The Curse (TV Program)

A jump ahead in time finds the Siegels almost seeming happy, or at least faking it well enough. Then something absolutely bonkers happens.Season 1, Episode 10: ‘Green Queen’Certain kinds of surprises are de rigueur in television. The shock of when a character unexpectedly dies, for instance. It’s jolting, sure, but it’s nothing too out of the ordinary. Television writers do it all the time.And then there is whatever just happened in the final episode of “The Curse.” Since watching this hour-plus of television, my mind has been reeling as I try to figure out what to say about it. Should I attempt to determine what actually occurred, even though I don’t think there’s an explanation? Should I just marvel at its weirdness? Should I try to unpack symbolically the intentions of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie? Sure, I guess, to all of it. But I also think the pure bizarreness is sort of the point.All I know is that the final episode of this first season (but perhaps not the only season) of “The Curse” is one of the most bonkers, baffling, creative and I think brilliant episodes of television I’ve watched in a long time, the kind of thing that challenges what TV can do.Because here’s what happens at the end of the episode: Asher is sucked into space. Not metaphorically. Literally. The last image of Asher we see is him frozen, floating above the Earth into the stars.Before that, “Green Queen” begins like a normal episode (if “normal” is a word we can even use with this series). We’ve jumped ahead in time about eight or so months. Whitney is visibly pregnant while she and Asher go on “The Rachael Ray Show” to promote their series, smiling awkwardly on a video stream as Ray seems far more interested in the man making meatballs in her kitchen, Vincent Pastore (who played Big Pussy in “The Sopranos”) than in the couple onscreen.Things seem to be going relatively well for the Siegels. Sure, maybe it’s hard to find “Green Queen” streaming on HGTV GO, but the network has ordered a second season, which will include their baby, an addition they think will draw attention. Asher and Whitney are doing a solid job at playacting as the happy couple over a Shabbat dinner when Asher tells her he has a “push present” for her, using the (gross, in my opinion) term for a mother-to-be gift.He wants to give Abshir and his family the Questa Lane property for good. Their joy in the Siegels’ generosity will be a memory Whitney can cherish forever, Asher believes.But when they arrive, Nala and Hani are not present, but some stranger is, and Abshir is terse. He isn’t groveling with gratitude. He just wants to know if they will pay the property taxes for the rest of the year. This is his chance to have the Siegels out of his life, and he takes it. You can see the disappointment on Asher’s and Whitney’s faces when they get back into the car. All they want is for their altruism to be rewarded by the acknowledgment that they are good people. Abshir refuses to give them that, and it’s crushing.We get no tender full circle moment between Asher and Nala. Just a closed door. Does that unresolved tension explain what happens next? I truly don’t know.Because one morning, Whitney turns off the alarm on her phone, and the camera pans upward to show Asher, not in bed next to her, but on the ceiling, his body facing her from above. It’s one of the most disorienting images I’ve recently encountered. But it’s not a dream sequence. Asher’s body has somehow become untethered by gravity.The explanation he comes to is that the house has turned on him. They have installed a climate controlled room for the baby — because they fear their passive house could kill their newborn — which has perhaps unbalanced the pressure inside the structure, sending Asher skyward. But opening doors and windows doesn’t work, and even if Whitney tries to pull him down he keeps being pulled in the opposite direction by some unknown force.What follows is several incredible, disturbing sequences of physical comedy from both Fielder and Stone as they try to solve this mysterious problem. Fielder moves his body like an alien, his limbs heavy as he tries to maneuver around the skylight and tasteful wood beams. He pants and struggles and stretches. Stone is reduced to crawling on the floor for fear she will get sucked up too.In their most bravura moment, she hands him a vacuum that he then uses to try to retrieve her phone, which she left behind in the bedroom. As he struggles upside down, she starts going into contractions.There’s something almost sweet about the way we see them truly working together. Whitney and Asher have been so deeply in conflict throughout the series that we haven’t