OK, What the Hell Happened in ‘The Curse’ Finale?

Wait, are we watching The Curse or The Rachael Ray Show? I pressed play on what I thought was the final episode of The Curse, so why is Rachael Ray telling me about Vincent Pastore’s new Italian cookbook and showing me his meatball recipe?

Oh, there we go. Several minutes into Episode 10, Asher (Nathan Fielder) and Whitney (Emma Stone) appear on a screen behind Rachael, as her next batch of guests of the day. While Pastore promotes The Wise Guys Cookbook (sadly, not a real item you can purchase), Ash and Whit are here to promote Green Queen, their new HGTV series. There’s been a bit of a time jump, as Whitney is pregnant and, well, the show is complete!

While the meatballs simmer, Whitney explains her passive homes to Rachael, who is suspicious of their value. They’re basically a… thermos? Who wants to live in a thermos? Rachael teases Whitney; Whitney explains her homes as if she were reading from a Wikipedia page about them; Vincent sauces up his meatballs; and Asher stares blankly into the camera with a frozen smile. Whitney gets three minutes to explain her homes before Rachael is back to promoting wet wipes. Vincent wraps the segment by singing an Italian song, and then we switch from watching Asher and Whitney on The Rachael Ray Show to them seated in the passive home.

Suddenly, the audience’s clapping and Vincent’s humming vanishes, and we’re in the silent, cold, boring home of the Siegels. (I still have so many questions: Did Rachael know what show she was signing up to do when she agreed to appear on an episode of The Curse? Did Fielder ask the hosts of The View to sign on first, and they said no?) Whitney is upset that Rachael didn’t ask about her baby bump, but Asher is too busy wondering if Rachael actually watched Green Queen at all. The PA at their house has no answers. She takes their microphones, the equipment, and ducks out as fast as possible.

At shabbat dinner, Whitney gripes about the poor performance from the show. It’s hidden from the algorithm on HGTV GO, so no one is streaming it. But Asher settles her doubts—they’re working on a second season! It’s all good. Still, Whitney is peeved that Cara (Nizhonniya Austin) was just profiled in The New York Times for quitting art. “Quitting art is an art piece now?” Whitney whines. Asher tells her to follow suit—why not quit art and work at a massage parlor? Whitney responds, “I’d have to say it was a statement on the Holocaust or something.”

WOOF. Asher hardly fights back, although it’s shocking to hear a single “Hey!” out of him to defend his fellow Jews. We’ve seen Whitney walk all over him this entire season; something has changed. In fact, it seems he’s working on understanding her love languages, because he got her a “push present” (a gift given to pregnant partners to help them through the labor process) ahead of the baby’s due date. It’s…a model of Abshir’s (Barkhad Abdi) house on Questa Lane?

This gift isn’t actually something for Whitney, Asher says; it’s something for her to do for Abshir. They’re going to give the house to him for free. Whitney isn’t a material person, Asher says, so this felt like the best way to please her. “What makes you happy is making other people happy,” Asher explains. “So, the gift is their faces when you tell them this.” They’ll pay the property taxes. If they go broke, good! They’ve spent their life caring for other people. Sure. Whatever floats their boat.

The couple show up at Abshir’s doorstep the next day, and Abshir is ready to call his lawyer to ensure the property is his. No need! Whitney gives him the good news, and hands him a set of clay bowls made by a nearby Indigenous artist. Abshir isn’t pleased, but he’s also not really upset. His only question: Who will pay the property taxes? Whitney and Asher volunteer to do so, but Abshir is ready to milk them out of their last penny—he asks them to send him cash so he can pay and build his credit. This guy!

Someone is wandering around with a vacuum in the background—who is that? Maybe it’s a cleaner, and Abshir is renting this place out as an Airbnb. Perhaps the other guy is a new tenant, and Abshir is making even more money off this free land. Either way, Abshir doesn’t want to be caught. He tells the guy to scram. Then, Abshir brushes something out of his eye, and Whitney is chuffed—he’s crying! No, Abshir says, it’s just dust. What an unceremonious moment. The pair head back to the car and Asher celebrates, showing Whitney that he recorded the entire thing to rewatch when they need a happy moment.

Back at the house, Asher and Whitney do some baby prep. They’ve hired some contract workers to pressurize the baby’s room, just to be safe. Whitney wants to hide that this is a room separate from the rest of the house, just in case anyone touring it fears that it’s dangerous for children. But if they’re going to such great lengths to make a different spot for the child, wouldn’t that make the rest of the home unsafe?

While chatting with Freckle (Edward Martinez), Asher says they’re only going to let the baby—who Asher refers to as “him”—use this room until he’s a year old. Then, a beat later, when Freckle is giving Whitney and Asher a gift (a dreamcatcher that they notice was actually made in China), Whitney is upset to hear him call the baby “their son.” They haven’t revealed the gender yet, although Whit seems to not have noticed Asher conspicuously divulging it just seconds ago. Anyways, they’re not accepting gifts until the baby is born—do they even want an inauthentically Indigenous gift, anyways?

