How to properly “explain” a show like this? You don’t — The Curse works best when you let its surreal, Lynchian vibes wash all over you — but it’s still fun to try. The finale of the Nathan Fielder/Benny Safdie collaboration especially lends itself to outrageous theories: Fielder’s Asher awakens on the ceiling of his passive home just as his pregnant wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), starts feeling contractions. Whitney goes to the hospital and eventually gives birth to a son; Nathan goes out the door, up a tree, and eventually, into space. So, is it a commentary on the pain of living? A magic trick? Are the protagonists actually sitcom characters? Something something motherhood? We overanalyzed the text and came up with a slew of potential theories that are almost as crazy as the episode we just witnessed.
It’s about sitcom characters stuck in reality.
Whitney and Asher aren’t people with lives. They are two characters from a sitcom who, through some sort of twisted magic (the titular curse), have dropped out of the great TV in the sky and into the gritty real world. Problems that would typically be hilarious through the lens of a multicam sitcom (having parents who are slumlords moving into their own slum, buying jeans for thieves, building a house of mirrors) suddenly take on a darkness the characters can’t possibly understand because they’ve never existed in a world where actions have long-term consequences. Likewise, while human beings can utter all kinds of nonsense that pass through others’ ears as swiftly as a summer breeze, sitcom characters speak in spells. Thanks to the efficiency of script dialogue, a character typically cannot or will not say something that has no meaning or consequence for the future of the story. So, when Asher tells Whitney he would “disappear” the minute she no longer wants him around, it’s as binding as anything Harry Potter could conjure. He is simply plucked out of the story by the omniscient narrator that created him, like Poochie dying on his way back to his home planet on The Simpsons. —Anne Victoria Clark
It’s about the “magic” of motherhood.
Setting aside all the microdicks, cultural appropriation, and weird racial stuff involving Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) and Nala (Hikmah Warsame) that The Curse introduces but refuses to interrogate, the series has a surprisingly conservative message about what fulfills women. The baby Whitney carries changes everything — how she designs her passive eco-houses; how she views her husband, Asher; how she presents herself to the audience of their show — and provides her with a clear-eyed purpose that nothing else in their lives did. Now that she’s about to give birth, Asher becomes irrelevant, so much so that the fantastical way his life ends is an afterthought for Whitney. She has a fresh start; she doesn’t have to wrangle with Asher, broken goods she failed to fix to her specifications. She’s entranced by her baby, by this thing she made, and the opportunity to imprint herself on someone else furthers her narcissism. It’s a cynically ugly ending, one not dissimilar from the point made in The Rehearsal, where Fielder similarly suggests that maternal feelings are not only transformative but inherent to the experience of being a woman. It’s a curse the show is saddling an entire gender with, and it’s as exhausting as the fact that “Cherry Tomato Boys” merch now exists. —Roxana Hadadi
It’s about actual magic.
I wouldn’t mind if the driving concept behind Asher’s fate in The Curse finale was just, “This would be cool.” That would be good enough. I think it’s pretty impressive that Nathan Fielder, Emma Stone, and Benny Safdie can make crawling on the floor or hugging a tree branch feel genuinely tense. It’s a parable! Like in a Coen Brothers movie! What is it a parable for? I actually don’t care. Fielder’s spoken about learning magic tricks as a kid; the whole sequence on the ceiling felt like a magic trick. Good for him. —Rebecca Alter
It’s about how our greed is failing the planet.
The Curse warns us against many things: being a hypocritical, disingenuous asshole; taking money from small children; marrying Nathan Fielder. But the most significant moral of this weird story is that that fucking with the planet really will kill you, you capitalist moron. The final episode reminds us of this multiple times, first when Whitney and Asher appear on The Rachael Ray Show and Rachael asks Whitney what else people can do to be environmentally mindful besides, you know, buying one of Whitney’s hideous passive homes, and all Whitney can come up with is “Take shorter showers.” Later, the couple has to adjust the pressure in their future baby’s bedroom to allow cooler air to flow in, a correction that defeats the whole purpose of what their allegedly flawless abode is designed to do. That decision sets up the batshit final act, in which Fielder’s Asher is deemed so toxic to the environment — in both the broader sense and within his own family — that he gets sucked into outer space and dies. It’s as if The Curse is telling us that people like Asher and Whitney don’t deserve to remain on Earth if we’re going to keep fucking with it so shamelessly. But wait, why doesn’t Whitney also get vomited out into the stratosphere? Because she is carrying a baby, one that will hopefully grow up, immediately recognize his own mother’s bullshit, and come up with more useful ideas about how to save the planet than “Buy my houses” and “Take less time to wash yourself.” —Jen Chaney
It’s about hopelessness.
The Curse clearly bit off more than it could chew — if it intended to swallow, that is. I won’t remember anything it tried (and failed) to do with the stuff around race, gentrification, and Indigenous appropriation, but its surreal and frustrating finale did leave me with an emotional hickey. As Asher floats up into the sky, no one listening to his attempts at expressing his needs, there’s a feeling of utter helplessness and invisibility that seems to be both the key and punch line to the entire exercise. The dude is a hopeless case, no matter how hard he tries to measure up to everyone around him, especially Whitney. Of course his annihilation comes without acknowledgement. The Curse should’ve been called The Cuck. —Nicholas Quah
It’s about how Fielder and Safdie had a cool idea for the finale and didn’t care how they got there.
The textual reading of the end of The Curse and the one the show most wants to support is that Asher promises his wife, Whitney, that he’s going to be worthy of her love, and the second she no longer really loves him, he’ll disappear without needing to be told. So in the finale, the baby comes, and there he goes, yeeted up into the sky after being displaced in his wife’s affections by his newborn son. But the broader reason Asher flies away into the sky, the subtextual reason, is that The Curse was invested in raising all sorts of questions and probing at troublesome themes about gentrification, reality TV, and the self, and had absolutely no idea what to do with any of those things. So the themes were yeeted off into the stratosphere along with Asher, allowing the show to end with a giant shrug of “What are you gonna do? Motherhood!” —Kathryn VanArendonk
It’s about being born.
Look: The real curse is being born and living in this world. Asher is being pulled upward — outward — against his will thanks to a cosmic force he doesn’t understand, much like the crying boy being lifted out of Whitney’s womb during her C-section. Just as his child enters the earth, Asher exits it, floating into the stars in a near-fetal position. “Do you want us to see if your husband is here?” a nurse asks Whitney. Of course he isn’t. Asher’s curse has been lifted, but his son’s is just beginning. —Ray Rahman