‘The Curse’ Ending Explained: Why Did Asher Defy Gravity in the Freaky Finale? 

Showtime’s The Curse delighted in unsettling viewers from its uncomfy premiere — complete with micro penises, cuckold sex fantasies, and shameless gentrification ploys — to its polarizing finale. After ten episodes of watching Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone play a mismatched couple angling for HGTV superstardom, The Curse pulled the literal rug out from underneath our feet. Halfway through The Curse Episode 10 “Green Queen,” Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) wakes up in the couple’s “passive living” house to find himself stuck to the ceiling. Heavily pregnant wife Whitney (Emma Stone) is safe in the couple’s king size bed, but the laws of physics have escaped the bumbling Asher. What happens next is a wild, mind-bending, genre-defying comic-tragedy. While Whitney is spirited to the hospital to give birth to the couple’s child, Asher finds himself progressively pulled further away from Earth. From the ceiling to a tall tree branch to the ether of outer space, Asher is flung out of reality.

Did all this happen because little Nala (Hikmah Warsame) cursed the greedy Asher all the way back in The Curse‘s opening episode? Did Asher’s friend and the couple’s producer Dougie (Benny Safdie) cause this to happen with his far more vindictive curse in the penultimate episode? Were there clues throughout the show’s run that The Curse would end this way? What the heck does The Curse finale even mean? Was it good? Was it bad? What the heck happened?

The Curse, of course, is an A24 and Showtime series created by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie. The bleakly satiric series follows the aforementioned Siegels as they attempt to establish a green real estate empire in Española, New Mexico. The only thing more important to the couple than success is coming across as altruistic. When Dougie suggests to Asher that he gives a young girl selling sodas in a parking lot some cash for the camera, Asher faces a conundrum. The only money he has is a $100 bill. He gives it Nala and then, unaware the cameras are still rolling, wrestles it back with a weak promise to get her $20 if she can just wait. The child curses Asher, setting off a series of events that become more and more cringe until they become unbelievable. Again, the mostly grounded show ends with a half hour of Asher desperately trying to force his way back into gravity’s embrace.

So what does it all mean? Here’s everything you need to know about The Curse finale, from critics’ reactions to the theories on Reddit…

The Curse Ending Explained: What The Heck Happened to Asher?

So what in the sweet baby bejesus are we supposed to parse from The Curse‘s outrageous finale? What did the episode’s writers, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, and episode’s director, Fielder, hope audiences would take from the sight of Asher tumbling into the cosmos? Well, Decider attempted to speak with either Fielder or Safdie about the finale, but the duo has remained mum on what it all means. And you know what that means… The meaning behind The Curse‘s ending is up to you, gentle viewer.

Not good enough? Okay, well, there are a number of compelling critical takes and fan theories about what the ending of The Curse‘s finale means…

Decider contributor Charles Bramesco tackled the finale from multiple directions, but focused on how Asher’s literal free fall out of reality excavated “the core of grasping sadness that’s always been there” in the heart of Fielder’s oeuvre. Basically, Fielder is an artist who, through Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, has explored the experience of feeling on the fringes of society, misunderstanding social cues, and working hard to game social interactions. Asher’s severance from Whitney’s literal orbit comes with “conspicuous symbolism,” according to Bramesco: “a terrible fear of falling — whether out of love, or into the sky.” So basically, we’re meant to feel Asher’s emotional unmooring from his relationship with Whitney via the visual language of The Curse.

The Nation critic Sarah Chihaya adds a bit of Twilight Zone lore to the mix with her analysis of The Curse‘s finale. She points out that the title of The Curse Episode 5 —”It’s a Good Day” — echoes that of a 1961 Twilight Zone installment, “It’s a Good Life,” wherein a town lives in fear of a cherubic boy with the power to banish people to “the cornfield.” Chihaya suggests that Whitney could be Asher’s curse. Like the boy, she has the power to exile him from reality if it suits her. (And, in both the HGTV edit of their lives and their “real life,” it does.)

Both Bramesco and Chihaya also point out that The Curse is purposely nebulous about the exact meaning of its finale, going so far as to offer the audience a cynical out. When passersby see firefighters attempting to rescue Asher from the tree, they witness the horrific ending of Asher zooming up into the sky, with nonchalance: “So it’s for TV?” “I think so.”

Of course, the lack of concrete answers in The Curse finale is drawing some negative criticism. Rolling Stone‘s Alan Sepinwall found The Curse‘s finale “deeply frustrating,” and surmised that the ending was something of a narrative cop-out from Fielder and Safdie, opining that the duo “began feeling the claustrophobia of the show just as much as the rest of us did, and decided the only way out of it was to have one half of the central couple literally escape the orbit of the whole damn planet.”

Then you have the Reddit fanbase, who are offering their own two cents. Reddit user epicmarc said that the finale represents the “very obvious symbolism of Asher’s rebirth.” The Curse fan noted that Asher tells Whitney there’s a “little me inside you” and refers to himself as the baby (wah) in one of their final scenes. “The doula delivers him from the safety of the house (womb) to the danger of the world. The branch (umbilical cord) is cut, and we get the scene of him flying off into space intercut with the baby being born as he curls up into the foetal position.” Makes sense! Sure?

What do I think? I think it was meant, like all of The Curse, to provoke discussion and leave the audience feeling off-kilter. The series has been not only ripping the painted veil off of the picture-perfect, comforting ruse of homey home improvement shows to show the genre’s cruel bottomline, but also consistently keeping the audience on its toes. The Curse wants to you to feel as awkward about that finale as Asher feels in every interaction in life…and then it wants you to decide what it all means.

The Curse‘s characters might have been touting “passive living,” but with its beguiling finale, its creators are forcing its audience into active watching.