Did The Curse Already Give Us the Year’s Wildest, Weirdest TV Finale?
It’s only January, but we feel pretty safe saying we won’t see a more surreal and confounding season finale this year than the one The Curse just served up. Let’s try to make sense of it!
The finale — which debuted on Paramount+ With Showtime on Friday and airs this Sunday at 9/8c on Showtime — picks up months later, with a now-pregnant Whitney and Asher appearing as guests on Rachael Ray’s talk show to promote their show, which has been relegated to HGTV’s streaming service. But Rachael doesn’t like the sound of living in an eco-friendly passive house (she likes her basement!), and she spends more time stirring Sopranos star Vincent Pastore’s meatball sauce than talking to Whitney and Asher, who sit awkwardly in silence via satellite. Back at home, Whitney is annoyed that their show is streaming-only, while Cara got a glowing write-up in The New York Times for quitting art. But Asher reminds her that Cara’s people have been through a lot: “We all process tragedy in our own way.”
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He has a present for her, too: He’s going to give Abshir the house he’s in as a gift, because “what makes you happy is other people being happy.” They’re excited to tell Abshir the good news, but when they show up at his door and tell him, he immediately asks who will pay his property taxes. (They will, they volunteer.) Plus, there’s a sketchy guy lingering at his house, and Abshir asks for the cash upfront to pay the taxes so it’ll help his credit. He’s not nearly as thrilled as they were hoping, but Whitney decides he’s just “putting on a strong face.” As they prepare their home for the baby, they have a panel installed that controls the air pressure in the baby’s room, since it’ll have central air conditioning and needs to be sealed off from the rest of the home. They have to push a button to release the air pressure before entering the room. OK, a little unusual, but we’re with you so far.
Then Whitney wakes up the next morning to find… Asher asleep on the ceiling. He doesn’t know how he got up there, and he’s stuck, like gravity is pulling him up. Huh? Maybe they need to equalize the pressure, so Whitney hits the button and opens the door to the baby’s room, but Asher is still stuck. She tries opening all the windows and the front door, and even physically pulling Asher down to the floor, but it’s no use. “You should stay away from me,” he warns, and she walks outside, gripping the floor and the walls. But she left her phone inside, so she can’t call for help. Asher tries to reach her phone from the ceiling, but he can’t quite get there, so he asks Whitney to bring him the vacuum. She hands it to him after a long struggle, but even with the vacuum, he can’t get a grip on the phone. Oh, and if that’s not enough to deal with, Whitney is now having contractions.
She manages to grab her phone and make it outside, calling her doula Moses for help. He tells her she doesn’t have time to get to the hospital of her choice, so she’ll have to go to a local one to give birth. Asher, who has now made his way to a overhang outside, insists he can drive her to the hospital (adding, “We are not raising our baby in this house”), but she asks Moses to pick her up instead. When Moses gets there, he’s puzzled by Asher’s predicament and tries to yank him down. But he ends up hanging onto Asher by the hands as he’s pulled upwards towards the sky. He loses his grip, and Asher flies upwards into a tree, grabbing onto a branch and clinging on for dear life. As Moses takes Whitney to the hospital, he calls Dougie and tells him about Asher: “He flew up, and he’s in a tree.” Dougie is unfazed: “I know exactly what to do.”
Dougie rolls up to the house in a flashy sports car while the locals gawk at Asher stranded in the tree. He tells Asher to just climb down, but Asher says he can’t. Dougie assures him help is on the way… while he texts a producer to bring a drone over to film this. At the hospital, Whitney’s baby is breech and she’ll need a C-section, so they hurry her into the OR while she asks where Asher is. He’s still stuck in the tree, with firefighters arriving at the scene and inflating a big cushion for him to fall onto. Asher tries to explain that he’ll fall up if he lets go and wants them to put a net around him attached to the fire truck, but they just think he’s nuts. Dougie asks a fireman to put a microphone on the branch Asher is clinging to, and the fireman hopes this isn’t just a stunt for their TV show. Yeah, we’re hoping that, too.
Dougie tries to talk to Asher about his fears about becoming a dad, but Asher insists he’s excited about it. A fireman does put a net over Asher’s back, but then he sends up another female firefighter — with a chainsaw. Asher screams at her to stop, but she saws off the branch he’s holding onto, and while it falls to the ground, Asher catapults into the sky. As Whitney is seeing her baby for the first time and crying tears of joy, Asher is hurtling up through the atmosphere, like he’s sky-diving in reverse. Dougie collapses to the ground, sobbing and yelling, “I’m so sorry!” And as Asher reaches outer space and curls up in the fetal position, Whitney watches her new baby being swaddled and smiles. While Dougie tries to explain what happened to the cops, a local guy marvels at what he just saw: “What movie they filming? How’d they do that?”
So what did we just see? Was Asher’s bizarre fate the ultimate consequence of his season-long curse? Was it a metaphor for the spectacle he’s become as a manufactured reality TV personality? (Is that why Dougie was blaming himself?) Or a manifestation of Whitney’s true feelings about Asher? (She did look pretty happy with her baby, even though her husband was nowhere to be found.) Whatever conclusion you come to, we can all agree that we haven’t seen a TV show end quite like that before.
Once you pick your jaw up off the floor, give The Curse’s finale a grade in our poll, and then join us in the comments below to share your thoughts and theories.
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