green Queen” feels like the best kind of season finale The Curse could’ve offered us, with the space Whitney and Asher had so curated serving as the epicenter of a nightmarish culmination of everything they’ve ever feared. A home not as respite or as haven but as a cursed space that drove them both out and away. Thrilling all around.
Stream season one of The Curse now on Paramount+.
126 Comments
What. The. Fuck.
Hear, hear.
I have no idea what to make of that yet. I’m sure there’s some meaning I’m not grasping. Was the curse real? Is there some mythological parallel to this I’m not aware of? Mostly, what the hell did I just watch? I did note that Asher left Earth at the same moment the baby was being delivered, so I did have a line that “I guess the universe only has room for one baby for Whitney to take care of.”My reaction can be summed up with Simpsons images:
100% agree on feeling like there’s some mythological parallel that I’m missing! Especially with the heavy focus on Asher’s Judaism in this episode. There were some think pieces about how The Rehearsal should be viewed through that lens, and Judaism is a big theme in Benny Safdie’s work as well.But also… I thought I was the only one that had nightmares about being the only person who gravity was turned upside-down for and how terrified I would be to step outside. So again, is there some larger, shared fear that Fielder and Safdie were tapping into? I must know!Finally, I can’t say whether the curse was real or not, but I want to say yes, because I think genre/nerd blogs really slept on this show. I’ve ranted about this before, but for all the whinging sites like io9 do about how genre fiction is looked down on, a lot of genre fans refuse to admit they do a lot of gatekeeping themselves. I want the curse to be real just so I can say, “Well here’s a show with a supernatural element that was super original, with complex characters, that actually had something to say and y’all ignored it because it’s set in Española, New Mexico instead of Westeros or whatever.” But I digress – everyone is sleeping on this show.
I don’t know all the think pieces or theories about The Rehearsal, but I remember having the idea myself that the show paralleled the book of Genesis in some ways, but I can’t remember off the top of my head what those are beyond “man” and “woman” being the first and second episodes. (Maybe the Fielder Method is creating the rest of the people. And it’s probably worth noting that Nathan and Angela’s rehearsal son is named Adam.)Anyway, I’ve been trying to figure out what the ending means and why Fielder/Safdie chose it. Maybe the curse is real. As I mentioned in another comment, maybe there’s a parallel between the Green Queen pushing out her baby and Mother Earth pushing out Asher at the same time. (In some ways, the person Asher had become is very much Whitney’s creation.) But, still, I don’t know what it means, I don’t have an answer to whether the curse is real, I don’t feel like I understand what the theme they’re going for was— even if my parallel there is intentional and correct, I don’t know what they’re trying to say with it or what its significance is. By the time this episode came around, I had figured that the “curse” was really a way to start breaking down the facades Asher and Whitney had put up about themselves, both as a couple and individually. And then that happens.I don’t think I’ve seen such a bizarre left-turn in a finale since Twin Peaks: The Return— and even there, there were a ton of supernatural elements already established. Whereas here, the curse may only be in Asher’s mind, a reflection of his fears about himself… and then the planet ejects him.
I think the show is saying something about how the world doesn’t want people like Asher, who out of the three leads seems to be the only one who genuinely wants to be good and puts in the work to be a better person, whereas Dougie and Whitney are ultimately more concerned with appearing good than doing good. Or it might be about the world rejecting cringe-y men with micro-penises. There are multiple ways to read it! Tangent: I watched a Q&A on YouTube with Benny, Nathan, Emma (and a couple others) after a screening of the 8th and 9th episode, and Benny asked the audience who thinks Whitney is bad. It was hard to tell because the camera wasn’t on the audience (it was a show of hands), but it seemed like most people thought she was a bad person because her good deeds are performative, and Benny asked, “Well what about the things she does when no one is around to see them?” And as someone who leans utilitarian ethically, I do feel that people are too quick to dismiss Whitney’s good deeds. I don’t think we’re ever supposed to know how much of what she does is altruistic, and how much is self-serving. But I think the people that come down on the side of “It’s all self-serving” are missing a point the show is trying to make. “Doing good” is not black and white. It’s hard. It’s nuanced. And regardless the authenticity of those motivations and intentions, what’s good for one person may be harmful for someone else.
Asher only decided to try to be a better person to keep Whitney from leaving him, though
It’s normal to need a wake-up call that you need to do better. The question is what you do next.
