The Curse Finale Recap: The Gravitron

I have given the finale episode of The Curse a total of three stars. I could have given it five stars. Or one star. It could have been the finale of this show we have been following called The Curse, or it could have been the first episode of some other show called The Curse that starred the same actors in the same roles but was, in fact, a new and separate show. I could have viewed it ten times, though in truth, I am only allowed five playbacks per screener, or I could have just not viewed it at all but written some words down anyway.

What does it mean for television to reach a satisfying conclusion? What did we want from the final moments of The Curse? It was a comprehensively batshit series that made few promises from week to week. It ended as it began, which is how it always was: a soup of famous and semi-famous names goading us to watch, then refusing to be watchable. Dare followed by double dare. I hated it. It was fine. I laughed a good amount. What follows is not an account of what happened because nothing happened except everything. Instead, it’s an account of what I think I saw and how that made me feel.

That the series had shifted form and maybe even slipped into a new time register was evident from the moment the cameras at Rachael Ray, a talk show that no longer airs, lingered on a live studio audience wearing orange surgical masks. It had never occurred to me that our characters had been operating all this time in the recent past of pre-COVID, but having watched the episode in its entirety, that observation now seems almost too feeble to write down. Whitney and Asher appear via Zoom to promote Green Queen, which has launched on HGTV GO but has yet to find a viewership.

Rachael is a hostile host. It’s like if Harmony Korine was the one interviewing Letterman. She wants to keep her AC, and she’s def not giving up her heat-leaking man cave of a basement. She pronounces “eco” like “echo” when I’ve been pronouncing it “eeko” my whole life. I say this having never seen more Rachael than I could catch in the doctor’s waiting room, but I’m pretty sure this is the most combative segment she’s ever done. I’m struggling to even recap this part of the episode, which lasts almost ten minutes and features Vincent, the meatball guy, crooning, because of how little it, or anything, means to me anymore. Asher doesn’t talk; Whitney took every note the studio gave her and is now heavily pregnant with her toady husband’s baby. It made me sad, but the couple seem happy enough. Despite the meager ratings, HGTV has greenlit Green Queen for a second season.

Meanwhile, Asher has really embraced the promises he made to Whitney last week about becoming a better, more generous, more performatively socially conscious man. Over a Shabbat dinner led by him, he objects to Whitney’s petty jealousy of Cara’s newfound quasi-fame. Her art was not commercially successful, it turns out, but her public decision to quit selling her art has garnered her a New York Times profile. Personally, I would have been more impressed if the art itself had been featured, but I guess there’s no such thing as bad press, even for someone with nothing to sell except a personal anecdote about having nothing left to sell. Bizarro Asher is on Cara’s side: Who is anyone to comment on another person’s re-trauma? This is what he somehow learned from watching The Producers. Or something.

Skipping ahead, Asher decides that the perfect “push present” for Whitney is to present someone else with a present because Whitney, who crams her homes with Indigenous art and every shade of beige textile, isn’t a “material person,” except of course that she is. “What makes you happy is other people being happy,” Bizarro Asher tells her, despite us having seen no evidence of this. Instead of a diamond, Asher decides to give Abshir the house on Questa Lane, an idea he conveys by presenting Whitney with a diorama of the modest ranch house, complete with figurines of Abshir and his girls, which totally tracks. Isn’t this how Whitney and Asher have treated the people of Española all season, like pieces for them to push around the board?

Abshir accepts the house, though not as gratefully as Asher would have liked. There’s a guy in the background of the house doing something, and even though it seems shady and like maybe it will be consequential, it will never be mentioned again. Cara will never be mentioned again. Fernando will never be mentioned again. We’ll never find out who was stalking Whitney down the road in episode nine. To be fair to Rachael Ray — a grouping of words I would not have guessed could be relevant to an episode of The Curse — even the Spiegels have stopped living the passive home lifestyle. They’ve clandestinely installed air-conditioning in the baby’s room, though we will never learn if the fraudulent representations they make about themselves on streaming ever get found out.

I’ve been confused by this show before, but never bored. I came to be bored with the finale. An eerie sense of cinema verité crept into the production, and every scene was an hour long. The purpose of this move becomes clear when Asher wakes up from a good night’s sleep mysteriously attached to the ceiling of his home, which he fondly refers to as “this fucking house.” The hysteria surrounding this development feels appropriate and somehow understated. Asher thinks maybe his levitating has something to do with an imbalance of pressure owing to merging an impassive house with a passive house, but no matter how many buttons Whitney presses or windows she opens, the ceiling refuses to release her husband. If you want to be generous, you might call this scene Kafkaesque.