seen much of this until now. As he tries to secure the phone with the vacuum, he starts counting to determine the length of her contractions. They really are a family now, bound together by these ridiculous circumstances.But then that connection between them is shattered because Asher truly cannot come down. The doula (Elliot Berlin), who has arrived to help Whitney get to the hospital, tries to pull Asher off the underside of the portico. He is successful, but instead of returning to Earth, he winds up stuck in a nearby tree, clinging for dear life to a branch, where he stays until Dougie arrives to help. Whitney is whisked away for a C-section.Having not seen his initial flight, neither Dougie nor the firefighters believe his concerns as he grows more and more frantic. Dougie thinks Asher is panicking about the baby, and he sees this as great material for the show. But when the firefighter saws off the tree branch, Asher is sucked into the sky, high above Española. As he floats up, Whitney’s baby is extracted from her abdomen, one Siegel replaced by a newer model.Dougie is distraught, crying on the ground, realizing that his carelessness has lost him another person. Whitney, having given birth, smiles tenderly at her baby, seemingly unconcerned about Asher’s whereabouts. And Asher, well, Asher is gone past the clouds, his body frozen in space.And what are we supposed to make of all of this? Are we supposed to take it literally? I think, on some level, yes: This is what happens in the context of this world we’ve been watching and its many ambiguities. It is also unmistakably surreal, and arguably mystical. Alice Coltrane’s “Jai Ramachandra,” which we also heard at the end of Episode 3, plays over the final minutes, the sound of her Sanskrit prayer accompanying these sad people.“The Curse” has always played with the idea that maybe some level of magic is real, and there’s an argument to be made that Asher’s ultimate journey is the result of the hex Nala placed on him, his punishment for the indiscretion of snatching that $100 bill from her hand. But I think there’s something too pat about that explanation. I think we’re left instead with a question about the nature of both television and reality, themes that have been persistent preoccupations of Safdie’s and Fielder’s.The final words of the episode are delivered not by our protagonists but by some of the onlookers. A man remarks: “What movie they filming? How did they do that?” A fellow lookie-loo explains, “That’s the guy from HGTV.”Their exchange goes as follows:“Huh, so it’s for TV?”“I think so.”“Huh.”“Huh” is right. The questioner clearly believes — or at least finds it easier to believe — that Asher’s disappearance is just a bit of Hollywood magic. And in some ways it is. But if you look at this conversation in the context of what came before, it takes on a sadder bent.Asher, Whitney and Dougie consistently tried to fudge the truth of their lives for the cameras in the name of good TV. Now their truth is stranger than anything they could manipulate, and just as easy to disregard.Notes From EspañolaGiven that it’s the 25th anniversary of “The Sopranos,” I’ve been thinking about that show a lot, so I was tickled to see Pastore turn up.Cara quit art and was profiled in The New York Times. I’d like to see that write-up.Whitney casually remarking, “I’d have to say it was a statement about the Holocaust or something” sent shivers down my spine.So did “There’s a little me inside you” from Asher.Safdie has said a second season is “not off the table,” but I can’t really imagine what a follow-up would look like.I can’t wait to read a million post-mortems about how they accomplished the upside-down sequences. Did they build an upside-down version of the house?Thank you for reading. It’s been a ride. More

“Green Queen” gets an awkward early screening as Whitney tries to broach her feelings with Asher.Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Young Hearts’It’s amazing what a reality television edit can do. Throughout “The Curse,” we’ve been exposed to what Asher and Whitney look like acting for the cameras, but we have rarely seen what they are like when they are actually on camera, once they’ve gotten the glossy treatment that the Property Brothers and other hosts have before them.The truth is: Whitney might seem painfully fake in her daily interactions, but she performs very well. She’s a natural, and watching a cut of the newly retitled “Green Queen,” it’s easy to understand why the network is so high on her. All of that falsity fades away under the bright lights, which crave that sort of manicured behavior. She fits into her role perfectly.This week’s episode, is revelatory with regards to Whitney