What’s a curse? I’ve looked at a bunch of definitions, and the gist is this: some wish, expressed aloud or perhaps in writing, that harm will be visited upon another person. You can wish, for example, that the chicken goes missing from a stranger’s spaghetti. Or, as happened on an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? that has caused me to fear German Shepherds to this day, you can use a cursed object — like an old bird’s claw — to twist a person’s dreams into nightmares. (A kid wishes to beat a rival in a track race, and the rival ends up mauled by a stray dog.)
But what is the point of a curse? I would argue it’s simply to punish a person. Torment them. The specifics of the curse are a means to an end: To cause your enemy to deteriorate. And if I’m right, it doesn’t matter if the curse Nala uttered was real when she made it. It’s real now. Asher is being completely undone by it. He’s testing the foodsafe lids on his ready-meals for evidence a small child has tampered with them; he’s inventing reasons to gain entry to Abshir’s house and interrogate his daughter on the various shapes of pasta. The curse may not have been anything more than a TikTok trend on that day in the Family Dollar parking lot, but by the end of this episode, it’s biblical.
Then again, some people don’t need to be cursed to self-destruct. In “Under the Big Tree,†Asher, Whitney, and Dougie learn that HGTV has ordered a full ten-episode season of Flipanthropy for their streaming platform. They love what the team has made, and with some modest tweaks to make it more “digestible†— Asher needs to get a personality, the show needs to drop all mentions of economic displacement — they’re ready to make the Siegels into cable stars. It’s not how quickly Whitney relinquishes her ideals that surprises me; it’s how efficient she is at convincing herself that she’s letting go of her ideals for the sake of her ideals. If she doesn’t have to bother with the nasty reality of gentrification, for example, it leaves more time to push the environmental aspect of the series. And don’t we all benefit from a greener planet?
But just because the network is scrapping the politics of remaking Española doesn’t mean Whitney and Asher can avoid reality. Whit tasks her assistant with telling Fernando he can’t bring his gun to work as her security officer because it makes her “uncomfortable†— a not entirely unreasonable request that’s dripping with foreboding. And Victor, the guy who moved into the couple’s first passive home for their TV pilot? He isn’t exactly hosting neighborhood potlucks. After having several packages stolen from his doorway, he circulated a flier suggesting a local did it. You can take the man out of Silicon Valley, but you can’t take the NIMBY out of the man. What’s more — and worse, in Whitney’s opinion — is Victor’s after-market mods to the eco-palace she built for him.
Vic has replaced the home’s induction stove with a gas oven, thereby negating the property’s “passive home†certification. On the one hand, it’s his house. On the other hand, isn’t this exactly what reno TV scandals are made of? Who could forget the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition couple accused of kicking out their adopted children — the ones that the makeover was supposedly for? Or the family of a young cancer patient who couldn’t pay the taxes on their new McMansion? Honestly, I was pretty shocked to learn the Fixer Upper clients don’t keep the furniture. Imagine if I, a loyal HGTV viewer, learned that the so-called passive homes being built were actually as environmentally destructive as my own? On second thought, I’d probably ignore it and keep watching, just like I did after learning the couples on House Hunters: International have all signed rental agreements before filming even begins.
Whitney gently and unsuccessfully confronts Vic about his unneighborly comportment, but, as always, it’s Asher who is bound to get them in real trouble. He stakes out Victor’s home and has an employee attempt to steal the $7,000 range back from the man’s garbage heap, presumably so he can install it in another home down the line. When the appliance is irreparably damaged in the heist, he screams at Freckle to leave the upturned oven on the side of the alley in a loud and clumsy incident that’s as sure to end up on Vic’s security footage as the theft of his Alienware computer, which really should have been signed for on delivery, if you ask me.
But Victor’s not the only client that Asher’s content to terrorize this week. He visits Abshir with unwanted groceries culled from his own pantry — the man works at a grocery store, for goodness sake! — and a completely plausible, probably true cover story: he needs to test for mold. Whilst on site, “Uncle Asher†(kill me) cuts a hole in the ceiling that oozes brown goo, so I’m feeling confident that Asher’s “good deed†of furnishing free rental accommodation will eventually end up in the building being condemned and Abshir’s family being evicted.