After a long day, Asher sings to Whitney’s belly in Hebrew and waves a flashlight around it, as she stares ahead without reaction. Then, the pair go to bed.

Little do they know that it’ll be their last sleep together. Something wild happens overnight. When Whitney wakes up, Asher is asleep—on the ceiling.

“Why are you on the ceiling?” she asks him. Great question! I think if I woke up in the same Hereditary-like situation, I would probably scream, but sure—why is he on the ceiling? He doesn’t know, obviously, but he can’t get down. Gravity has reversed itself. Asher thinks it has to do with the pressurized baby room, and tells Whitney to turn it off. It doesn’t work. If that were the case, Whitney would also be floating to the ceiling, no?

Asher comes up with another novel idea: Whitney can throw a towel up to him and pull him down. But in doing so, Whitney is pulled up and they both are stranded in midair. Asher is stuck in his gravity-less corner of the world. At this point, he’s getting worried that whatever this is could be contagious, so Whitney has got to get out of the house, stat. She runs (or rather, waddles) out, holding onto door frames along the way to avoid being sucked up into the rafters.

As soon as she’s outside, she realizes she left her phone and has no way to call for help. Asher attempts to grab the phone and fails, so Whitney crawls back inside and hands Asher the Dyson (product placement?) to suck up her phone and call…who, exactly? The vacuum technique doesn’t really work.

You know what would make this even more complicated? If Whitney gave birth. Boom! The contractions begin, they’re super intense, and Whitney is left unable to help in any way.

Whitney snatches her phone and crawls back outside, where she struggles to figure out who to call first: the doula? The firefighters? A doctor? She calls the doula Moses (Elliot Berlin), who tells her he’s going to drive over and pick her up to take her to the hospital. While they wait, Asher tries to explain the experience. It feels like he’s “falling up.” He also says that he wants to move out of the passive home forever. Good call.

Moses arrives, calls Whitney “Mama” around a dozen times, and shuttles her into his car to go to the hospital. He tries to help Asher down, but in doing so, Asher only flies straight up. Asher is not just trapped on the ceiling—he’s being sucked up into the sky. Moses panics as he holds Asher from flying out into the stratosphere like a lost balloon, opting to fling the floating man onto a tree branch for safe-keeping. Before he takes Whitney to the hospital. Moses calls the firefighters and Dougie (Benny Safdie). Dougie says he knows “exactly what to do.”

Dougie rolls up in his souped-up new car and consoles Asher. But Dougie wasn’t at the Siegel residence to see this all go down—instead, it’s his belief that Asher is trying to run away from his father duties after seeing Whitney go into labor. Dougie calls someone to ask for a drone. Again: He’s got everything under control. I guess?

At the hospital, Whitney struggles to give birth. She’s freezing cold. Moses isn’t allowed in the birthing room, meaning she won’t have her doula to guide her. She wants to know about Asher. Everything is stressful, with Whitney heading into the operating room to have a C-section.

The neighbors have now started to notice Asher, and the firefighters have arrived. Everyone is on the same page: Asher is overreacting to the baby news. Dougie waxes poetic about his own father running away when he was born—but Asher is different, he says. Asher is a good guy. Regardless, Dougie wants to use this for Green Queen Season 2 and asks the firefighters to attach a microphone to Asher so he can record everything.

Asher tries to get his point across: He is not scared about becoming a father—he’s excited. He just needs a large net tethered to the truck to go behind his back and pull him down. The firefighters whisper something about tranquilizing him to get him down, and blow up a huge mat, hoping Asher will let go and fall on top of it.

As Whitney finally gives birth to their son, a firefighter climbs a ladder to Asher with a chainsaw. She’s going to cut down the branch so that Asher will fall onto the mat. Asher screams for help from anyone to stop her—Dougie, the neighbors, the firefighters—but it’s no use. When the firefighter is done sawing down the branch, it plummets to the ground and Asher is sucked into the sky. Everyone watches in complete and total awe—and Dougie asks his drone guy to follow Asher into the sky.

Dougie sobs, but hey, at least his drone guy is getting good footage. Whitney has no idea this is all happening, blissfully unaware as she cradles her newborn at the hospital. And then we cut to Asher, who continues to skyrocket further and further into the air. He’s not just dealing with reverse gravity. There’s something pushing him out of this world.

After some harrowing shots of Asher in outer space, able to see the earth’s curvature, we go back down to Dougie, who tells the police what happened. One of the guys recognizes Asher—hey, isn’t that the guy from that show on HGTV?

Well, Whitney got everything she wanted: an heir, public recognition, and Asher to leave her alone.

In a world full of bonkers TV series, The Curse reigns supreme by living up to its name— perhaps Asher was, indeed, cursed by Nala (Hikmah Warsame). How else do you explain floating into the sky to your death other than supernatural forces praying for your downfall, or rather, the absolute opposite? The Curse was real.