on multiple levels, and it’s also a tour de force for Emma Stone, an actress whose natural understanding of the camera and what it can do allows her to play all the facets of this complicated, troubled character. The episode leaves no doubt about just how wrong she and Asher are for each other. But before then, a series of smaller Whitney-related events peel back layers of her carefully constructed persona.Why did Whitney marry Asher? The question has plagued this series. Their relationship is so lacking in any affection that doesn’t feel forced, you have to rack your brain to imagine a time when they were truly in love. Here, we get clarity on some of her potential reasoning. Asher’s infatuation with Whitney provided her with an escape hatch. She could take his name to get away from her old life as a lackey for her parents. After learning that a relative of one of the show’s drivers was evicted from a building run by her parents, she Googles herself under her old name, “Whitney Rhodes.” There’s a photo of her smiling at the opening of the complex, complicit in all of their misdeeds.Asher was a way to disassociate from her parents on paper — even if she’s still using their money to fund her ventures. She’s no longer “Whitney Rhodes”; She’s “Whitney Siegel,” who wears a Star of David around her neck to further distance herself from her past — no matter how merely symbolic that piece of jewelry is.Maybe at one point the intensity of Asher’s affection was appealing to Whitney, who saw something almost exotic in his Judaism. Now, however, she can’t stand him. And what’s worse: Now they have to perform for a representative from HGTV, Martha, stopped by to check up on the show’s progress. When Dougie, parroting what he has heard from the network, explains that the story line about the dissolution of their marriage isn’t going to work, Whitney starts to cozy up to Asher again. And she yet can’t help but feel enraged by his little touches. Asher challenges her to say that she loves him. She refuses, though she will go bowling, clearly a favorite pastime of his, to make amends.During their outing, there is a moment of what appears to be genuine joy between the two of them, but the spell is quickly broken when Asher’s friend Bill from the casino approaches. Bill wants to apologize. He thought that Asher was the leaker, but says he was mistaken. Asher, thinking he is impressing Whitney, confesses to being the “whistle-blower.” Later that night, she hears him quietly speaking to himself, perhaps masturbating, proudly bragging about this achievement. But then the fantasy morphs into imagining himself watching Bill having sex with Whitney. You can see the disgust grow on her face.He approaches her while she’s furiously rowing on an erg machine about new language in the contract that suggests he might be “exposed to ridicule, humiliation or condemnation.” Then an idea seems to dawn on her: She’ll show him everything, including the confessional where she spills her feelings about their relationship. Maybe if he sees it, he’ll listen to her and understand. So she and Asher and join Dougie in his hotel room, sitting awkwardly in the bed, to view an early cut of “Green Queen.”A strange thing is that after everything we’ve been privy to, “Green Queen” is still pretty compelling television. Dougie knows what he’s doing, and you can see why HGTV would be interested in the material. Here’s a very pretty person — Whitney — vowing to do good, and, as filmed by Dougie, she seems smart and capable. Asher, meanwhile, just seems at first like a goofy nuisance, making nonsensical jokes about Arnold Palmers. It’s bizarrely charming.Dougie is willing to skip over the material that really goes for Asher’s jugular — the network doesn’t want to use it anyway — but Whitney wants Asher to see just what she has done to him. Stone’s face is solemn. All of Whitney’s eager-to-please brattiness has been sapped from it as she watches with grim anticipation. It’s brutal to behold. Onscreen, Whitney appears earnest as her minor complaints about Asher morph into genuine concerns about her relationship. The problem is his worship of her.She wonders: “Can someone love you so much that the real version of you completely ceases to exist?” It’s a funny question coming from Whitney, who doesn’t really seem to have a great sense of self to begin with.And yet it’s possible, thanks to the manufactured quality of reality TV, to empathize with Whitney, maybe for the very first time. On one level we know what we’re seeing is at times fake — for instance, the shots of her laughing at the art collector’s party, where we know she had an uncomfortable time. Still, Stone sells the oppressiveness of Asher’s love for