There Is No Explaining the Series Finale of The Curse

After 10 episodes of unbearably awkward white-savior bullsh*t and some top-shelf acting, especially from Emma Stone, The Curse ends on the most baffling note possible. With Whitney (Stone) on the verge of giving birth and their HGTV GO series warranting an interview with Rachael Ray, Asher (Nathan Fielder) wakes up one morning to find himself stuck on the ceiling. Terrestrial explanations for Asher experiencing a highly localized reverse polarity of gravity are suggested (we'll get into them), but the upshot (uh, literally) is that Asher floats upwards indefinitely, past the clouds and the upper atmosphere, into space, gone forever. And that… is the end of the show.

It's not that simple in execution, of course. The bulk of the finale, “Green Queen,” is spent trying to get Asher down from the ceiling, and then later, down from a tree. The first responders sent to rescue him from the tree think he's on drugs, which makes sense. You can't really fault the firefighters for disbelieving Asher when he says if they cut him free he's going to get sucked up into outer space, even though that's exactly what happens. Fielder is also incredibly committed in these scenes, communicating Asher's helplessness and terror quite viscerally.

So, The Curse ends with Whitney having given birth, serene and solitary, while Asher's body floats lifelessly in space, the Kubrickian star-child recast as a 2010s American cuck. But… what happened? Why did Fielder and co-creator Benny Safdie end their show this way? What does it say about the characters, the creators, their audience, and of course, the titular curse? Unable to simply throw our hands in the air and say "That was so weird!" we're delving into some possible explanations.

The Passive Homes Were The Curse

For a few moments, when Asher is still merely stuck on his bedroom ceiling, it seems like there might be a (bizarre, heightened) pseudo-scientific explanation for what's going on. It's the pressurization of the house! These abhorrent, impractical temples to fake virtue that Whitney and Asher (mostly Whitney) have touted all season. The closer these homes got to actual consumers, the more obvious it was that no one would actually want to live in one. Tenants immediately began modifying the homes to make them more livable, in a way that negated their environmental virtues.

You could call these people selfish — Whitney likely would! — but you couldn't blame them. As Rachael Ray puts it in the note-perfect talk show sequence that begins the finale, no one actually wants to live inside a thermos. Not even Whitney and Asher! Their ultimate hypocrisy shined through when they talked about their plans to modify the baby's room, because they wouldn't subject an infant to this vacuum-sealed, pressurized way of life.

So when Asher first deduced that it must be something weird with the pressurization in the house that had floated him to the ceiling, it made a bit of wonky sense. These unnatural homes had created unnatural air pressure currents inside the house. What a fitting way for Whitney's Passive Home venture to crumble. But of course, once the doors and windows were opened, Asher stayed on the ceiling. This reverse-gravity field he was in wasn't just localized to their home. This is how Asher wound up in the tree.

Asher Is The Curse

Now we're getting into the metaphysical, which is probably where we should be when discussing people floating away into space. In the previous episode, "Young Hearts," Asher basically said as much to Whitney. After seeing the rough cut of the TV show that essentially burns Asher down in order for the Green Queen to emerge from the ashes, Asher said that, instead of some curse, he had been the problem all along. Laying himself down at Whitney's feet, Asher promised, "If you didn't want to be with me, and I truly felt that, I'd be gone. You wouldn't have to say it; I would feel it, and I would disappear."

It lacked the formality of a TikTok curse, but Asher's words certainly came pretty close to being prophetic there. Just as the original curse seemed to remove the chicken from Asher's dinner, now Asher was the chicken being removed from Whitney's life. He felt, however subconsciously, that Whitney didn't want him there with her, so he somehow willed himself out of her life, in the most direct way possible. The series ends with Whitney alone in the operating room after giving birth. She doesn't need to see her doula, she's indifferent to the prospect of someone checking on Asher's whereabouts. She's renewed and free to be the Green Queen, alone with her baby and her reality TV empire in the making.

Nathan Fielder Is the Curse

This now makes two Nathan Fielder series in a row that end with his character on the precipice of fatherhood, only for something extreme to happen to alter the dynamic. In The Rehearsal, this was Nathan claiming to be the father of the actor child who'd been playing his son. Here, it's Asher at the very last minute getting sucked into space, just as his son is being born.

We don't need to delve into Nathan Fielder's psyche and his thoughts on parentage in order to explore how The Curse finale once again sees Fielder imposing himself and his nihilism upon his audience. If there's a joke to this finale, it's definitely on us. After investing in this story for nine and a half episodes, the ending is self-consciously meaningless and "random." Despite being set up by what Asher said in "Young Hearts" about disappearing, there really isn't any deeper meaning to Asher floating away.

It's a surreal button to put on this show that brought up some genuinely interesting observations and questions about the impulse and burden to appear to be "doing good" en route to building a brand empire around oneself. Passive Homes were a way for Whitney to make money and get famous while having to deal with her parents' slumlord reputations, and Asher's willingness to subsume his wants and desires for the greater project of Whitney made for a fascinating two-way character study. Ultimately, we're left with the still-fascinating Whitney, but the Asher character is literally tossed away, a parody of beta-male insubstantiality.

Then there was the show's take on television, a self-flogging impulse, to be sure, but one which connected to its target. The take that reality television of this stripe demands perfection — good intentions; an easily understandable marriage; "likability" — while at the same time demanding (and rewarding) discord and bitchiness turns everyone on these shows into hollowed-out jukeboxes of "correctness" felt spot-on. Indeed, Dougie (Safdie) is the most devastated character by the end, left weeping on the ground and renouncing a life wasted on television. The Curse held a savage contempt for lifestyle-brand reality TV (and maybe all reality TV) that felt specific and sharp.

To end it all with a conclusion that's just short of pressing a button and blowing up the whole town feels so incredibly cheap. For a show that could make the artifice of "well-meaning" liberals feel viscerally embarrassing, this ending lets everyone off the hook. We were wrong to wrestle with how much of ourselves we saw in people like Asher, because he ultimately wasn't a real person. Just a husk of flesh, lighter than air, easily removed from the world without consequence.

Nathan Fielder has made a career out of tricking people into seeking deeper meaning in stunts that ultimately boil down to "this is so stupid." With The Curse, he proved that the better he gets at making compelling TV with sharp insights about the world we live in, the more of a betrayal it is when he takes the cheap way out. Asher may have been the one to get sucked out into space, but whatever investment we had in this show was sucked away just as suddenly.

The Curse is streaming on Paramount+. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.