The Curse Recap: The Scrambler

I hate it when characters sing loudly (and/or eat ice cream) in the car. Remember Dawson’s dad, Mitch Leery? The genial substitute teacher at Capeside High who was cuckolded by his news-anchor wife? Ever since Mitch crashed his car as he crooned along to “Drift Away” and distractedly hunted the station-wagon floor for his runaway scoop of vanilla, I’ve never been comfortable when TV characters are on the road with the radio turned up. Plus, why was that poor man stopping at the ice-cream parlor at Christmastime? It was too cold out for ice cream. And did his last words have to be “Give me the beat, boys”? It was all so senseless.

In “Down and Dirty,” Asher and Dougie go on a mutually punishing little bro quest. As they cruise down the dark highway, too many Pacificos deep for either of them to be behind the wheel and jamming out to “Hell Yeah,” by Dead Prez, I was sure at least one of them, maybe even both, was about to depart this Earth. Probably this was the bunk anthem back in the summer of ’03. Probably this is because someone brought the 2 Fast 2 Furious soundtrack to camp with them. Asher and Dougie’s prospective last words: “You can get down, but you can’t be afraid.”

In the end, though, they don’t die. They don’t even crash the car. But over a long, claustrophobic day, they bump into each other again and again in ways that are sure to leave bruises. It all starts at work: It’s finally Asher’s turn to sit for confessional interviews, and initially, Dougie peppers him with softball questions intended to capture Asher’s adoration of his wife. The words Asher uses to describe this woman who can barely stand him include: kind, thoughtful, intelligent, selfless, true, and pure. What would Asher do if Whitney left him, Dougie asks, in a crazy hypothetical world? “I’d have nothing,” Asher says as cameras zoom in on his worrying hands.

Dougie seems to excel at this part of reality-TV production; it truly doesn’t upset him to upset other people. And the nasty questions about Whitney dumping Asher are relevant to the series they’re making — or at least the version that Dougie and Whit have been plotting in the background. But then Dougie asks Asher about the ex-girlfriend who originally brought him to New Mexico — the one who dumped Asher because she found his request to watch her have sex with another man to be outside the limits of her personal kink. There’s no way this is getting on HGTV. This is just for sport. This is just who Dougie is, who he has been since they were kids.

Still, neither of them has anyone else in their lives, so after they wrap for the day, Asher and Dougie go to dinner, where they enter a trancelike state of revertigo. They sit at a table eating bottomless tortilla chips for hours, like teenagers trying to keep their Chili’s bill low. They look up song lyrics on Genius.com and analyze the verses that have been stuck in their heads for decades. Somehow, Asher ends up apologizing to Dougie for being a bad friend, which he absolutely has been but which is entirely okay because Dougie isn’t Asher’s friend at all.

The night eventually ends with Dougie drunk-driving Asher to a mini-mart and then on to Abshir’s house, where he has to change the 9V in the smoke alarm. To me, this seems a bit far-fetched. Surely, a capable single father who has a ladder in the backyard would remove the dead battery himself rather than invite his creepy, curse-riddled landlord to the house unnecessarily. But I digress. At the mini-mart, Dougie buys Asher some gay porn, perhaps to embarrass him in front of the cashier or, more cynically, to insinuate something about Asher’s cuckold fetish or, worse yet, just to humiliate Asher with pics of huge dicks. Then, at Abshir’s house, Dougie attempts to convince Nala to curse him, too, despite Asher begging him not to involve himself.

Dougie, though, can’t help himself. It’s an occupational hazard. He can’t ever stop producing, cajoling, and pushing people into the positions he finds most entertaining — use proper nouns. Say it again in a sentence. Say it louder. Say it this way. Say it after me. Dougie proposes that Nala’s new curse could act as a kind of test. If Dougie’s chicken-dinner doggy bag goes missing, it can’t be a coincidence.

But as he begs the little girl to say the three magic words, Dougie starts to break down. Part of him wants to die. The question isn’t “Why does Dougie drink and drive so recklessly?” it’s “Why does he even bother with the Breathalyzer?” Nala, afraid of Dougie’s crying, calls for her father instead of declaring a curse, and Asher and Dougie scurry out in the chaos. Dougie, of course, finds all this uproarious because he’s still 12 years old. I bet he listens to Dead Prez all the time, not just when he’s reminiscing with old camp friends. When Asher doesn’t share his amusement, Dougie accuses him of pretending to be a good guy for the sake of Whitney — she’s his personal reality-TV camera, dogging Asher around even when he’s not at work.