her and how stifling that can be. So it’s almost a relief when Asher storms out of the room. He got it, you think.But then he returns, his fervor renewed. He has manic energy as he closes in on her face, telling her she was right. “I’m a terrible person,” he spits. “There’s not some curse. I’m the problem.”Whitney is shocked. Instead of repelling him, she has succeeded in making him cling to her even tighter. “I’m all in on Whitney,” he says.It sounds like a threat. She starts to cry, tears he reads as an emotional outpouring. But there is terror in her eyes.Notes From EspañolaThe episode begins with an eerie sequence from the point of view of an unknown driver who waits for Whitney to leave her home and then drives all the way to the shopping plaza. Who is that?I had to put on closed captioning during the scene where Asher is talking to himself to understand what he was saying, so if you didn’t catch that at first, that’s not on you.Whitney’s discovery that Cara is her masseuse is exquisitely awkward, but does the fact that she eventually decides to walk away from the appointment show some growth? Or does her overtipping as a way of assuaging her guilt undo all that?The way in which Stone flinches just a little bit every time Fielder touches her is brilliant.Fielder’s enthusiastic bowling is almost as unnerving as his enthusiastic rapping last week. Almost.I can’t get over the ick factor of the shot of Whitney’s father trapping a roach in the apartment where he apparently is now forced to live. Her folks might be the scummiest people on this show.We’re in the homestretch, and I truly have no idea how any of this is going to resolve. That’s a good thing, but also I’m so scared. More

In a series full of painful-to-watch interactions, this week’s episode might be the most excruciating yet.Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Down and Dirty’This week’s episode of “The Curse” is about friendship. Or maybe, more accurately, it’s about the concept of friendship and the trouble our protagonists seem to have with grasping it. Asher and Whitney call people “friends,” but that’s just empty language to them. They have no true sense of what it means to be a friend to someone else.The backbone of the hour consists of one night in which Whitney and Asher have divergent outings. Whitney goes to a party that Cara is attending in a beautiful home hosted by an art collector, who also happens to be a military contractor. Naturally, there’s an ulterior motive to Whitney’s excursion: She has a camera trailing her to capture footage for the show of what her life is like away from Asher. At the same time, Asher and Dougie have dinner — a sort of apology meal on Asher’s part for having neglected their friendship.The episode brings into focus just how transactional Asher’s and Whitney’s relationships are. Even their marriage is one of convenience. And we’re confronted once again with just how poisonous Asher and Whitney are to the people in their presence.Dougie, who is so mired in loneliness and self-hatred that he craves whatever companionship he can find, has clearly come to despise Asher for what he sees as a dismissal of his feelings. So he has taken to torturing him with the barely concealed glee of a schoolyard menace. Cara, meanwhile, is starting to realize just how soul sucking it is to be beholden to Whitney at any price; indeed, taking Whitney’s money in last week’s episode has only tightened her bind, forcing her to pantomime her way through her revulsion. In a series full of painful-to-watch interactions, this week’s episode might be the most excruciating yet.In some ways, Whitney should be at ease at the art collector’s gathering. These are her people: rich capitalists who use their interest in art to help mask their exploitation. But she doesn’t want to recognize herself in them. She needs to believe she is like Cara — an artist. So she tells her camera guy not to film the host, and she balks when she introduces herself to a group and a man tells her he works in private security.Whitney parades around the room with a drink in hand, posing as she examines the art in the room, making sure the camera captures all of her angles. She approaches other guests hoping for interactions that will make her look good. Some play her game. Cara’s friend Brett (Brett Mooswa), having clearly heard about Whitney from Cara, decides to play the role of the wise and mystical Native American, and she eats it up. “That was so beautiful,” she says after his speech. “Can I give you a hug?” She’s unaware that when he turns away from her he is giggling to himself.But Cara doesn’t find Whitney’s cluelessness as funny as Brett does, especially when Whitney tries to goad her into