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This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Curse, now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.
After a few midseason episodes that raised questions of whether this was all going somewhere interesting — or, at least, whether Fielder, Safdie, and company had enough to say to fill 10 hours — the story finally gets moving again with “Self-Exclusion,” as the Seigel marriage starts to crack wide open.
Early on, we see Whitney once again reaching out to Cara. She’s still blind to the fact that Cara plain doesn’t like her. Cara sees her as a poseur(*) and a privileged rich girl whose lifestyle is funded by her slumlord parents. Whitney thinks they are friends, and perhaps they could be in the reality TV sense of things — especially after Whitney essentially bribes her with money from the aforementioned slumlord parents. But she is desperate for them to be actual friends, to the point where she opens up to her about how unhappy she is in her marriage, how she can tell Asher doesn’t really care about the things she cares about and is just going along with her ideals to appease her, and that she thinks he’s holding her back. These are sad feelings to be revealed to a genuinely close friend, but Whitney doesn’t seem to have any of those. Cara is at least sympathetic in that moment, but still unmoved in general by Whitney. It’s only when Whitney brings up the idea of a $20,000 consulting fee that Cara stops acting completely aloof with her. It’s as fake as so many reality TV friendships and romances, and if some part of Whitney can see that, the rest of her doesn’t want to acknowledge it.
(*) There’s a funny bit early on where Whitney buys the racist statue Cara told her about, fails to properly secure it in the back of her car, then finally drives off in triumph with it, chair-dancing in the car to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” In this moment, Whitney thinks she is awesome, and that Cara will be grateful for this generous gift, without even considering that Cara rightly wants no part of this disgusting thing.
And as if to prove her point about Asher’s lack of character and lack of good, progressive values, Whitney finally gets a look at the TV news report with the incriminating casino video, in which a gambling addict won $70,000, then had it taken away by the control board because she shouldn’t have been allowed in there in the first place. In the background, she can see Asher laughing at this poor woman. He makes up lame excuses for his behavior, but she’s not having it. “You wouldn’t do anything good if I didn’t force you to,” she says, cutting him absolutely to the core. The fight leaves her so shaken, and so down on Asher, that she starts opening up about her feelings toward him during a talking head interview with Dougie. She either doesn’t understand that there’s only so much you should reveal about yourself in this context, or simply doesn’t care. Fliplanthropy, or Green Queen, or whatever it’s ultimately called, was supposed to make Whitney and Asher very rich, but now she may see in it the added benefit of helping her get out of a marriage she’s not strong enough to end on her own.
It’s a rough episode for Asher in general. He returns to the corporate comedy class, again failing to make anyone laugh, and then has to endure the instructor going on and on and on and on about Asher’s small penis, and how that could be an easy source of humor for him. Asher doesn’t want to hear this, and the other students really don’t want to hear this, and somehow Asher is the one who gets punished and kicked out of the class. His furious response is the most emotion Nathan Fielder has perhaps ever shown on screen. Much of it is obviously in response to the humiliation this idiot just put him through. But you also get the sense that Asher recognizes, just as much as his wife does, that there is very little about him that is special or good. What does it say about him that his most notable trait is his extreme lack of endowment? Later, we see him listening to a recorded conversation with Whitney and taking notes. This is the closest so far that this show has edged into the territory of Fielder’s The Rehearsal, but this guy clearly isn’t capable of being appealing to his wife without a lot of research and practice, and he understands that.
The episode is bookended by a pair of Nala scenes, showing her being bullied at school by a girl named Josie. She puts a curse on Josie, and it appears to work when Josie later falls and hurts herself on the playground. It’s frustrating that The Curse doesn’t treat Nala as an actual person, rather than a mystery box who exists solely to make Asher worried that he’s actually been cursed. But whether or not Josie’s fall was the result of dark magic, or just a coincidence, a curse on Asher Seigel would be redundant. He and Whitney are doing just fine wrecking their lives without this little girl’s help.