Agreed but the good deeds he does are completely to satiate Whitney so she won’t leave him
In the last episode he said if not being with her would be the best thing for her that she wouldn’t have to tell him. He’d just be gone. He’s not really doing good to keep her from leaving, he’s doing it to make her happy. He worships her. So maybe the show is commenting on people who only do good to make God happy.
Hell, maybe in some way Whitney really only needed Asher to get Green Queen established and have a baby, and once that was done, the universe sent him on his way.
I didn’t understand that myself it seemed improvised and kinda incoherent. If anything it read to me like he was just a more exaggerated version of what he was before ie still putting her on a pedestal but manically to the point he almost scared her into staying. That would explain the, “That’s a good girl.” too.
I think the reason people read Whitney as bad, despite her good deeds public and private, is because she’s a fair-weather philanthropist who’ll stop the second she finds something else to puff up her self-image. Her good deeds don’t have any foundation in actual concern for others so she can’t be depended upon. It all feels like a powder keg that just hasn’t gone off quite yet.
I feel like that reading does a disservice to the show. For one, we never see her completely abandon her philanthropy because she found something else to puff up her self-image. And if she did stop doing good deeds, I’m not clear on how that would undo whatever good she did. I think it also does a disservice to the writing and Emma Stone’s performance. She is deliberately hard to read, so to come down on the side of “She’s DEFINITELY bad because she’s DEFINITELY doing things for selfish reasons” – to me – throws all of the nuance in Stone’s performance into outer space. Because the reality is probably that she’s a lot like most of us: not 100% good, not 100% bad, just someone trying to get through life.TBH, I think the reason people read Whitney as bad is because of the preconceived assumptions and expectations that viewers project onto her, and this show is about how those assumptions and expectations add stress and tension to the smallest of interactions. They’re not coming from a bad place; past experiences shape our future expectations. IMO anyway.
She went to a small town specifically to gentrify it with super expensive homes that she knew weren’t safe for her own baby
I don’t think she knew that the homes wouldn’t be safe for her baby when she built them. I’m not saying she’s a good person. I just think the writing and Emma’s performance convey complexity behind Whitney’s actions to me. There’s deliberate ambiguity. I love it.
At some point she became aware that those homes are potentially bad for infants and the show gave no indication that she was going to stop selling them
It didn’t confirm that she would continue selling them either. Ambiguity.
That’s a pretty enormous character detail to just not address
That first part is interesting, because I also think Whitney was right when she says that Asher wouldn’t be doing anything good if it wasn’t for her. So even if Asher is sincerely putting in the effort, in some ways he is Whitney’s creation. Another friend of mine suggested Asher left the planet because he had become so much of another person in his efforts to please Whitney that there was nothing left of Asher himself to tether him to our world, which is an interesting thought, at least.Whitney is definitely concerned with appearing good, but per your comments on the Q&A, I don’t think it’s entirely self-serving— or if it is, Whitney’s not aware it is. (I don’t really remember “the things she does when no one is around to see them,” though.) And I never much got the impression that Dougie cared about being or appearing good, so much as finding a way to live with himself and what he’d done in the past.I do agree it’s nuanced and that’s what makes these characters so compelling. Especially in the sense I think of when talking about classic tragedy (like, this is something Aristotle wrote about)— the tragic hero must be neither too good or too bad, and their good and bad qualities must be intertwined with one another. Whitney’s sincere desire to build eco-friendly living is intertwined with the Siegels’ need to profit on their Española investments. Her good deeds are intertwined with her cluelessness about how they’ll be received and her white-savior complex. And so forth.
Her good deeds are shown to have negative consequences mainly because of her self-absorption, short sightedness and performative nature. She pays for the jeans and that leads to gangsters showing up to take advantage which ends up upsetting and leading to the unemployment of the first person they “helped” at the beginning of the show.Her parents point out that she’s driving the residents of Espanola into the projects they and they’re friends run with the gentrification. Even the actor buyers on their show were “from NYC.” One person who bought a house from them didn’t care about their passive house ideals and the one guy who did care about it (Dean Cain kinda playing himself?) was harshly and unfairly pre-judged by her.I question what good she did and if she is good at all. Even how she treats Asher is reprehensible she’s almost using him as her pet Jew which goes against her parents teaching her nothing. That could also explain her wanting to make passive houses too she sees it as a way to rebel against her parents who she also has no problem taking dirty money from. It seemed like at least part of her relationship with Asher was about using him to experience another culture/religion to seem world and open minded when she’s really not.
