In this week’s episode of The Curse, Asher (Nathan Fielder) kicks things off with a win, only to have a huge blow to the ego just a few moments later. It’s not easy being Asher.
Asher attends an auction purchasing a foreclosed home on Questa Lane which is set to be demolished. He told Whitney (Emma Stone) he’d spend $40,000 or less, yet he wins the auction to acquire the spot for $62,500—over budget, to Whitney’s displeasure, but not by that much. At the price the couple is hoping to sell these passive houses for, that’s nothing. Asher bounds out of the auction with a smile plastered to his face.
The smile fades as soon as he, Whitney, and Dougie (Benny Safdie) start watching a recording of a focus group talking about their pilot for Flipanthropy. Although the group enjoys the commentary on the climate crisis and gentrification—after all, what are the Property Brothers doing to offset their work’s carbon emissions?—they can’t get over Asher’s awkward vibe on the show. He should have a better sense of humor, the group agrees. They laugh more while gossiping about Asher than they do while actually watching the show. The group lands on feeling incredibly unsettled by his lack of sexual tension with Whitney.
In order to distract Asher from the mean remarks, Dougie interrupts the video by purposefully spilling blueberries on Whitney’s white couch. That doesn’t work. Dougie tries to place an order for Domino’s. Another fail. Watching the group, I have to wonder if any of these cruel words, which are so personal and specific, were things said about either Safdie or Fielder earlier in their career. The quotes sound an awful lot like what audience members are saying about The Curse in its audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Curse finally returns to the event that gives it its title, when Asher is reunited with the young girl who put a hex on him, Nala (Hikmah Warsame). That land Asher bought at the beginning of the episode? Nala, her sister, and her father Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) are all squatting in a house that Asher and Whitney are set to tear down. Asher breaks into the house with a drill, causing Nala and her sister to flee as soon as they see him. A neighbor calls the police when he finds Asher chasing after the girls, shouting that he has the $20 he still owes Nala, and the cop arrives to explain that the family will have three days to leave the property.
But Abshir argues that he and his daughters have been following all the rules. They’ve been trying to pay rent, but the landlord has stopped all communication with them and halted all property tax payments—meaning the house was repossessed by the government and, subsequently, Asher. Asher has a choice: He can once again screw this family over by kicking them out, or he can fix his relationship with them. He opts for the latter, telling Whitney he wants to give the family at least a year to figure out where they’ll move before making them leave. Ash and Whit are waiting for the land value to increase in Española anyways, so there’s no rush.
Whitney wants to establish a working relationship with this family, because she’s certain there’s some higher force pushing them together. The fact that these are the same people Ash met in the parking lot? “That must mean something,” Whitney insists. Asher goes along with it, but he still feels awkward about taking back that $100 he gave the family on-camera—and the curse that Nala put on him in response—and would rather avoid them.
The couple head to the OB/GYN, where Whitney will receive a shot to terminate her pregnancy. She confides in her doctor that this is actually a “relief,” considering she’s working on the HGTV show, and for a second, it’s as if she’s finally getting everything she feels about Asher off her chest. But no—after all, Asher is in the room with them, hidden in a corner. He has a lot of questions for the doctor. How should he update his app tracking Whitney’s ovulation after this? They can’t have intercourse for a week, but what about oral or finger penetration? These are words I never thought I’d hear from the mouth of Nathan Fielder.
As they drive home from the doctor, Asher receives a phone call from Dougie, who is “walking around the neighborhood”—a lie, we see, when the show cuts to Dougie in his hotel bed—and wants to hang out. Asher rejects him. The show spends at least a minute zooming in on the lonely Dougie, who is loafing around in a depressive state, nothing to do, no one to talk to, and starts to cry.
But Asher and Whitney have bigger fish to fry: Why is Barrier, the coffee shop they started for the show that hires locals displaced by gentrification, closed? They call the property manager. He says he only contractually must keep it open when they’re filming for the show; the same goes for the jeans shop next door. That information cannot get out, or it will ruin their reputation. To cover their tracks, Whitney and Asher hire Fernando—the man they gave a job at the coffee shop in the first episode—as a security guard in the meantime. This still leaves the other employees jobless, but Fernando was the one they featured the most in the episode; it’s important to keep their promise to him, at least.
Asher and Whitney continue to tie up loose ends, going to meet Abshir and his daughters at the house after the Fernando situation is solved. After a prolonged discussion about hot dogs (because why wouldn’t they argue over eating them with buns versus with rice, a curious suggestion by Whitney, on this bonkers show), Whitney interrogates Nala about the spell she cast on Asher, while he listens in from across the room. “Tiny curses,” what Nala confesses she did to Asher, are a trend on TikTok. The little girl says that she “took the chicken out of his spaghetti” with the tiny curse. Asher is obviously freaked out—the chicken was missing from the spaghetti dish in his HelloFresh order—and later spends an hour watching the tiny curse videos on TikTok.
When Asher argues that maybe Nala did really curse him after all, Whitney hints that this is a little racist. Would Asher think this about a little white girl? He says yes, but the pair drop the conversation when Whitney gets her shirt stuck on her head, asking Asher to help rip it over her noggin. He does, and the pair have a good laugh. Wait, Whitney thinks aloud—“we should do this again and I can put it on my Instagram.” This way, the team at HGTV and potential viewers will find Asher more funny and relatable.
Restaging the videos with a new sweater doesn’t really work, as the sweater doesn’t get stuck on Whitney’s neck. At the same time, Asher still can’t stop thinking about those damn tiny curses. The pair soon erupt into an argument: Did Nala see the pasta in their trash, inspiring her, or was it a coincidence? They only stop when Whitney realizes her phone has been recording their heated discussion this entire time. Instead of capturing the “real” side of their relationship, she’s documented the real side of their relationship.
Whitney goes to bed alone, rewatching their argument on a loop. Maybe the fake, unfunny version of Asher won’t be a hit with audiences. Could this argumentative, possibly racist side of him be more interesting on TV? More importantly: Does Nala actually know how to curse people?
