This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Curse, which is now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.
Prior to this week, The Curse allowed the many problems in the Seigel marriage, and in the production of Fliplanthropy, to gradually simmer. With the penultimate episode, “Young Hearts,” all aspects of Whitney and Asher’s lives come to a full boil.
Whitney first went into the HGTV show with two goals: to make a killing in local real estate, and to publicly establish a do-gooder identity that’s in sharp contrast to the reputation of her slumlord parents. Over the course of the season, she’s discovered an unexpected third benefit: with the help of Dougie, she hopes to use Fliplanthropy as an escape hatch out of a marriage she no longer wants to be a part of. (Assuming she ever did, outside of seeing it as another way to rebel against mom and dad.) Early in “Young Hearts,” we see that she now wants to go even further than Dougie when it comes to humiliating Asher on camera, laying the groundwork for their inevitable divorce.
But when Martha from HGTV arrives in Española, Whitney discovers a major flaw in her plan: the network bought an upbeat show about a happy couple trying to make the world a better place, and Martha wants no part of letting it turn into the reality TV equivalent of Scenes from a Marriage.
Martha also wants to downplay the gentrification angle, and all the talk about the local non-white communities, and just focus on Whitney’s passion for fighting climate change. This is a familiar line from executives, and not always an unreasonable one: you don’t want to overcomplicate things, especially at first. But it’s yet another example of Whitney surrendering her principles, one by one, in pursuit of this thing that she believes is finally going to make the world love her.
This means that she has to attempt to mend fences with Asher, even if he’s for the most part unaware of how unhappy she is with him, not to mention what she’s been plotting with Dougie. As always, Whitney is ready, willing, and able to put on a false front if it will get her what she thinks she wants. So she and Asher go out for a bowling date, and she at least seems to be having a great time. (Emma Stone is herself one of the most convincing actors in the business right now when it comes to playing wild enthusiasm, so she’s perfect for a sequence like this.) And Asher in turn attempts to impress her further by confessing to Bill that he leaked the video to local news. He tries to give himself a big hero moment by turning Bill’s insult around on him, bragging, “Actually, I am a tool, ’cause tools fix things.” But Asher is who Asher is, and later the encounter becomes just another piece of his cuckolding fantasies about Whitney.
Whitney’s response when she overhears Asher suggests that this fetish is another aspect of her life that she has long pretended to enjoy. But in other ways, she’s pretending to herself at least as much as she is to the rest of the world. She tries confronting her parents after getting a close look at one of their many unsafe, oppressive properties, but they’re unmoved, and her mother accuses Whitney of playing dress-up with the persona she’s crafted for herself. And she continues to try to buy Cara’s friendship, in this case giving her a huge tip for a massage she doesn’t even get when she realizes that Cara will be her masseuse(*).
(*) Abshir and his family are again absent — the show is really not interested in them as characters, unfortunately — but it’s interesting to think about his nightmarish trip to the chiropractor compared to the posh spa where Whitney is preparing to get a relaxing massage.
All of this builds to the climactic sequence where Whitney — prompted by Asher noticing that the contract has been altered, essentially to prevent him from suing anyone when the show winds up portraying him in such a negative light — decides to show him the latest cut of an episode. We get an even lengthier glimpse of the show (now using the Green Queen title) than we did earlier in the season. It’s highly polished in the manner of most of these kinds of shows, but it also dwells so much on Whitney’s passion for local culture that you can begin to understand Martha’s concerns in that area. In the moment, though, Whitney doesn’t care about any of that. She just wants to use the footage as a way to confess her true feelings to Asher. And when the message doesn’t seem to be entirely getting across, she insists that Dougie show him the material they already cut out, about the pottery, his cell phone, and her more explicit and harsh comments about her husband.
Like so many of Whitney’s schemes, the result is not at all what she was expecting. Though Asher storms out of Dougie’s hotel room, he returns moments later, giving a slow clap and admitting that he had been feeling the same qualms about their marriage for a long time. He recognizes that Nala never really cursed him, and that he has brought all these terrible things upon himself. “It’s not magic!” he acknowledges. “It’s me! I’m a bad person, and I’ve been dragging you down with me, OK?” Whitney is stunned to hear him say that he still wants to be with her after that, but it’s not a familiar romcom moment where his resolve changes her feelings toward him. As Asher keeps talking and talking — including the suggestion that, should he recognize in time that she still doesn’t want to be with him, “I would feel it, and I would disappear” — the main emotion on her face is fear. He is being both dominant and submissive at the same time, once again placing her in the power position of their marriage, but with such intensity that she doesn’t feel she can do anything but agree. As is the case at the bowling alley with Bill, Asher thinks he is being the hero of the story, but nothing comes out the way he intends it to. He thinks, for instance, that it’s a compelling argument to remind Whitney that they often like to say that they’re so good on paper, because it ignores how stifling she finds the actuality of their marriage. He promises her that, “The world will know Whitney Seigel,” which is the exact thing she so obviously and desperately wants, but the way in which he’s saying it makes the prospect seem far less appealing to her. And by the end, when he’s murmuring, “That’s a good girl,” he’s all but refusing to let her go, as if she’s an unruly pet he knows he can tame.
It is perhaps the most disturbing scene yet in a series that’s been full of them, and certainly the most intense. Nathan Fielder has the lightest acting resume of the main trio, but he’s terrific here going toe-to-toe with Stone, verbally bulldozing her while all she can do is try to absorb and understand everything he’s saying.
It’s a terrific episode, easily the highlight of The Curse so far.