I don’t read it the same way. I think short sightedness is responsible for most of the negative consequences – far more than self absorption – but I don’t think being short sighted makes her a bad person. I think there’s a presumption that she wouldn’t be short sighted if she wasn’t doing things for performative reasons that I don’t agree with.I don’t think she’s a good person either. I think she’s a person who does some bad things and some good things.
I think there’s a presumption that she wouldn’t be short sighted if she wasn’t doing things for performative reasons
Her fuck ups are due to her shortsightedness, but it’s her need to be the savior that keeps her from stepping back once her mistakes become clear. That motivation is the reason she’s not going to stop until Española is gentrified to hell.Remember when those Thai children were trapped in that underwater cave? Plenty of good people worked together with experts and did everything they could to ensure an effective rescue, and one notable asshole blustered in with a useless submarine that wasted everyone’s precious time. Whitney ain’t quite Musk, but people are suspicious of self-serving “philanthropists” for a reason.
And yeah, ultimately she’s still a mixture of good and bad, and Emma Stone has done a phenomenal job adding as much texture to that as possible, making for a very interesting discussion. But with discussion and texture come varying perspectives, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone coming down to a personal conclusion while acknowledging the complexity of the material.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone coming down to a personal conclusion while acknowledging the complexity of the material.
That’s completely fair.
Yes, I definitely think there’s something to Asher being Whitney’s frankenstein monster. I think that partially plays into the theme of mirrors and warped reflections. Asher was a warped reflection of Whitney, he was almost a genuine version of what she wanted to be (genuine in that he committed to it fully by the end of the season as opposed to her where her commitment is only to her own self-image – so not truly genuine). I think it’s telling that Asher says he’s staying because he knows she still wants him there but if that ever changes she won’t even have to tell him he will just go. And go he did.
I mean there’s a lot of evidence that points to her never wanting him there and only once she got the most base thing from him his seed and baby he left. She seemed to be caught in a trap of her acting out against her parents in various ways ie seeking religion when her parents didn’t provide it and essentially rebeling against them by trying to be a good planet conscious landlord which only ended up gentrifying the town and sending its residents to her parents rentals.
I mean there was unexplained possibly supernatural elements before then the chicken at the fire station for one.
Yeah, but those were just hints that could have been reasonably explained without the supernatural, whereas this was far more blatant. By the time of The Return finale, Twin Peaks had already had the White Lodge / Black Lodge, everything in episode 8, that creature that crashes through the box and shreds the two youngsters, etc. So the presence of even more alternate realities and/or timelines were not a big surprise there. Whereas this finale was far above and beyond what we had seen before.
Oh yeah it was different on another level but there was hints. Twin Peaks over its three seasons and a movie has had way more runtime and alot of what was going on early in its run could have just been Cooper having weird dreams. If I remember correctly his first vision with the Giant/Fireman happened when he was shot too so at that point it wasn’t clear of he wasn’t just hallucinating from blood loss and based the Giant on the doorman who slowly made his way through Coop’s room in a very delightful scene.
I have that fear too. I mean it’s not something I worry about but I’ve had dreams, and reading this story freaks me out:https://culturacolectiva.com/en/history/ewa-wisnierska-woman-survived-paragliding-huge-storm/(I don’t know that I’ve read that exact article before, but it seems like the story I’m thinking of)
By this logic Frosted Flakes should be called “Rat Droppings Flakes”. There’s a difference between “gatekeeping” and “expecting genre material to contain genre”. I’m happy to read that the finale has a healthy amount of weirdness but that’s hardly grounds to complain that genre fans have “slept on” this show.
…I’m not following the logic, but I’ll cop to having a lot of thoughts swirling through my head that I then expressed poorly. It was a bad straw man argument anyway.
I really have trouble understanding why people, like you, read reviews of shows they haven’t watched, then venture through the comment section to discuss said show they haven’t even watched yet.Fucking bizarre if you ask me.
