The Curse Recap: Fun House

The Flipanthropy cameras are finally rolling again in Española. As bad as Asher is on TV — and he is excruciatingly clumsy and awkward — it’s Whitney who wins the prize for insufferable character of the week. (The prize, to be clear, is my ire.)

In “It’s a Good Day,” she reveals herself to be my least favorite kind of rich person: the kind who refuses to admit they’re rich, which she does when she insists she could never afford the $850,000 house she’s selling to Lucinda and Dennis, a pleasant-seeming interracial couple who have also agreed to appear on Whitney’s reality-TV show for a pittance. In other moments, Whitney further reveals herself to be a spoiled brat and a megalomaniac. There is nothing she wants in the whole wide world that she doesn’t deserve to already have; there is no aspect of the universe that shouldn’t be subject to her control, including the thoughts of the total strangers she’s selling homes to. Now that we can see her so clearly, I’m ready to understand a little bit more about the slumlord’s little princess to self-obsessed eco-warrior plotline. How did Whitney get so deranged?

We don’t get the answer this week, just ample evidence of her self-centeredness. Where to begin? There’s the fact that Whitney tells Lucinda and Dennis, who are visibly perspiring in the passive home they’re buying from her, that 78 degrees is not hot. I suppose temperature is relative. True, 78 degrees is not a scorching temperature for an oven or Dante’s “Inferno,” but poor Dennis is drenched with sweat. It’s hot to him. Or we could focus on the fact that she’s refusing to sell homes to anyone who doesn’t sign a letter of support for the tribes that was authored by James, the tribal leader we met a few episodes ago. Sure, her heart’s in the right place. But it’s not insane for these first-time homebuyers to worry that an easement dispute one town over could one day have implications for the land they’re buying — land that probably does rightfully belong to the exact same tribe.

Eventually, Lucinda and Dennis bail on the home sale — and the TV show — altogether. Asher is worried about cash flow, but Whitney’s response is good riddance. Lucinda and Dennis, who admitted they didn’t even care about passive home certification, don’t deserve Whit’s home. And Vic doesn’t deserve Whit’s home. In fact, no one could ever be good enough to deserve Whit’s “Japanese-inspired powder room,” which turns out to be “prison-inspired” (the sink water flushes the toilet).

But Whitney doesn’t want anyone to utter the word prison on her show. In fact, she doesn’t want them to say anything she hasn’t pre-authorized. After Dennis and Lucinda walk out — and who can blame them after Asher calls Lucinda a “fucking bitch” in response to Lucinda calling Whit “a lot” — Whitney doesn’t even want real buyers. With Dougie’s go-ahead, she drives to Santa Fe to cast her dream couple: Pascal, an ambiguously ethnic man with the most lustrous long dark hair and a nearby woman he has never met who just happens to have a baby. When they refuse to play house, Whitney has to settle for Pascal’s real girlfriend: a white lady with a two-tone dye job. They say the lines she feeds them about how great the house is and how eager they are to make an offer. It sounds terrible and fake and indistinguishable from the buyers I’ve encountered on actual HGTV home reno shows.

If you’re wondering why Dougie isn’t objecting to Whit watering down his show with bland praise, it’s because he’s outside shooting the shit with Cara, the Native American artist Whitney thinks she’s friends with. After Lucinda and Dennis made their getaway, Cara was the first person Whit called to pose as a homebuyer, but Cara’s questions about crime in the local area were too real (“I read online this is one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country”), and her casual mention of the Instagram account that led to Whit’s trolling were too pointed for even Whitney to ignore.

Plus, I get the sense Dougie’s not planning to make a show from the straight-forward house-tour footage at all. God is in the details and art is in the off-camera sniping the mics pick up after Dougie yells cut: Asher’s failing sexual innuendos, Whit’s nagging about getting buyers to sign James’s “contract.” I wonder if Dougie was still rolling sound when Whitney jumped into her parent’s Mercedes SUV and screamed at them to leave set. “The reason I came back from California was you said these properties could be mine,” she complains, oblivious to how entitled and puerile she sounds. Whitney’s Flipanthropy is about the passive home movement; my guess is the version Dougie eventually screens focuses on the chaos that erupts between a nice doofus and his narcissistic wife.

