'The Curse' Ending Explained: What Happened to Asher? (2024)

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the ending of The Curse.

The Big Picture

  • The ending of The Curse leaves many unanswered questions and loose threads, adding to the unsettling tone of the series.
  • The bizarre and unexplained events in the finale, such as Asher floating into the sky, suggest that supernatural or divine intervention may be at play.
  • The reaction of Dougie and the neighbors to Asher's calamity highlights the complex and flawed relationship dynamics in the show.

Is there really a way to explain the ending of The Curse? Not definitively, but we can try our best to unspool the bizarre story thread together by the minds of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie. Throughout the series, The Curse kept us guessing on just about all accounts, from Asher’s (Nathan Fielder) borderline unwatchable antics to the characters' motives and, basically, the plot of the series as a whole. But any theory, guess, or speculation would wilt and pale in comparison to what actually happens to our Green Queen and her Jester.

'The Curse' Ending Explained: What Happened to Asher? (1)

The Curse

TV-MA

A newlywed couple struggle to make their vision for eco-living a reality in a small New Mexico town.

Release Date
November 10, 2023
Cast
Emma Stone , Nathan Fielder , Benny Safdie , Corbin Bernsen , Barkhad Abdi , Constance Shulman

Seasons
1

Network
Showtime

Streaming Service(s)
Paramount+ with Showtime

How Does ‘The Curse’ End?

Making their first promotional appearance on TV, Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher are ecstatic to be featured on Rachael Ray. However, even their promotional appearances are awkward as the couple Zooms into the show only to third-wheel with Rachael and her in-house guest Vincent Pastore, as the pair make meatballs and drink wine. Trying to remain as cordial as possible, Whitney attempts to explain her approach to passive homes but only ends up in an argument with Rachael. As their time on the show comes to a close, Asher and Whitney stare down the studio audience with their identical, eerie Joker-esque smiles, from behind Rachael and Vincent. This is assumedly the best gig they could get — zooming into a kitchen show where they can’t even interact with the food.

After focusing the opening 10 minutes of the finale on Rachael Ray, Fielder and Safdie have already succeeded at disorienting us from anything we were expecting, and it only escalates from there. There has been an undisclosed time jump since the last episode as Whitney is now pregnant. The two have prepared a room for their new child fitted with an AC system, negating their series-long argument of passive homes not needing such a wretched environment-harming contraption.

After buying the house for their neighbor, Abshir (Barkhad Abdi), and his family, it appeared that the finale may focus on the aftermath of the purchase. But, instead of reacting in elation, as Asher and Whitney were hoping (desperate for their good deed to be acknowledged), Abshir is unmoved and instead pokes and prods for the official papers deeming his ownership. It seems something may be up, but it's just a red herring – it turns out the only thing that’s “up” is Asher.

Asher wakes up the next morning not in bed next to Whitney, but on the ceiling and that is when the finale derails and takes logic with it. Though there turns out to be no logical explanation for this happening, Asher and Whitney are convinced that there are “air pockets” responsible. This notion leads to a very pregnant Whiteny crawling around the house like an animal as if the floor were lava, fearful that she too may be sucked up into the ceiling. Asher never makes it back to the ground.

As Whitney is carted off to the hospital to give birth to their son, Asher clings to a tree begging for his life while a group of firefighters and Dougie (Benny Safdie) laugh about how insane he’s gone. Denying Asher’s claim that he needs to be hoisted down in a very specific manner to not float into space, the firefighters instead chainsaw the branch Asher clings to as a last resort. Screaming his head off, only we, the audience, and Asher realize what will happen when the saw breaks through. In a scene you need to see to believe, Asher goes soaring – hurtling – into the sky, untethered from the tree. Despite filming the entire fiasco, Dougie stops laughing as he realizes the gravity (or lack thereof) of the situation as Whitney gives birth to a child who will never meet his father.

What Happened to Asher?