….wut? This isn’t a genre show like the others you mention in any way, shape, or form. Having one bizarre scene at the tail end of the season does not magically transform the entire series into a goddamn sci-fi or fantasy show. GoT had fantasy elements from the jump. This was a show about things like gentrification and flipping houses for 99.9% of its duration, with one bizarre/ supernatural scene at the very end. Claiming that people who like fantasy and sci-fi are being disingenuous or something for not being all over and/or covering this series about a home renovation show from day one is just silly.What a bizarre, irrelevant, and utterly pointless thing to complain about…
“Genre” isn’t just sci-fi and fantasy. It’s also horror (it’s also apparently whatever the hell Cobra Kai is since io9 covers that show), and the show has had tonal elements of horror throughout since the first episode. Not to mention that the name of the show is literally “The Curse.” Curses are supernatural. We weren’t sure whether the curse was literal or not until the end, but that’s also the case for movies like Sound of My Voice and Safety Not Guaranteed. It doesn’t mean they’re not “genre.”It’s not “one bizarre / supernatural scene” either. It’s more than half of the episode. And there were other bizarre, unexplained things throughout the show; they just weren’t unquestionably supernatural. This isn’t a genre show like the others you mention in any way, shape, or form.I only mentioned The Rehearsal and referenced Game of Thrones. I’m pretty sure you don’t think The Rehearsal is a genre show; what other shows are you talking about?This was a show about things like gentrification and flipping houses for 99.9% of its duration“Things like” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. The “flipping houses” in particular is such a small part of the show, both in terms of the plot and thematically.Claiming that people who like fantasy and sci-fi are being disingenuousI did not claim that. I was making a dumb, straw man argument. You don’t have to make up things I didn’t say to criticize it. That’s such a disingenuous thing to do.
Hahahahaha.
That pretty much sums it up.
Emma Stone was at the Suns game tonight. She had to leave a little early. Maybe she had to get to a watch party so she could watch peoples’ faces when this episode dropped.
There’s a safety line that at least one of the firefighters clips to. You’d think they’d belt up Asher and clip him to it. I feel like I’m being pedantic, but it looked like they went out of their way to show at least the last woman clipping herself to it.And how long before Abshir sells that hose.If it’s really worth $300K now, Asher really is good at flipping houses.And can there be a S2? Where do you possibly go from here?
I’m getting “if there’s a season 2, it’s going to be about a completely new group of people” vibes.
It was completely obvious that no one but the two people that witnessed him falling upward, Whitney and her doula, believed a single word that Ash was saying about his predicament (which makes complete sense, as it was absolutely bonkers and had no grounding to anything that has ever happened on this planet).
The neighbors witnessed him falling up, they just assumed it was part of a movie or something, cause yeah, it’s bonkers.
Dougie and his cameraman believe it. They chased him with a drone.I don’t remember them showing what the firefighters thought, but they saw it.
I was referring to when he was stuck in the tree. The only witnesses to what led to that were Whitney and her doula. I most definitely wasn’t trying to say that no one saw him go from the tree to falling upward in to open space.
Oops, I see what you mean now.
They wanted him to fall though so why would they clip him to anything and frustrate that?
At the end they wanted him to fall, but at first they just wanted him to walk down the ladder, and I think I’ve seen them put safety belts on people to do that.
I kept wondering why he didn’t wriggle his body to the underside of the branch, so he’d be “on” it, instead of desperately “hanging from” it…
Me too. I figured he was maybe too tired by then, or not have the strength to begin with, or too freaked out to think of it. He could have also showed the firefighters what he was dealing with if he could just stay there under the branch no hands.
You’d have thought he’d have learned to crawl, or even walk, across his ceiling a lot faster than he did.
There’s a safety line that at least one of the firefighters clips to. You’d think they’d belt up Asher and clip him to it.
People not listening to the people they’re trying to help and hurting them in the process is a core theme of the show.
People not listening to the people they’re trying to help and hurting them in the process is a core theme of the show.Great point. That pretty much sums it up.
This is all the explanation needed to make the ending jibe with the rest of the series. Well done!
Safdie and Fielder probably howled in the edit for all 10 episodes. They successfully parodied a whole tone of prestige, and elevated film making. Asher’s attempt at taking apart The Producers was the final nod I needed to know the whole thing was a joke. It’s a masterwork! An incredible satire, making something that looked, and felt like it meant something. Purposefully obtuse, with breadcrumbs that lead in circles. Using rote, and pretentious camera work, in hilarious ways, that wouldn’t feel out of place in a freshman film class, with people nodding along “this means something.”It’s one hilarious, incredibly mean spirited piece. Bravo to them. The Andy Kaufman tv interference writ large across 10 episodes of television. Brazenly telling the audience fuck you, entertainment is destroying your brains. Loved it.