performing for the camera. Cara seems to know that she has put herself in an impossible position: Whitney’s money has obligated Cara to be cordial, but at a price that seems to exceed the $20,000 she received. Pretending to be Whitney’s friend helps Whitney believe they are artistically on the same level, which Cara and we as viewers know is not true. And while Cara’s good word, even if it’s fake, lends value to Whitney’s work, the association risks having a negative impact on Cara’s own standing in the art world and in her community.Whitney feeds Cara lines she wants her to say about how she’s proud to have her work displayed inside Whitney’s homes, and Cara dutifully repeats them. Finally, however, she gets the opportunity to tell Whitney a little bit about how she really feels when Whitney asks her to explain her performance piece in the tepee way back in Episode 2. Whitney still wants to know if she was supposed to eat the turkey Cara sliced.“The slicing of the meat is me giving pieces of myself to people, whether I want to or not, and as a Native person that’s basically what you are doing every day,” Cara says. She adds: “Whether people choose to eat it is totally up to them. And you ate it.” As Whitney, Emma Stone’s face changes from an understanding smile into a grimace. Someone finally called her out to her face. Maybe that’s just what friends do.While Whitney is learning some hard truths about herself, Asher and Dougie are engaged in an emotional battle of performative friendship. In a way, their date starts with Dougie’s interview with Asher, where he is quite evidently trying both to unnerve him and to catch him in linguistic traps that will make him look terrible in the edit. Dougie brings up details we have never heard about Asher before, among them that he came to New Mexico for another relationship, which ended before he got together with Whitney.Although Asher is uncomfortable during the interview, he leans into congeniality at dinner with awkward attempts at niceties, saying things like “I’m happy you’ve been such a good friend to me” as Dougie throws back beers. And Dougie is hardly a victim. He is also a bully. During the interview, he brings up Asher’s embarrassing sexual proclivities; during their meal, he secretly orders chicken to the table, just to freak Asher out.When Asher has to go to Abshir’s to change the battery in a smoke detector, Dougie comes up with a plan. He wants to see if Nala will curse him with the same chicken-related fate as Asher. If the chicken they have taken home from the restaurant — Dougie’s joke — disappears, then it worked. Asher is resistant, but Dougie forges ahead, essentially barging his way into Nala’s room under the ruse of needing to do housework. As he asks Nala to curse him, he grows desperate, crying. She screams for her father, terrified by this strange man weeping beside her bed.It’s a sequence that’s almost hard to parse. Is Dougie genuinely sobbing? Is he doing this for Asher? Maybe he needs to believe in curses so he can have something to blame his awful life on? Regardless of his motives, Nala doesn’t fulfill his request.When Asher and Dougie get back into the car, they start to fight. It leads to perhaps the most brutal exchange of the series so far. “Does this get exhausting,” Dougie asks, “cosplaying as a good man?” Asher replies, “Like you’re one to talk.” Dougie wants to know what that’s supposed to mean. Asher then coup de grâce: “I don’t know, ask your wife.” He quickly apologizes, realizing the cruelty of his blow. But something has shifted. Even the score sounds different. It is harsher and less eerie, like something out of a sci-fi movie.As Asher moves to exit the car, he tries again to make amends. Dougie coldly agrees, saying, “We need more friends than enemies in this world, right?” His cute little axiom sounds like a threat, and at this moment Asher really doesn’t have any friends. Neither does Whitney.And now Asher has two curses on his back: One from Nala and one from Dougie, who curses him as soon as he gets out of the car. While Nala’s might have been mostly child’s play, there’s deeper malice behind Dougie’s hex.Notes from EspañolaIt’s always a jolt when an episode begins with entirely new faces. This one started with some local kids who have learned that they can steal jeans with no repercussions. There might, however, be some repercussions for Asher and Whitney in the form of Fernando, who sees them as enabling crime.Whitney has spent about $14,000 on the stolen jeans. Jeez.Whitney’s baby voice as she whines to Asher after Fernando leaves is one of the most haunting, grotesque things I have ever heard. Props to Emma Stone for that.Once again, Whitney has an interaction with the Española Sikh community, this time in the form of a man at the party who flirts with her. I’m starting to wonder if this is all going to end with her joining.“Exhausting” is a term that keeps coming up. The experience of being Native in this country is “exhausting” to Cara; Dougie asks Asher if cosplaying as a good person gets “exhausting.” The performance of life is tiring, and “The Curse” is digging into that. More

