Among the privileged few who got to watch 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 no one would believe you if 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 brief disclaimer: I know this is going to sound crazy, but I swear it’s true.
What happens is 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 figure out how to watch it—but they’re already formulating a second season, with a new addition to the cast: Whitney, who was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy early in The Curse, is now pregnant and close 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 people don’t really need it, but they’re still clandestinely installing air conditioning in the baby’s room, because they’re not taking that chance with their child.
And then, Asher wakes up one morning and finds himself on the ceiling. For reasons that never become clear, gravity has abruptly reversed itself, and he is, 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, maybe? But a freaked-out Whitney manages to make her way 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 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 going on 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, seemed like the kind of show where inexplicably bizarre things simply happen. (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 absorb what I was seeing.) Although the series’ inciting incident is the curse placed on Asher by a young girl selling sodas in a strip-mall parking lot, 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 talk about curses. “If you put an idea in your head,” he tells Asher, “it can become very real.”
There are a lot of ideas in The Curse, some realer than others. There’s Whitney’s dream of building 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 people don’t like hearing their prospective home compared to a thermos.) There’s the discrepancy between the versions of themselves that Whitney and Asher play for their reality show, directed by the amoral and desperately lonely Dougie (Benny Safdie), and the versions they present to each other. Whitney, who sees herself as a morally upstanding liberal trying to better the community and the world—a self-image that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny—is repulsed by Asher’s spinelessness, and even when he starts trying to act like a better person, she’s convinced it’s just 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 man of action. Fernando, the ex-con Whitney and Asher have hired to guard 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 thousands of dollars in designer jeans on her credit card rather than risk the bad press that might result from going after shoplifters. Infuriated that they’re effectively subsidizing a crime 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 rather 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 mild 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 section of their reality show focusing on 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 stay 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 leave, Asher takes it as a call to action. You’re right, he tells Whitney, I’m exactly as terrible as you think I am. “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 different person from this moment forward—she’ll see. And if she still doesn’t want to be with him, he promises, “you wouldn’t have to say it. I would feel it, and I would disappear.”
In a way, The Curse’s finale is simply Asher keeping his promise. It’s clear that, notwithstanding their modest good fortune, 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 can 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 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 if they can also kick in some cash to pay off the property taxes.
So instead 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 believe Asher is just having a psychotic episode, saws through the tree branch that is his tether to earth, the show cuts to the surgeon’s scalpel slicing through Whitney’s belly, her plans for natural childbirth cast 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 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 couple of episodes earlier, but there’s no indication he’s more competent at black magic than he is at anything else. 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 worth taking another look at the show’s title. “The curse” is, among 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 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 if it’s just the power to make the chicken disappear from a prefab entrée, it may be a power that’s specifically wielded by women. Whitney doesn’t curse Asher, at least not out loud, but she certainly seems to wish he was gone. Of course she’s upset to find 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 everything that came before it. But if it’s a show built around discomfort, there’s no way 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 people are going to hate it, and I would guess that Fielder and Safdie would be disappointed if that weren’t the case. But for those willing to stay with The Curse until it exits the exosphere, there’s never been an ending like it.