This jeans situation has gotten out of hand on The Curse. Or rather, should I say, it’s getting out of store, because that’s where all the jeans are going. OK, bad joke. But it’s better than anything Asher (Nathan Fielder) would’ve come up with. Low bar to set, but still.
We start this week’s episode with a bunch of teens gossiping while driving to an unknown location. There, they reveal their plan: One of their brothers has been stealing expensive pants from Iosheka Jeans, and no one’s ever stopped him. The plan is to grab an armful and sell them online.
We know Whitney (Emma Stone) is footing the bill for the stolen goods, but these kids don’t. “Is it, like, a promotion or something?” one of them asks Enola (Rosie B. Molina), the cashier who is charging the jeans to Whitney’s card and doesn’t care about stopping thieves. Fernando (Christopher D. Calderon) had been calling the cops on shoplifters, so Whitney, in all her white-savior glory, ends the 911 calls by paying for anything stolen. Good going.
One of the boys in the group tries to flirt with Enola. He asks her if she’s ever taken a pair of jeans; oddly enough, she hasn’t, only because she feels weird doing so. But love is real! The boy invites her to dinner, asks for her size, and waltzes out of the store with some nice denim, which will likely be waiting for her at a candlelit dinner at the nearby Jack in the Box.
But Fernando is tired of all this theft, so he and two of his guys show up to Whit and Ash’s house with literal guns strapped to their back. They thought that the couple was supposed to clean up the town, not create more problems. The couple scolds Fernando for showing up armed, but the word “scold” here is loose. “Buddy, quit it,” Asher says to the hulking man, which does nothing but make him laugh. Fernando leaves with the peace still broken, both with the strip mall and Whitney and Asher.
We get an estimate on where the jean spending is at. Whitney has been charged for $14,000’s worth of jeans. Asher is surprised, but he can’t blame her. That damned curse must be causing this mayhem! Whitney, peeved by Fernando, starts cracking the whip. She’s going to demand rent from these stores as soon as they’re done filming. She’s also going to fire Fernando, which is when the real Whitney comes out: When Asher worries about what will happen to Fernando’s sick mother if they fire him, Whitney immediately mocks him with fake weeping and a baby voice. Not only is Whitney’s marriage crashing down—her fake respect for the Española is crumbling, too.
Asher spends the rest of the episode kicking it with Dougie (Benny Safdie), who’s finally shooting Asher’s confessionals for Fliplanthropy. Instead of trying to flatter him like he does with Whitney’s interviews, Dougie tries to throw Asher off. His questions range from “Do you think Whitney is a better person than you?” to “What would happen if you didn’t have Whitney?”
Eventually, Asher starts repeating what Dougie tells him to say. “Whitney is a better person than me,” Asher admits. “I hire people to get down and dirty for me.” It’s not going well for Asher, and things get worse when Dougie reveals one of his biggest secrets on camera. Asher met Whitney in Santa Fe, where he moved when he was still in a relationship with a different woman. The reason they broke up, Dougie divulges—through a series of thinly veiled leading questions—was because Asher wanted his girlfriend to have sex with another man while he watched.
Asher is speechless until he finally finds the right thing to say: “I’m never telling you anything again.” They wrap for the day.
Meanwhile, Whitney calls up Cara (Nizhonniya Austin) to whine about the “militia” (a MILITIA!) that showed up at her door this morning. In actuality, it was just Fernando with a gun and two other fellas. Cara gives one-word responses until Whitney asks where she’s at; she then invites herself to Cara’s lunch with fellow Native friend Brett (Brett Mooswa). Before Whitney shows up, Brett, having heard about Whitney’s obsession with the Native community, asks Cara if she thinks Whit may pay for his “wisdom.” When Whitney arrives, Brett puts on a real show, thanking his burrito for bravely sacrificing its life to become food.
Whitney invites Brett to an art collector’s get-together at Vivi’s (Antonio Weiss), a rich architect, where she plans to shoot a scene of herself interacting with other artists for Fliplanthropy. Brett joins, if only to continue teasing Whitney about her weird, fake relationship to the Native community. Last to arrive is the cameraman Whitney asked Dougie to send, who tells Whit that this will only be for B-roll. There’s no sound person. She’s upset, but it’s fine; she’ll just record a confessional later where she’ll explain what’s going on. It’ll be better that way, even.