For some of you, I’m sure this absurd development will be extremely your shit. Perhaps, if that’s you, you’ll find my bewilderment a little pedantic. And I did laugh. It was funny to watch Asher try to navigate his home under conditions of reverse-gravity, like his life had become one long episode of Floor Is Lava, a show I have admittedly seen even less of than Rachael. Yes, it was funny, but it was also stupid. Perhaps you will then tell me that this was the point. I probably won’t say much after that, because I don’t want to be rude about the stupid thing you’ve just said.

The stress of seeing her husband and future co-parent trapped against the ceiling is enough to induce Whitney’s labor. Of course, a floating husband was not in the birth plan she devised with her doula, Moses. The contractions are coming quickly, and Whitney is forced to abandon Asher, though not before a disastrous intervention by Moses. In trying to free Asher from the underside of the house’s mirrored awning, he gets him stuck in a tree. Now, Asher is hanging on for dear life, his arms and thighs chafing at the effort of holding onto the future of his dreams: a hot wife, a TV show, and an heir. The tree bit did make me laugh at first, but the redder Asher’s thighs grew, the more it made me sad.

With Asher’s blessing, Whitney heads to the hospital, where she learns she’ll need an emergency C-section because the baby is in breech. This is very upsetting, though, of course, it can’t possibly register at all as an A-plot because, on the other side of town, Asher is trying not to fall out of a tree and into the sky. Whitney calls Dougie to come watch over him, which is a mistake because Dougie can’t wrap his head around the physics of what’s happening. He assumes Asher has scrambled into the tree like a little cat, running away from the burdens of impending fatherhood.

The Española Fire Squad, who is exactly who you’d call if your cat had gotten stuck in a tree, at least in the comics, doesn’t believe Asher either. He begs them for a net to catch him before he loses the grip-strength to survive, but they’re setting up a crash pad below him and threatening to tranquilize him. The only people who truly understand that Asher is falling up are busy delivering his son. Not that that, or anything, matters. They couldn’t have stopped the inevitable. And thanks to Dougie being on the scene, at least they’ll be able to watch the footage of the misdirected rescue operation. The fire squad does cover Asher with a net, but only to pacify him long enough to take a chainsaw to the tree, severing Asher’s last tether to planet Earth. The tree limb falls to the crash pad and Asher soars, chaotically and violently, into outer space, where he presumably moon-dives to death.

Dougie, in his signature Ed Hardy shirt and Cuban heels, crumples to the floor and blames himself. It’s hard to see what he could have done, and yet, I agree he could have done more. But even if they’d freed Asher from the tree, he’d still be on the ceiling, more of a fresco than a father. And there’s a case that it would have been better for everyone if Gregor Samsa died of starvation the same night he found he’d become a horrible vermin in The Metamorphosis. His family would have been spared financial ruin. Gregor himself would have been spared the pain of being slowly forgotten upstairs. This Asher can never hold his son, the one Whitney looks at with blissed-out wonder as the camera roves out of the operating room, down the streets of Española, and back into this fucking house before finally fading to black. Asher changed himself to become the man Whitney wanted and then wafted away from the Earth all the same. That we never see her reaction to the news that her husband has floated out of orbit suggests everything we need to know: It doesn’t matter.

None of it matters. Not the passivity of your house or the hotness of your wife or the size of your dick. Not the quality of your friends or the intensity of your phone addiction. Give a little girl a hundred bucks or don’t. Give her father a house or don’t. Convince yourself that you owe something to the world and work hard to give it back or don’t. Nothing. Matters. Life is the curse you can’t outrun. It comes for your wife while you’re driving down the road a little drunk, or it evicts you from your apartment just because you ripped out all the appliances. Life is stupid. The show is stupid. TV is stupid. Caring is the curse. Having babies is arguably immoral. Whitney’s a curse. Asher’s a curse. Dougie is a curse. The show is the curse. The show is called The Curse.

Weirdly, if I could have a single question answered about the ten hours I spent in its company, it would be this: What happens to the woman who Dougie took on a date in episode two? She seemed nice.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated a seder when it was a Shabbat dinner.