Gonna need some time to process this one. My initial thoughts on the second half are that I’m unsure about it as the ending to the show we’ve been watching these past several weeks, but that I loved it as just a very funny, unsettling, and well-made series of scenes.Seen a few people treating it as just an unsatisfying non-sequitur but I found it to be a representation of Whitney’s rejection of Asher, her clearly still kinda disliking him but suppressing it so hard since the commitment he displayed at the end of the last episode that it came out in this wild physical sensation of literally pushing him away from the earth. This may not be correct at all of course, but it works well for me.
Interesting– as the Green Queen pushes out her baby, Mother Earth pushes out Asher.
Plus earlier in the episode the baby was the wrong way in her womb and they said it’d straighten out in time for the birth. So there’s a parallel there with Asher literally the wrong way inside the house when her labor starts and he struggles to escape the house like the baby struggles to escape her womb and both aren’t free until they are both cut loose. One via the saw and to his death and one via a scalpel to his life.
I think the doctor said there was time for the baby to “Flip”*chef’s kiss*
I guess it works fine when you break down the metaphor, but that same metaphor could have been communicated way easier with way more consistency with what we’ve seen prior. This ending just reeked to me of shock value over all else, “wouldn’t this be crazy?” being at the forefront instead of anything else.
I love this explanation. It’s how I interpret it and similar to the reviewer, I think Asher was trying to cling to Whitney and their life so hard, and so in the last episode he had to literally cling on
Where has it ever been established that a season 2 is coming?? This is the series finale.
Safdie says there are ideas for season 2 and that there’s a lot more to explore in that world, but that it’s too early to confirm anything.
Yeah I think he was bluffing. I saw him say that, and also a cryptic answer he gave at a Q&A at a screening of an earlier episode, but I think that he was maintaining the secrecy of what happens in the finale. I really do think that this is the end and was always intended to be.
How did they do this? Was it all wire work? It felt like watching a magic trick.
The inside stuff was probably just Asher in an upside down room.
Some of it probably was but I don’t think he’d have the level of body control to do all of it and even then it’d still require feet wires at different points. Some of it seemed like safety wires with bungies involved. I’d definitely like a corridor crew video about it or a behind the scenes to know for sure.
That’d make sense if there weren’t two people touching each other several different times while each person experienced opposing gravitational pulls. I’m pretty sure the wire pulls are visible on Fielder at various moments, too. Impressive however it was done.
I think it’s pretty easy to join two shots like that now.As I saw in a different comment, you’d still need wires to contort him into some of those positions, only sometimes they’re pulling in the opposite direction than it looks like.I noticed his hair looked a little like he was upside down sometimes, and I thought does that make sense? If he had long hair, which way should it hang when he was trapped on the ceiling? I think it should hang up towards the ceiling, but we’re in the world of Cursed Physics now.
I thought the exact same thing about his hair, and in turn started looking at his clothes to see if they draped down at all. It’s a testament to how well they pulled it off that we’re even discussing this, especially in 2024 when practically everything has been done already. Genuinely impressive.
Probably a lot of different ways depending on the scene.
When Dougie broke down it felt like confirmation that his curse worked and had something to do with stealing Asher’s gravity.
Been a joy reading the recaps without watching the show!
There is a video on YouTube that directly and blatantly plagiarizes your article. You should do something about that.
youtube is filled with this like this. between that and AI internet is becoming a cultural landfill.
When you said directly, you did not overstate one bit, the ripped off stinking nature of whoever produced this video.
I curse them
Nicely played!
I’m taking that as the curse Dougie put on him after Asher made that unbelievably fucked up comment about Dougie’s wife. I think he even says “what have I done” when he breaks down about Asher flying away
Well, he also was given pretty clear instructions about how to deal with the situation from Asher and ignored them all to film what was going on.
And if Dougie was referring to thinking that he cursed Asher: of course his reaction to a supernatural phenomenon around him would be that he must have caused it.
of course his reaction to a supernatural phenomenon around him would be that he must have caused it.Yeah, if he got hit by a bus or something, that’d be one thing, but compared to just flying off into space for no reason, a curse doesn’t sound so ridiculous any more.
We don’t know what the specifics of Dougie’s curse entailed, but we do know the last thing Nala cursed someone with was to “fall,” which the other girl eventually does.
Asher made the unbelievably fucked up comment about Dougie’s wife after a night (and probably a lifetime) of constant abuse/bullying from Dougie. You can only push people so far. It finally exploded out of him when he couldn’t take it anymore.Plus, Asher probably knows how Dougie’s wife died, so maybe it was time for Dougie to face that.