The scenes that revolve around Asher are definitely the series’ weakest. Nathan Fielder’s brand of I-dare-you-to-press-pause comedy has clearly inspired The Curse’s tone, but compared to Whitney and Dougie, his character feels too unspecific. Whitney’s cringiness is an extension of her socio-cultural eco-warrior ambitions and her wildly unchecked need to please. Dougie’s cringiness is rooted in his sadness and desperation. But Asher’s? Rather than his cringiness arising from some recognizable trait or foible, it seems to be his actual personality. I couldn’t begin to tell you what Asher wants out of life, what he likes about his wife, or what his wife likes about him.
That said, the scene where Abshir pulls Asher aside to teach him about how hard it is to be a single dad to pre-teen girls is probably the episode’s most evocative. Abshir has spent weeks trying to get his daughters to stop talking about curses, and now this stranger keeps bringing the subject up. “Where I’m from, we don’t play with that,†Abshir warns his landlord, who asks the obligatory question: Well, where are you from? Any non-white person with the slightest hint of accent will recognize this scene from their own lives, as well as the white man’s dumbfounded expression when he gets an answer to the question he asked — “Minnesota†— instead of the question he was trying to ask. But, when it comes to curses, Abshir is here to father Asher as much as Nala and Hani. Curses are junk, he says. “But if you put an idea in your head, it can become very real.â€
Then there’s Dougie, who has his own way of seeing curses. Yes, a curse can be a means for destroying a person’s life. Or it can be the framework by which a person comes to understand how his life came to be destroyed. Dougie got into a car accident, which never happens. It happened on a night he was drunk-driving, which never happens. The collision wasn’t even his fault, which means he couldn’t have stopped Melanie from getting killed. It was an act of God, and there’s only one way for him to make sense of such a smiting: He must be cursed.
A curse that he’s seemingly trying to turn into a source of good for the world. Dougie starts “Under the Big Tree†asleep at the wheel of his Mustang, parked on the banks of the Rio Grande with two other unoccupied cars nearby and the words “under the big tree†written in marker on his hand. After his phone dies, he starts looking for his keys in a hungover stupor that, thanks to Oneohtrix Point Never’s unrelenting synths, starts to resemble a sun-drenched vision quest. At the base of the first tree he tries, he finds a dusty shard of Native American pottery, which he pockets and later pets like a talisman. At the second, he tangos with a scorpion. But he finally finds what he’s looking for at the base of the puniest tree in the clearing. Ah, yes. It’s not the size that makes the big tree, but the enormity of what you bury at its base.
Perplexingly, what Dougie’s buried is a bag of car keys, along with the names and addresses of the people to whom the other cars belong. It’s not until Dougie visits the first house — that of Kalvin with a “K†— that he finally remembers what happened. He agreed to buy booze for a bunch of teenagers at the liquor store in exchange for holding onto their keys and preventing drunk-driving. Eventually, Kal and his mom are persuaded to thank a belligerent Dougie for the heroic services of providing alcohol to underage kids and for his “supervision.†The scene is preposterous, but given Whitney is forcing a local man to walk the beat without protection and Uncle Asher is scaring local girls with his attempts to grow a sense of humor, it’s at least possible that Dougie is the member of the trio currently doing the most for the larger Espanola community.
Like in the previous episode, nothing much important happens in “Under the Big Tree.†The episode mostly serves to develop the character of Dougie, which it does in a series of perfectly pitched details: the doorway pull-up bar he seemingly totes from hotel to hotel, the $1,700 coat he throws over his lightly bedazzled, post-grunge wardrobe. There’s the way he apologizes for bullying Asher, then relents when he realizes that Asher’s been telling himself a different story about the rough-housing of his youth.
But mostly, it’s that final moment in the car at the episode’s end. The sun beating down, Dougie flips the pottery shard he found over in his hands. And over and over and over, examining it for any discernible sense of meaning.