User Reviews

Well, that just happened.

This might be the wildest, weirdest and craziest thing ever! Whoever came up with the "falling up" idea for this finale is a genius.

I don't know what I saw. It's felt like a fever dream. But I was uncontrollably smiling and laughing throughout.

Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone give another exceptional performance. Throughout the season, it was mostly Emma who gave the standout performance, but Fielder steals the show in this finale. He is so great, especially during the final few minutes. Benny Safdie makes a small appearance and adds more humour to this already hilarious episode. But it's the writing and direction that makes this episode one of the wildest experiences.

It was a freight train for 9 episodes, speeding through the metaphors of a couples relationship and efforts to "do good while doing well."

So seeing these two separate at the finale should not be a surprise... in fact the inevitability of their path's separation must have weighed on Nathan's creative shoulders while writing it.

So the viewer, who has been grounded in the reality of the series, might view this as a cop out. The couple, after all, have had to deal with shoplifting, poverty and gentrification, real world issues. The finale is not quite as grounded.

The couple tie up some loose ends before their baby comes. They promote their show (relegated to a website not HGTV's cable channel as they hoped) on Rachel Ray, but their promotion takes the backseat to Big Pussy Bompisaro's alter ego Vincent Pastore's cookbook (the week of this shows premier coincides with the 25th anniversary of the premier of the HBO show 'The Sopranos') not to mention some eco friendly kitchen wipes. So the couple's success is dampened at every turn.

That dampening includes their 'gifting' of a house to the family they have tried to help since the $100 bill curse that kicked off their spiral. The couple show up like a dime store version of Ty Pennington's Home Makeover to tell the Father of the Cursemaker, "you are the home owner now". But the dad is less than impressed, perhaps because he is consumed with bigger problems and can't value home-ownership when he has spent so much time just getting by and keeping a roof over their heads. It seems that the money they offer to pay for the real estate tax is a bigger need than a deed granting him the house.

Before that scene we get one last awkward dinner with the couple. Asher schools Whitney on Judaism and Mel Brooks' 'The Producers' before he tells her his plans to give away their flip house. He tells her that she is "not a material girl" and this act of charity is good from his skewed point of view. We see her react to his words as someone who wants to be charitable, but knows she just took $40,000 from her parents to keep the show working.

The couple wake up together for the last time as poetic license takes over the finale.

Speculation was that The Curse was going to be a penance to Nathan's previous work, The Rehearsal. That he realized that he was setting people up and pulling the rug out from them when the reality show they thought they were on was something quite different.

But I think this show is more personal. I understand that Nathan was married and divorced IRL. The extraction of Asher from Whitney's life/atmosphere/ planet was coming. We saw it coming. But not like this.

The final shot, after Asher has struck his 2001:A Space Oddesy baby pose, is of the couple's mirrored house. The camera pushes in past the reflection of the glass siding that reflects the outside world, and begins to bring us inside. I think that is Fielders way of showing what we just saw was a tv show that wasn't about another TV show. It was about him.

I still think Asher is a sociopath and a bit sadistic. He gives Whitney a pregnancy/ "push" present of giving their home to the single dad and his daughters. Whitney appears pained by this decision. This is shown in the scene where they are telling the dad, and in a split screen the side with Asher is clear, and the side with Whitney is blurry and scratchy. Whitney has been tortured by Asher all along. I also saw this when he tells Whitney "you have a little part of my inside you". Now that the baby is coming, Whitney is not having it. First Asher is banned from the bed, then essentially from the house, and eventually from the Earth. He is the curse that has been excised.

This episode was one thing and about halfway through it turned into something completely different. This will surely create a lot of online discussion and interest and theories, but will it translate to new viewers, I don't know.

The Curse was something special, I don't know if there will be more, but I also don't know if the show will be something I remember as good. I think it will just be something that gave us a few fun quotes, a few fun moments and not so much more.

I could be wrong, but this was not the right finale for this time. I would've preferred a happy ending for all, but time will tell.