This week characters young and old are indulging in magical thinking.Can you make yourself believe something even if it isn’t true? The characters on “The Curse,” either consciously or unconsciously, seemingly think that might be possible. It’s certainly a disease of sorts that Asher and Whitney have, and it seems like it might be trickling down to Nala.The episode this week is bookended by two scenes of Nala in school. It opens with her in gym class. As her bully climbs a rope Nala whispers, “fall,” trying to see if she can hurt her. For a moment both Nala and the audience are convinced that maybe she’ll plummet. Nala’s focus is intense. There is a close-up of the hook holding the rope to the ceiling. It quivers. It wouldn’t be surprising if it breaks. But it doesn’t. The girl makes it down safely.Has Nala convinced herself she has magical powers? Has Asher convinced her she does with all of his questions? Regardless, whether or not she thinks she can make her classmate fall, she gives it a shot. At first it seems fruitless, but then in the episode’s final moment her enemy runs into a wall in the playground. Maybe there’s something to Nala’s belief after all.Not that Nala actually really knows all that much. As her enemy crashes into the wall we hear Nala telling another girl there’s makeup you can wear for an entire month. We are reminded that she has the knowledge of a child and probably doesn’t wield metaphysical power.Whitney has a similar, parallel story line specifically centered around the artist Cara Durand. Whitney and Cara’s relationship has always seemed one sided — Whitney thinks they are friends; Cara seems less convinced. Whether or not they can actually be called pals, it’s clear that Whitney’s interest in Cara isn’t entirely about camaraderie: For Whitney, Cara’s friendship is also a business partnership. If Cara likes her, she’ll sign the release to let her art be featured on “Fliplanthropy.” If Cara likes her, she’ll agree to be a consultant on the show, bolstering Whitney’s credibility with the Native community.In an effort to make this happen, Whitney shows up at Cara’s door bearing a truly strange gift. She buys an offensive statue that Cara had pointed out to Dougie from a mini golf course, and gives it to Cara, explaining that she can use it in her art and “recontextualize it.” Cara appears disturbed. Whitney’s sense of altruism is askew — in thinking she is helping a Native artist she just brought a terrible stereotype into her house. Yes, Cara clearly plays with these images in her work, but Whitney doesn’t realize how off-putting it is for a white person to essentially force her to grapple with this kind of depiction.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

Asher seems to be losing his grip, except when what’s in his grip is a bunch of nails.Season 1, Episode 6: ‘The Fires Burn On’The final line of this week’s episode of “The Curse” finds Asher saying, “I’m fine, don’t worry about me.” But I am starting to worry about him. It’s not quite sympathy — Asher hasn’t done enough to deserve that. Maybe it’s something more akin to concern. After all, as he says it, his left hand is dripping with blood. It’s his own fault. He filled his palm with nails to test whether Nala has some sort of psychic powers. This is a sign of a man losing his grip with reality.And there is another reason to feel worried for Asher: Whitney and Dougie have teamed up behind his back. Whitney’s hostility toward Dougie finally eases when she discovers that she needs him to make her show more interesting. And Dougie’s idea for making “Fliplanthropy” into something less utterly boring? Humiliate Asher on television.From the very first episode of “The Curse,” Dougie and Whitney have had conflicting ideas about what “Fliplanthropy” should be. Whitney sees it as a brand building exercise, a chance to show how good she is, a way of assuaging her guilt over her slumlord parents’ financial support. But that doesn’t make for entertaining television. Dougie, he of the burn victim dating show, understands that.In the first couple of moments of this week’s installment, we see what the Whitney version of “Fliplanthropy” looks like. It is incredibly dull. The term “like watching paint dry” has never been more apt: Literally, the show