I like Emma Stone but I tried watching one episode and it was unbearable. Everyone said it’s good! So i tried another episode and still unbearable. Should i try to stick with it? Or if I don’t like the first couple I won’t like the rest?
Probably not tbh
Jesus why subject yourself if you found it unbearable on both attempts? It’s fine, let it go
I think so. It got better and better for me. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s also complex, brilliant, and laugh-out-loud funny.
No. It was unbearable the whole way though.
For me it’s one of those shows that’s good, but you don’t really enjoy watching it. I’m glad I did, but I’m certainly not running out to tell everyone they must see it.
Wow. That was the ending that I desperately needed and never could’ve fucking predicted. I should’ve known better than to think a Safdie/Fielder collab would result in something sane. Not since the glorious Summer/Fall of ‘The Leftovers S3’ & ‘Twin Peaks: TR’, circa 2017, have I been genuinely mesmerized by television like this. The unpredictability of the world, a heretofore very grounded world, literally turning upside down was a mental/emotional minefield that had me alternating between howling laughter and saying “WHAT THE FUCK over and over like some kind of teenage stoner. This show was a gift.
I just want to chime in once more, via this comment upon my comment, to say that my rewatch of the finale has imparted either wisdom or delusion (you decide) —There is an actual curse in this show, true to its namesake, and it’s a collective curse manifested by most of the community of Española: From the beginning of this show, it’s been communicated to us that Asher and Whitney (and Dougie) aren’t good people. The way they treat others is despicable from the outset, exemplified via the journalist situation, Nala, Cara, etc. Then a literal, audible curse is cast (Nala’s). Then another (Dougie’s). To say nothing of the curses probably being cast under everyone’s breath. Even the last ep with the production chick and mover dude, you can almost feel the silent curses being cast; Whitney’s one right before The Elevation may have been what broke the wish-camel’s back. Actions have consequences, thoughts and feelings have consequences, whether we understand them or not. Asher is dead in space or whatever. Whitney will have to go on the rest of her years with his baby. Dougie will probably drink himself to death. It’s all a strange manifestation of karma.And that’s it. That’s my thesis. All I got, folks. Keep watching great fucking tv.
He promised to disappear if Whitney didn’t want to be with him. Did he wish himself away? Being depressed can make a person want to disappear.
I think the girl “cursed” him to go to heaven, after her father told her that Asher and Whitney gifted them the house. She always goes to bed super late, so she probably made this wish during the night. That’s why Asher woke up on the ceiling. She definitely didn’t mean it literally like this.
I get why the ending is… mixed for a lot of people, to say the least, but I really dug it. I feel like the show said everything it had to say about these people at the end of the last episode: it was clear everyone was stuck in their own miserable
little ruts, were incapable of learning what they needed to move forward, and nothing short of divine intervention or an elemental
force was going to knock them out of orbit.
And so it did.I feel like it’ll age pretty well as people have time to sit with it and expectations adjust from “that super awkward show Nathan Fielder’s doing with Benny Safdie and Emma Stone” t0 “that Nathan Fielder show with the weird as fuck ending.”
Is there anything to be gleaned from the fact that the baby turned out to be a girl?
Okay I went back and looked again – the way the hat was folded looked like a bow (which some hospitals use for female babies) but I think it was just a standard hat
A bridge too far in the surrealism dept for this viewer. I don’t like realism that’s magical, either.
This is off the cuff, but this show has been about seeing “outside the box” and how these fake productions appear in real life. The assumptions we as an audience make about these people who we only see in clips and snippets. I thought this especially apparent the previous episode where they watch the cuts; it’s amazing how much better it seemed than the same moments shown previously.
So the last episode was where they took the audience out of our box in a much more meta sense. We go in expecting one this show about a show to be one thing and then have to deal with the fact that our assumptions about their art were so incorrect.
I dunno. Lol…
reminded me of john from cincinnati.
HATED. IT. Whatever meaning or symbolism or attempt at saying something was happening here…betrayed the people who just watched 9 hours of this nonsense. Boring and stupid, this made me rethink all the fun I’ve had with Nathan and all the gritty realism I’ve dug with Benny. Emma, you get a pass, and I’m sorry you got mixed up in all this ultimately meaningless garbage.
the ending felt like the premise of a Quentin Dupieux movie
trying to explain to these firefighters that you can fall upward seems as hard to believe as it is for your average doctor to believe that covid is no joke; that it fucked badly with your health; as it can with anybody’s; and that they should please; pretty fucking please put on an N95, specially when you have to do a breath exam. hu yeah this is definitely familiar.