Which all makes me wonder what Asher thinks the show they’re filming is about. He sees himself and Whit as partners in their home-flipping business; she handles the renos and he’s back office. But on “It’s a Good Day,” Whitney doesn’t seem to give a shit if the houses sell at all. She rejects an offer from a college student whose daddy is footing the bill because she doesn’t want her neighborhood populated by the kind of people she despises, even if the same exact description — trust-fund baby — would suit Whitney just as well. Flip isn’t a business; it’s a vanity project. And vanity projects don’t need partners. They don’t even need sidekicks with iPhone notes full of jokes, though kudos to Asher for trying. (My personal fave note was “Puns are safe.”) Asher warns her that they need to sell homes to build homes, but Whitney isn’t trying to engage reality. She’s trying to improve it.

Take those crime rates Cara mentions. Until now, The Curse has been vague about the situation in Española. Vic had a few parcels stolen, sure, but the most persuasive indicator that the area could be unsafe is the fact that Fernando carried a gun. When we see him again this week, back at work as a barista in a non-security position, he’s still got a handgun in his waistband. He doesn’t use it when he helps Enola from the jeans store next-door apprehend a shoplifter because he’s not an insane person. But the fact he carries it feels meaningful.

Whitney, however, doesn’t want to see that. When a producer mentions a nearby shooting, Whit insists it occurred beyond Española city limits. She tells Enola that the next time a shoplifter takes something, Enola should run Whitney’s credit card rather than call the police. It’s a well-meaning gesture, of course. But I’m starting to sense that Whitney can’t be serious about helping her adopted hometown because she refuses to look at it honestly. She wants homebuyers and TV viewers to see the shooting she sees when she looks at it with her white-savior blinders on. Whitney is right that shoplifting is usually a crime of desperation, but the city she’s shilling on TV is a fictional community where crime doesn’t exist. What was it she said when they were about to roll camera? “No jokes, no negativity.”

Finally, after a long day of pretending to sell her house to pretend buyers, Whit and Asher grab dinner at a local joint that will soon be featured on the show. In truth, this girl has no real community. Her community is the show. She hopes if she puts it on TV — puts her “good friend” Cara, her mentor James, her local fast-food place — it will become real.

Asher, for his part, still has one more buyer in mind for the house, an outdoorsy guy named Mark Rose. He shows up for the viewing in a pickup truck covered in bumper stickers that function like a map of his personality. He supports worthy causes including snowboarding and the World Wildlife Fund and he blows racist dog whistles: a blue lives matter flag, a “They Live We Sleep” sticker. But, like a man who hates the government, Mark loves how close to off-grid the house is without feeling like a bunker. And he supports the tribes in the stand-off about easement payments because he is some small sliver Apache and that’s enough to trigger his empathy. Whitney and Asher won’t put him on the show, but in the end, he’s the one who is going to move in next door. Whitney was so desperate not to have someone like her in the neighborhood that she invited a white supremacist in instead.

To be fair, she appears deeply rattled by the compromise that’s been struck. Asher is content to ignore the Calvin pissing decal and take the money, but Whitney ends the episode shell-shocked. When Asher points out that it’s the time of the month when she’s ovulating, she responds by putting on her sleep mask. When he tells her, “You’re my angel,” she doesn’t even muster a reply. (Mine was “ew.”)

But you know how I know she’s really beaten down? When her husband gets into bed, curls up behind her, and places his own giant noggin on her pillow. TWO HEADS, ONE PILLOW. It’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen on The Curse so far this season, and broken, despondent Whitney just relents. She can probably even feel his warm mouth-breath in her hair. (Ew.)