The Curse season 1 finale: Oh. My. God.

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+.