You’re reaching harder than anyone in this episode
What the fuck did I just watch? I don’t mean that in a bad way but a genuine mind blown what the fuck. I liked basically all of Fielder’s projects but I wasn’t really feeling The Curse that much. So much of the series was just filled with cringey dread and anxiety. It moved slow and you keep waiting for it to go somewhere, but it just gives you more dread, anxiety and awkwardness. Then it hits you with THIS. That was completely wild. I’m not sure if its enough to “save” the show for me, but I’ll definitely be thinking about it a lot and will probably watch it all again just to help fully process whatever happened
I think it is a statement about art, think about the meat in the tent, it’s so abstract that only the artist will ever know the truth, but it envokes something. The meat in the tent person quit, yet they are still discussing them. The show is over and we are still discussing it. In other words, I think they are trolling folks a bit for art. Which would not be outside their realm.
I still like it better than Lynch’s style of trolling for art
Lol at people that think David Lynch is trolling
I was worried I wouldn’t enjoy this because when cringe comedians aren’t working with real people and are scripted it doesn’t usually work. Honestly I didn’t feel any of that uncomfortable third party awkwardness like with Tom Green, Sasha Baron Cohen and Fielder’s earlier work but it did give this show an atmosphere and it had other things going for it unlike say Freddie Got Fingered (which I paid to see in a theater).
I kept thinking, “Ok, one of them’s having a really vivid, scary fucking dream…” which made sense with all the stress they’ve been through… but, nope…
I guess if someone ever gets all high and mighty about how “predictable” shows are these days, you could shut them the fuck up with *this*!!
Damn.
Rewatching the series and in the first episode when Asher gets help with the ATM, the guy who helped is wearing a shirt that says “TURN UP” with an arrow pointing upwards.
I think Abshir knew once the baby was coming Asher would be going via The Curse. That’s why he was so pushy about getting the paperwork done that day.This was a stressful watch. That whole thing is a specific fear of mine. I get freaked out thinking about the lawn chair/weather balloon guy.
This felt so final that I didn’t even consider they could or would make another season.
The series could have just been a short intro and the final episode. The middle was simply boring.
It takes so long to get approval of a comment. Not sure what you need to do to get instant approval? I accidentally used a burner account, but I’m just going to repost. Maybe it’ll get marked as spam?Safdie and Fielder probably howled in the edit for all 10 episodes. They successfully parodied a whole tone of prestige, and elevated film making. Asher’s attempt at taking apart The Producers was the final nod I needed to know the whole thing was a joke. It’s a masterwork! An incredible satire, making something that looked, and felt like it meant something. Purposefully obtuse, with breadcrumbs that lead in circles. Using rote, and pretentious camera work, in hilarious ways, that wouldn’t feel out of place in a freshman film class, with people nodding along “this means something.”It’s one hilarious, incredibly mean spirited piece. Bravo to them. The Andy Kaufman tv interference writ large across 10 episodes of television. Brazenly telling the audience fuck you, entertainment is destroying your brains. Loved it.
yeah, I don’t know about this one… I enjoyed the rest of the series and while I get there probably wouldn’t really be any way to wrap up this show neatly, the big swings for absurdity in this episode would’ve worked a bit better if there were previous touches of that in earlier episodes.
That was some amazing television. Does anyone else think that Freckle’s contractor employee who Asher made him fire might have been the one who did the curse that had him falling up? It’s open-ended and I like it as an unexplained phenomenon separate too but my mind wants to connect it to the show’s title and that interaction was juuust weird and disconnected enough to make me think that was its intention.
is there really a season 2? i assumed this was a limited series.i googled it after posting the above comment. Apparently, Benny Safdie has said “there are ideas” for a season 2 but no decisions have been made regarding its renewal.
It made me want to reread Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist.
That finale sucked. Happy to be one of the few here noticing that the Emperor is naked.
This is just really smug. Just because it didn’t land for you, it doesn’t mean other people are insincere about their appreciation. Get outta here with that arrogance.
or maybe, here’s a thought, you’re just wrong. crazy, i know.