features a whole segment in which there’s a discussion of paint drying. Whitney finally realizes, “something feels off,” an almost painfully obvious revelation.Dougie proposes a solution. He knows she doesn’t want to create drama around Española itself, which means they can’t discuss any of the crime or racial tension in the community. But there is a ready source of drama staring them right in the face: Whitney and Asher. Of course their marital strife is evident onscreen — in one shot, you can see her rolling her eyes at him because he has his phone in his hand while giving a gift of pottery. Why not highlight that and make their conflict the driving force of the show?Dougie sells this to Whitney as a way to make herself more appealing, as well as a way to make the series entertaining. If the audience believes she is telling them the truth about her relationship with Asher, then they will believe she is telling them the truth about everything else. Whitney is into this plan, and she doesn’t really stop to consider the potential damage to her already fragile marriage. She even has a new idea for the title of the show: “Green Queen.” If that title refers to her, what does that make Asher? Dougie suggests: “the village idiot.” Whitney laughs. It’s so mean.No one runs this plan by Asher as what is still known as “Fliplanthropy” continues to film at a local Española firehouse. Whitney flirts shamelessly with the firemen to make Asher jealous, but any potential for a blowup over that indiscretion goes away once Asher makes a mysterious discovery in the bathroom. After peeing — yes, once again we see a shot of his small penis — Asher finds a pile of cooked chicken on the sink, holding it up to his nose to confirm that it is indeed poultry.He accuses Dougie of putting it there to mess with him, an accusation Dougie denies, and then goes on a crusade to find the culprit. He interrogates the firemen, trying to discern if they had any chicken in their meals recently. (They didn’t.) Then he convinces one of them to let him go through security footage. He is so preoccupied with this that he has no idea that Whitney and Dougie are conspiring to make him look like a fool on HGTV. His absent-minded stare during filming fits perfectly within the story they are creating. It doesn’t matter that he is thinking about chicken instead of Whitney.Without a clear answer as to where that chicken came from, Asher once again suspects that Nala might be behind it. So, while doing work on her house, he starts quizzing her in an effort to determine whether she has metaphysical powers. He does this at first by hiding nails under a bucket and asking her to guess how many there are. She is puzzled by his game, but she answers nonchalantly — and correctly, three times. Clearly unnerved and tense, Asher grabs a fistful of nails and asks her to guess again. But she is too upset to guess when she sees the blood running out of his palm.At under 40 minutes, this week’s episode is the shortest of the season yet, and it does feel more transitional than the rest. The plot moves along quickly. Even though it’s still deeply uncomfortable, it seems to linger less in each setup so as to get us faster to the episode’s unnervingly bloody end.The show seems to be entering a new phase with this Whitney and Dougie alliance, one in which Asher will grow more and more isolated. Already, he has no one. His own wife is actively undermining him with his supposed childhood pal. He even can’t reach out to his old casino friend Bill, who ignores him in the hardware store. All he has is himself and his spinning mind, trying to figure out whether something supernatural is happening to him or it’s just a prank. Asher is often awful and off-putting, and yet, I pity him, and yes, I am worried.Notes from EspañolaI’m really intrigued by the interlude featuring Abshir and the chiropractor, though I’m not sure what to fully make of it. The scene may be one of the most upsetting in “The Curse” so far, and that’s saying a lot. There’s a look of terror on Abshir’s face as his body is stretched and his bones are loudly cracked. This is supposed to be curing him of his pain, but evidently it is a deeply painful experience, and the scene is filmed in a particularly violent way. I can’t get it out of my head, especially the way it appears almost without context.Once again, I’m left wanting more of this budding Cara-Dougie relationship, even if he won’t actually date her because she smokes. (He doesn’t want another wife dying on him.) It’s making Whitney extremely jealous.Notice the charge that popped up on Whitney’s phone from the jeans store. How much has she paid for stolen jeans?”Green Queen” is a terrible title for a show. More