The Asher anomaly could be linked to a million and one things. With no actual explanation, we’re left to speculate just what in the actual hell could’ve caused that. The first and most obvious answer in a show titled The Curse would be the curse. Having believed he was cursed by Abshir’s daughter, Nala (Hikmah Warsame), the show’s namesake actually took a backseat to the majority of the other events happening in the show, but you could tell it was always on Asher’s mind. Perhaps, the curse finally exacted itself on Asher, sending him up into the hemisphere. It’s a weird next step after being haunted by a mysterious bathroom chicken, but then again, when did curses ever make sense?

Another possibility could be related to his relationship with Whitney. Throughout the series, we got the fly-on-the-wall perspective of how the newlyweds operate as a couple, and it doesn’t take a marriage counselor to see that they aren’t the most stable pairing. Things seemed to reach a point of no return when Whitney conspired with Dougie to film a piece about how unhappy she was in her marriage and her unilateral decision to retitle the show "Green Queen" despite Asher still being the co-host.

In the penultimate episode, as their marriage crumbles past the point of no return after a screening of "Green Queen," Asher launches into a passionate speech to Whitney about how he’s realized that there is no curse – that he’s a terrible person and that everything that’s happened is because of him. Practically on top of her, spittle falls from Asher’s mouth as he tells Whitney he’s willing to do anything to make their relationship work – even “going away.”

Related

The 10 Most Memorable Scenes and Skits From Nathan Fielder's 'The Rehearsal'

Feels like a show made by someone who graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades.

While there is no direct confirmation of the supernatural (though Asher’s incident seems proof enough), perhaps Asher’s impassioned speech triggered some sort of divine intervention, accepting his apology as an admittance of guilt and sentencing him to his uncanny demise.

Finally, the most probable explanation is simply that there is no explanation. So much happens in The Curse, and we don’t get an answer or closure to even a fraction of the subplots, so why would we expect to get one here? The show is inherently unsettling and our protagonist pair is so far removed from reality that this could also be summed up as par for the course. One could spend all day speculating as to how this could’ve possibly happened, but considering the tone of the series, maybe this was always in the cards for Asher.

‘The Curse’ Leaves Too Many Loose Threads

At the rate of storylines created by the conclusion of The Curse’s 10-episode run, it has to have been intentional that Fielder and Safdie left some of the series' biggest questions unanswered – but that doesn’t mean it works. Aside from Asher floating into oblivion, The Curse owes us an answer to some of the other inexplicable events – namely, who was that in the car stalking Whitney at the start of Episode 9? Why was Abshir so cagey about having the home bought for him? Will people just continue to steal from Whitney’s Espanola stores? That can’t be lucrative, especially now that she is a single mother with an infant child to look after. The Curse ambitiously tackles so much that there was no chance it would be able to address these questions, but it would have been nice and perhaps added a bit more depth to the series as a whole.

The Curse is better suited when it asks the “what happens next” questions that will likely never be answered. For example, the nurse asks Whitney if she’d like to have her husband in the room after the birth of her child… we know their relationship was on the rocks, but one can only imagine how Whitney will react now that Asher is gone forever.

Most intriguing is the reaction of Dougie and the neighbors witnessing the Asher calamity. Dougie is one of, if not the most interesting character in The Curse, a chaotic force with bottled-up shame. His consistent torment and abuse of Asher continue until his last moments as Dougie fights to film every bit of the fiasco he can, even going as far as to have a firefighter place a mic in the tree with him. It isn’t until Asher floats away that Dougie has the reality check he’s needed all season… Asher was his only real friend and now he’s gone. Dougie could’ve done something, at least tried to help him, but instead, he laughed it up with the firefighters and brought out the drone for extra coverage.

While it stings and subsequently leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, we didn’t get an actual explanation of the wacky events of the finale. The choice to end The Curse on the note of Dougie’s despair and the neighbor’s bewildered amusement was brilliant. The neighbors, after conversing with one another, conclude that Asher’s calamity was some bit of TV magic — a segment for a new HGTV show — and in the end, isn’t that all Asher and Whitney wanted?

All episode of The Curse are available to stream on Paramount+ in the U.S.

Watch on Paramount+

'The Curse' Ending Explained: What Happened to Asher? (2024)

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