The Ending of Nathan Fielder's 'The Curse' Is Unexpected

By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 12, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 12, 2024 |

Spoilers for the end of The Curse. If you quit watching The Curse a few episodes in and want to see how it ends, this post is for you. If you’ve never watched The Curse and want to see how it ends, this post is for you. If you’ve watched the finale and want to talk about it, this post is for you. If you have watched all nine episodes and haven’t yet watched the finale, this post is not for you. You should watch the finale first. I’m not saying it’s good, but to truly appreciate how bad or how good it is, you really have to witness it. Spoiling it would rob you of its power. That said, if you haven’t watched the series yet and are considering it, I would not recommend it.

——

Because of the heavily-hyped mystery around the ending of The Curse, the internet has collectively spent a lot of time trying to predict the unpredictable. It turns out, it was impossible. No one could have predicted the end because it literally defies gravity.

The episode picks up many months after the events of last week’s episode, which ended with a deranged Asher (Nathan Fielder) doubling down on his efforts to be a better husband to Whitney, who had been subtly — and then not-so-subtly — trying to get out of their marriage. Asher’s manic, aggressive efforts only left her feeling more trapped.

The episode begins inside an episode of the Rachael Ray Show, where a visibly pregnant Whitney is there along with Asher to talk about their HGTV series, Green Queen. Whitney and Asher appear remotely, while in the studio, Rachael Ray is cooking meatballs with The Sopranos’ Vincent Pastore. Ray is disinterested in Asher and Whitney, who receive little screentime while an awkward Pastore sings about making his meatballs. It’s an agonizing, interminable sequence for its awkwardness.

After, Asher and Whitney are home reciting Shabbat prayers. Asher decides to give Whitney a gift before the baby arrives. He gives her a model of the Questa Lane house Abshir is living in. Asher unilaterally decides to give Abshir the home they’d been letting him stay in for free, and his gift to Whitney is allowing her to see Abshir’s face when they gift him the house.

They go over to Abshir’s house and give him the news. Abshir is nonplussed, asking only who will pay the property taxes (Asher agrees to do so). It’s another awkward scene, made all the more so when Asher thinks Abshir is crying, only for Abshir to say he has dust in his eye. It’s mortifying, or it would be if Asher felt shame.

The next morning, Whitney wakes up and finds Asher on the ceiling. Let me repeat that so you don’t gloss over it: His entire body is clinging to the ceiling. Though it’s a passive home, they put an air conditioner in the baby’s pressurized room. Asher and Whitney assume the pressure created an air pocket Asher got caught in, but any attempt to pull Asher down from the ceiling fails.

Whitney goes into labor. Asher is stuck on the ceiling. Whitney calls her doula to come pick her up, and Asher tries to get out of the house, only to find that once he does leave the house, he continues to float. He floats into a tree and grabs a branch. Meanwhile, Whitney arrives at the hospital.

The final few minutes cut back and forth between Whitney giving birth alone via a C-section while firefighters try to remove Asher from the tree. No one believes Asher when he insists that he is floating, so one of the firefighters decides to use a chainsaw to cut the branch to get him down. Asher loses it. He begs the firefighter to stop while Dougie looks on from below, laughing because he assumes Asher got freaked out about being a father and climbed up a tree.

Once the branch is cut, however, Asher floats above the tree, into the sky, and out into space. Dougie, who initially tries to record Asher flying into space with a drone, breaks into sobs once it’s clear that Asher is gone. At the hospital, Whitney has her baby, and though she doesn’t yet know that Asher has floated into space, she finally seems at peace. A wave of relief seems to wash over her.

It’s important here to recall during Asher’s deranged meltdown last week that he said to a terrified Whitney:

Whatever it takes, I’ll do it. You won’t even have to tell me anymore because I know. I won’t be guessing, because I know you, baby. And if you didn’t want to be with me, and I actually truly felt that, I’d be gone. You wouldn’t have to say it. I would feel it, and I would disappear.

And so he did.

There’s probably more to it than that: Asher floating away in the fetal position while Whitney gives birth is probably a metaphor for an actual rebirth or something, but it’s all bullshit. The final half-hour sequence is impressive to watch as Asher navigates the ceiling of his home before floating into the tree while Emma Stone acts the hell out of it, but it’s also a silly way to conclude the series. It’s not deep or profound. It’s dumb. Many of us sat through a series that is often dull and tedious trying to decipher a deeper meaning and assuming there would be a satisfying payoff, only to see Asher float into space — an ending so pointless, it leaves you questioning the value of the entire journey. It’s as if the Fielder and Safdie took a bizarre turn simply for the sake of being weird, and in doing so, they robbed the audience of any meaningful resolution. It’s pointless, and maybe that is the point. Maybe it’s commentary on viewers who waste their lives watching facile, HGTV house-flipping shows. Or maybe Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie couldn’t think of a better ending, so they borrowed something from Willy Wonka.

The ending does not retroactively make watching the rest of the series worthwhile. It is not going to be widely hailed by critics. It’s bonkers, but also: ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Doing something weird and wildly unpredictable does not by itself redeem an otherwise mid-series about a couple whose marriage breaks down while filming a reality series. It’s unpredictable, sure, but the ending falls flat, leaving viewers with an unresolved, unsatisfying conclusion that makes us wonder why we invested our time in the first place.