We catch up with Asher. Even after all those mean-spirited comments Dougie made to him on camera, Asher is still trying to buddy up with his old pal by taking him out to dinner. Asher and Dougie debate the definition of “finna,” and Asher says he likes to be included in pranks. Dougie then pranks him by ordering a grilled chicken—the curse is back!—but fesses up right away. Again, he denies any involvement with the chicken Asher found in the fire station’s bathroom.
The pair is really getting along now, but things get tense when Dougie tries to force more alcohol down Asher’s throat. Asher says no, and that he’ll drive. No, Dougie says; he’ll drive. Dougie orders a Coke and leaves the table to go to the “bathroom.” Instead, he secretly asks the waiter for a shot of rum in his Coke. It’s all good, though, because as the pair drives to go fix Abshir’s (Barkhad Abdi) broken smoke detector, Dougie tests his blood alcohol content: .078 percent, squeaking in right under the .08-percent limit. Noice.
The pair stops at the gas station to buy batteries for the smoke detector—and Dougie buys some gay porn too. These penises are huge. “It’s a disability,” Dougie says as he shows them to Asher. The tiny size of Asher’s pizzle, Dougie argues, is much better. Asher clearly hates this conversation, so Dougie starts rapping to “Hell Yeah” by Dead Prez to break the tension. Asher joins in, and he literally says “n-word” while singing along so that he doesn’t say the actual slur—which is maybe a sign that he shouldn’t be rapping this at all.
Over on the artist-gathering-turned-set, Whitney is continuing with her anti-Asher charade. She flirts with one of the men at Vivi’s artist gathering, who invites Whitney to check out the house’s secret elevator with him. The cameraman follows them until the guy says that there’s only room for two in there, where the pair share a suggestive moment together. But the “elevator” is actually a bathroom and the “suggestive moment” is just 45 seconds long.
But wait, there’s more! In a vain attempt to make herself look like a better artist, Whitney pushes Cara to praise her mirrored homes to the camera. Copying Dougie’s exact formula, Whitney forces Cara to repeat nearly pre-written lines back to the camera. In a weird way, this puts Asher and Cara on the same plane: Both are being used by Whitney, with one vying for Whit’s love and the other for her money. Somehow, Whit has everyone in a trance.
Cara grows more and more unsettled by Whit, shown only by the sneer on her face. Finally, Whitney asks about the point of Cara’s art show a few weeks ago, when she screamed at guests in a teepee after feeding them turkey slices. The turkey slices, Cara explains, are pieces of herself. It’s exhausting to be a Native person, always having to give yourself away to the people around you. Whether or not people choose to eat the turkey is up to them. “And you ate it,” Cara says to Whitney, holding her gaze before Whitney tells the cameraman that the shoot is over. It’s obvious: Cara is tired of Whitney’s bullshit.
Dougie and Asher are now dealing with Abshir’s broken smoke detector, which Dougie sees as an opportunity to investigate whether Nala’s (Hikmah Warsame) curses really work. While he replaces the batteries in the fire alarm in Nala’s room, Dougie tries to get her attention by asking her about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”—a story, he says, that’s about “a boy who curses a wolf.” Um. Did Dougie ever actually hear this fable? Pretty sure there are no curses involved, like, at all.
No more Mr. Nice Guy. Dougie confronts Nala, demanding to know more about the curses, then requesting that she curse him. She won’t do it. He offers her $20. Still, no. His last-ditch effort to coerce her into cursing him is to cry in front of her, but then Abshir gets involved, and Asher pushes Dougie out of the house. Asher tells Dougie he was being cruel, but Dougie says that Asher needs to stop “cosplaying as a good man.” Asher responds with a quick dig about Dougie’s dead wife. Ouch. Dougie is so peeved that, after dropping Asher off, he tries to put a new curse on his friend.
Whitney is also wrapping up her night. Driving home, she seems pleased. But we end on something entirely different: a trash compactor. Outside Cara’s home, the racist statue of a Native person from the mini golf course is broken into two pieces. Slices of itself, one could say. Maybe on her way home, Whitney will pick it up and enjoy it for dinner, just as she did with Cara’s sliced turkey.