Yet it’s Asher, with his massive shoulder chip and stormy temper, who lands the even worse blow. You’re no good guy either, he tells Dougie, followed by the three words that hit like a curse: “Ask your wife.” Asher apologizes for the unkindness, but it’s too late. Dougie says it’s cool but later whispers the series’ mantra: “I curse you.” Use his name. Say it again. Say it louder.

In some other pocket of Española, Whitney too is cosplaying friendship. She’s at what some might generously call an “art party” at a collector’s house, except there’s no food and no conversation and everyone there — Marjorie, Cara, Cara’s Native American friend Brett — looks dour and miserable. Except Whitney, who is so stoked to have some B-roll of her doing anything at all without Asher trailing her like a puppy. She acts deranged, which is, of course, how she always acts. Brett, who is hoping to win some screen time or a Native American consultant payout of his own, comes dressed in a poncho and mumbles nonsense about the nature of art. “That’s so beautiful,” Whit tells him. Later, Cara explains that every time a person ate the slice of turkey at her art show, they were really consuming the fragments of her Native American identity that the modern world compels her to slough off day after day. “That’s so beautiful,” Whit tells her.

As it turns out, all the art buyers at the party are defense contractors and the Green Queen cameraman’s job is to film the soirée without accidentally capturing any of the people who are invited. But this is the trade-off, Cara explains. Sometimes, you have to spend time with people you don’t like so they’ll buy the things you make. Sometimes, when there’s $20,000 on the line, you have to sit across from a woman you barely know and repeat after her: You make some really cool homes. I love collaborating with you. We are best friends. Whitney gets the footage she wants. She cajoles people into position, just as Dougie taught her. Here’s Whit having an intimate conversation with an artist she admires. Here’s Whit hugging a near stranger who also happens to be Native. Here’s Whit flirting with a white Sikh disciple of Yogi Bhajan. She’s a natural producer; it truly doesn’t make her uncomfortable to make other people uncomfortable.

For her part, Cara doesn’t say much that Whitney doesn’t script, but from her face, you understand that publicly conflating her art with Whit’s reno show may be the most excruciating way she has ever gone about making a living. Instead, she stages her protest silently — by leaving the racist statue Whit gifted her last week outside for bulk pickup.

Relationships are deteriorating across the series, but none more so than Whitney and Asher’s marriage. They share only one scene in this episode, but it’s a fucking doozy. At this point, stealing designer denim from the Española shopping mall has become something of a teenage pastime. Older kids pass the knowledge down to younger kids. In the opening scene of “Down and Dirty,” one pack of affluent delinquents cops a dozen pairs. Whitney’s jeans bill has soared past $14,000. The shopgirl doesn’t care much, but Fernando does. He comes to the Siegels’ house with a gun on his shoulder and some enforcer-looking buddies by his side to confront the couple about the “cancer” they have invited to town with their novel approach to shoplifting.

Obviously, Fernando’s is an unhinged approach to negotiating with your boss. And it’s clear that Whitney’s “solution” to the problem of petty-theft prosecution — what she hilariously calls an “urban art piece” to Cara — is out of hand. Asher, though, sticks up for Whitney with Fernando, as we saw him do with Monica in episode one and again with the potential homebuyers who called her “a lot” in episode five. “I was ready to take a bullet for you,” he tells Whitney when Fernando leaves the house.

Whitney laughs in his face and tells him to start charging rent to the boutiques in the strip mall. Considering the only jeans they’re selling are to Whit in the first place, this should effectively shut down the store and end the stealing epidemic. But Asher notices a flaw in her logic: If the shops go out of business, Fernando will lose his job. And they promised Fernando a job. Fernando’s mom is dying. Dougie pumped the old woman’s face with menthol.

Finally, Whit drops her mask. She mocks her husband, bug-eyed and singsongy. Her vicious and terrible impression of Asher is about the same quality as what Asher was serving in the corporate comedy class. It’s not remotely funny, but of course that’s not her goal. The goal is to obliterate her husband. She makes fun of him for thinking he’s a nice man. She makes fun of him for thinking he’s a tough guy. He looks genuinely shell-shocked, as if it has never occurred to him that his trustafarian wife might be a total bitch.

Yet the best part of the whole episode, in my opinion, is Whitney shooing the cleaning lady up the stairs as Fernando enters her already pristinely clean home. She doesn’t want Lily to see Fernando’s outburst; she’s probably squeamish about Fernando seeing Lily tidying her Taschen coffee-table books. Whitney is obsessed with positioning herself center stage where everyone can see her, but ultimately she’s terrified of being looked at. Afraid, perhaps, that they’ll perceive the cold and ugly heart she just revealed to Asher — that an eye roll or a dagger will come out instead of a platitude.