I procrastinated watching this week’s episode of The Curse as long as I could (while still having any chance of hitting my deadline). Thinking about watching it made me nauseous. I was worried that Whitney’s chiropractor had killed Abshir; in the comments section, several of you seemed certain that Abshir had been paralyzed by the man’s unforgiving neck adjustments.
The good news is that we were all wrong. If Abshir was dead or even just gravely injured, I doubt the series would have spent such an agonizing amount of time on whether Nala could climb the rope in gym class. Surely, the recently orphaned are exempt from that particular timeworn American trauma. I, for one, never got to the top of the rope in all my years of public schooling. I could only climb “the blue rope†— the one in which knots had been tied a few feet apart to serve as footholds for the kids with little upper body strength.
The bad news is that The Curse has developed the habit of not following through, which makes it hard to watch on with much excitement. I’m not saying I wanted to see a single father stroke out on the exam table, but the chiropractic scene was the most tense few minutes of TV I’d seen in weeks and nothing has come of it. Most shows teach you how to watch so that, by the end of a series, you begin to sense the moments of significance. By contrast, I feel like I understand The Curse less and less. It’s untrustworthy. That might be a compelling experiment for the people who make the show, but as a viewer, it can be alienating.
Let’s take a little dive into Asher. At this point, scenes involving Asher on his own strike me as completely superfluous. They can be funny but not hugely funny. They’re awkward as hell, but not in a way that really lingers. This week he was humiliated by his comedy teacher, who insisted that Asher tell a small-penis joke that Asher deeply did not want to make. Then, when several class members were offended, the teacher used him as a scapegoat for his own poor judgment. The scene was a bit funny, and yes, it was supes awk. But I have no confidence that it will mean anything. Without pathos or consequence, Asher’s scenes are mostly about the audience’s endurance for the absurd.
Comedy, we’re told, is about emotional intelligence. People like self-deprecating humor because name-checking your own foibles is a demonstration of self-awareness. By this logic, Asher can’t be funny because Asher is barely a self. He is nothing but a parsimonious man with an uneasy chuckle, a wee penis, and an unhappy wife whom he doesn’t understand. Here the small man is sitting at the coffee table foolishly trying to save the contents of the meal delivery he ran over with his car; now he’s looking at the credit-card bills trying to account for every outgoing cent while his wife takes out $40,000 at the bank of dad. Asher’s whole existence on the show is piddling. He’s 100 percent composed of foibles.
For the plot, you have to look to Whitney, who, at this point, bears most of the burden for forward motion. (Dougie, in a much more explicit way, also stirs the pot.) She’s the one pushing the story in her marriage while Asher waits on the sidelines, along with viewers, wondering if she’ll ever directly tell him what’s wrong. She does tell Dougie, though. Whitney sits with the Green Queen, formerly known as Flipanthrophy, director this episode for a series of “confessionals†for their home-reno show; he asks her to comment on the state of the union. And this time, Dougie doesn’t even need to goad Whitney. Whitney is loose. She tells Dougie that she knows Asher less well now than she did at the beginning of their relationship. She sees glimpses of a person she doesn’t recognize and wonders to herself, Is this penny-pinching, ineffectual shambles of a man really going to be the father of her children? Okay, she didn’t use that exact language, but you could tell she was thinking it.
It doesn’t help Asher’s case that the confessionals are filmed the morning after Monica finally airs her exposé on how casinos engage with gambling addicts. In New Mexico, addicts are allowed to “self-exclude†from casinos, which means that casinos are legally required to turn them away. At Whistling River, where Asher used to work, they would often let known addicts gamble their money away for hours, only apprehending them if they were about to walk out the door with a jackpot. In the tape that Asher stole for Monica, we watch a casino inspector fail to stop a known addict from taking her slot machine earnings over to a Blackjack table, only intervening when she’s about to walk out with tens of thousands of dollars in chips. But we also see the back of Asher, laughing at the inspector’s jokes and patting the man on the back. Whitney is scandalized; Asher says he was only ingratiating himself with the inspector so that the inspector would do the right thing. I don’t completely believe him, nor was that what I found most disturbing. Why did Asher ever give Monica an incriminating tape in which he at least appears to be a chummy conspirator in the incriminating act? Is he really that dumb, or is he that desperate for Whit’s approval?
It might be the latter. It turns out Asher has been recording his conversations with his wife. At the end of the episode, we see him listening to the tape and making notes about how he behaved and what he could do differently to earn back her affection.
Whitney, for her part, ends the episode playing HORSE with Cara — an atypical bonding activity for 30-something women, but, hey, at least it’s fun. They’re finally sharing an actual experience together that could be construed as friendship. Of course, over the course of several scenes in this week’s short episode, Whit basically bribes Cara to this point, but who’s keeping score? Well, everyone involved, plus me at home.
First, in a massive social misstep, Whit buys the racist statuette from the local mini-golf place that Cara showed Dougie last week and leaves it on Cara’s doorstep. It’s invasive and totally off-putting, but eventually Cara lets Whitney in the house against her better judgment.
And it’s not Cara’s fault. She can spot a snake when she sees one. It’s just hard to maintain an icy front when the snake in question hasn’t actually tried to bite her, at least not yet. Sitting at Cara’s dining-room table, Whit confides that there’s trouble in her marriage. If their friendship has felt forced or uneven, it’s because she’s been a bad friend to Cara — secretive and unforthcoming. I wouldn’t say Cara believes this spin, but Whitney’s willingness to make herself that pathetic is hard to reject.
Plus, the real bribe comes in the form of $20,000. That’s the amount Whitney tells Cara that HGTV is willing to pay her to become the “Native American consultant†on GQfkaFlip — a job that requires her to stop Whit from mixing up the Tewa and the Tiwa people and just generally hold Whit’s hand as she publicly adopts the mantle of white savior. Twenty large is the price for Cara letting her art appear on TV, and likely the only recompense she’ll get for letting deranged Whitney a little deeper into her life. Cara thinks it over while the red-masked Indian warrior stares at her from across the room, and what I hope she hears him screaming is: “Take this woman’s money and run far away.†When Whit comes to Cara’s house a second time with the $20,000 she borrowed from her own personal “HGTV account†(that is to say, her slumlord dad), Cara quickly locks the cash in her freezer alongside the ice trays and frozen waffles.
Ultimately, Whitney is not so different from Josie, the popular girl who torments Nala and pretends she’s trying to be friends in gym class. Whitneys, like Josies, get to the top of the rope no matter what it takes; the rules don’t apply to them. When Nala tells a teacher that Josie is bullying her, he spouts out nonsense about self-belief and moves on. No one suspects that Josie is actually a fucking snake, even though it’s so plain to see.
This means Nala, like Cara, is left to deal with this fraudster as she sees fit. Luckily, Nala might be a witch. True, she does not successfully cause Josie to fall from the rope with her whispered incantations during gym class, but a few days later, Josie does fall on the playground. It’s clear that between Asher’s bloody palm (now scarred) and Josie’s accident, Nala is starting to believe in her own powers, despite her father’s warnings and despite the fact that pre-teen TikTok has moved on to other trends. Oh, if only Abshir hadn’t had to live to see this day.