Youre happy that you watched a show you thought sucked while the rest of us were captivated? Ok…
This finale absolutely blew. I loved the series until this episode. What a massive disappointment. The series always played with moments of heightened reality but this went into full-blown fantasy and it did not work. It would have maybe been ok if any of it was interesting fantasy but all everyone did was scream and act annoying. I hated this so much.
I’m two weeks late to this party, but I can’t help thinking of how the previous episode ended when I think of this one: Asher telling Whitney “If one day you don’t need me anymore, I’ll vanish. You won’t even have to say anything, I’ll just feel it and I’ll be gone.” And in this episode, with the birth of their child, Asher vanishes from the Earth itself. I feel like Asher’s intensity when he made that promise was so great that he cursed himself.
Breaking it down: Whitney did not want to have a kid. Her disgust with the idea only grew throughout the first nine episodes of the series. But pressure from the network and Asher seem to have worn her down. A child will absolutely help secure the future of her show, but what the hell does Asher contribute? He’s still a black hole of charisma onscreen. Arguably the main thing he contributed to the marriage in a practical sense was his financial savvy, and he’s so obsessed with pleasing the idealized, sainted version of Whitney who exists in his head that he’s now making terrible business decisions, like giving Abshir the house, paying all his taxes for him, and even telling him how much he’d get for the place if he sold it (no way Abshir doesn’t sell the house by the end of the year. I would too.)Asher’s only remaining contribution was to provide an extra pair of hands while Whitney was pregnant, and now she’s not pregnant anymore. So, as he promised, Asher vanished. The curse was real, and Asher cursed himself. And with that, he completes his transformation into the martyr figure he always wanted to be.
I’m over a month late to the party and this interpretation resonates with me.It’s interesting how this fantastical situation — that is up for interpretation — is still depicted in a very grounded way. They problem-solve the predicament in a very grounded way. All the way up to Asher rocketing away from the earth until he’s eventually a 2001 Space Child in fetal position. Intercut with Whit finally meeting her baby, at which point she’s no longer desperately asking for her husband. Someone offers to go find him and she seems to have nearly forgot about him already.I find the whole series relentless in its ridicule of Asher on every level, which makes it even more fascinating that Fielder co-wrote it all and directed a number of the episodes including the finale. He’s created this uxorious cuckold that’s one of the saddest fictional characters I’ve ever seen. Emma Stone herself has unbelievable natural charisma, and they expertly exploit the disparity between her magnetic screen presence and Fielder’s awkward/repellant screen presence. Which would almost feel cruel if Fielder himself wasn’t orchestrating this whole thing. There’s always been a question of how much Fielder is “performing” when he portrays himself in his shows — but this show offers a chance for Fielder to perform in ways I didn’t know he was capable of. It’s an intense performance that I hope finds some recognition.
I can’t help but wonder if they didn’t have a finished screenplay or even a real concept for this series… You had all the actors, cameras and production to make a show – and… I’m really surprised this got made. Great news for people who can’t tell stories that want to break into Hollywood, I guess?
I hope there is not a second season. Not every high budget limited series needs to be AHS or GoT.
It was curious that Whitney, whose mom accused her the prior episode of being a religious dilettante, rejected her doulo’s (male doula) presence after her baby’s birth, while the camera lingered when her joyful expression transitioned into calm, emotionless relief, as if she knew and was glad of Asher’s fate. It’s notable there’s a stronger presence of Jewish men vs women as death vs midwife doulas, in which they mostly carry out a religious, not medical, end-of-life role.
Dougie’s guilt laced grief felt somewhat disingenuous; done in anticipation to deflect suspicions he and Whitney conspired to kill Asher, especially since some firefighters and witnesses thought it was all part of a TV stunt.
Considering he did curse Asher months beforehand and Whitney kinda broke the fourth wall by cringing at the camera when Asher declared, “there’s a little me in there”, it does imply some type of supernatural shenanigans were afoot between the two. Especially since their more straightforward efforts to destroy Asher’s devotion and modify HGTV expectations without repercussions failed miserably. Whitney would consider it noble to ‘make a deal with the devil’ by literally sending her husband ‘off to the heavens’, thus keeping their ‘til death do us part’ vows intact in her vain, twisted, narcissistic mind. Who knows, she may have sold the soul of her child at the moment of Asher’s awkwardly loving statement. And clearly there’s no love lost, just perhaps a bit of lust, between her and Dougie if he played an active role the conception of her child. Until its birth she didn’t look enthusiastic at all about being a mother and has zero respect for her husband’s Bully Friend Forever.