This show was sold to me as a really weird and absurd piece of meta-fiction that would embrace the weirdness of its premise. It has certainly done that in a very smart way, but it hasn't really felt like the show was going to do anything that would be out of the ordinary, except focusing on a bunch of pretty strange characters. I was ready for the finale to be another example of that and simply end it all with a nice bow that would make the audience feel like they'd seen something that was really good, but more accessible than expected. But instead of that, the creators decided to really embrace the absurd in the finale and give us a totally unexpected, yet thematically beautiful note to end the show on. It's sure to bring up some issues with people as it feels largely disconnected from the rest of the show, but looking at it for what it is, this episode feels like the perfect ending to a show that never really followed the norms and would constantly make fun of its own basis. A show that dappled in depth now goes deeper than ever before, and it is pretty much a perfect finale.

The episode has an interesting structure, immediately separating itself from the rest of the show as it is set a while after the previous episodes. The time jump makes room for some new developments to have happened off-screen that have implications on what happens later on in the episode. The second half is pretty much all dedicated to Asher being stuck on the ceiling of the house and Whitney going into labor, giving birth to their child. It may not make a lot of logical sense, but it makes a lot of sense that the show would end on this quite brilliant note.

These characters have always wanted to be in control of the situation, but it has never worked. Now, they're totally not in control of something that is out of their hands entirely, yet follows their roles pretty aptly. Asher has always been there, but no one seems to really want him around, so this episode pretty much tries to get him out of the way constantly, while Whitney feels stronger on her own, which she is for the majority of the episode. However, it comes at a terrible time, which makes it so much more tragic.

They end the show high on emotions. All of the actors really give incredible performances in this, and it's worth noting that the heightened tension makes for some truly great chemistry between all of them. Nathan Fielder has surprised tremendously in this show, showing off some great acting skills, despite often referring back to his usual brand of comedy. Emma Stone is a great actress, and her performance here really showed a different side of her, although she used her usual charm to really hit it home. And Benny Safdie also ends it on a truly emotional note that really worked.

"Green Queen" ends the show on its most absurd note; and yet it's also the show's most emotionally satisfying and endearing moments without a doubt. The thematic depth is all over this episode, and despite its absurdist nature, it truly hits a homerun and works in favor of all its characters and storylines set up.

The stars are great. I love Nathan Fielder and his acting and Nathan For you is comic genius. The Rehearsal was also hysterical. Emma Stone is one of the best actresses of our generation and fantastic at everything she performs. The series was interesting and I was looking forward to the finale. I was perplexed at the conclusion not understanding the gravity of the situation. I tried reading other explanations of the ending but really wasn't satisfied with any of them. Perhaps if the show conclusion was 10-20 minutes shorter I may have enjoyed it more. Perhaps I need to think more deeply around the symbolism in this and the previous episodes. Maybe it's just me and I will like the conclusion more if I sleep on it... as long as I don't wake up hitting the roof.

I think I'm even more disappointed in myself for watching this thing through the entire season than I am in the series itself. And that's saying something.

There were times I tried, I really did, to give it the benefit of the doubt, to try to take the black humor at face value. On rare occasions it nearly succeeded. And Emma Stone was almost always a pleasure to watch, even as she had to wrestle with The Curse's sad and pathetic script.

I say the ending is like the punch line to a shaggy dog story since we had to wait through the entire season to find out what the actual curse was. It led us hither and yon to the point of almost forgetting there was a curse, and then, boom, there it was at the end. And it was so absurd it insulted our willingness to suspend disbelief.

Even fantasy has to have a touchstone with reality to be believable and for us to accept it. This fantasy simply made no sense. As much as we might question it, gravity happens to apply to all of us, even as distasteful a human being as Asher. It was like, huh? This is what the curse was and we had to sit through 10 hours of this accursed thing to get to it? And even it wasn't clear until it was too late to care.

Like so much of the entire series, Asher's demise came down to a massive failure of communication. Everyone involved, including Asher himself, failed to communicate the actual problem, and with everyone wrapped up in their own ego and perspective, there came a point when we could see the result coming with undeniable clarity.

I admit to feeling badly for Whitney and, to a lesser degree, for the baby. Asher clearly was doomed, it being difficult to breathe and not freeze to death in space, but in a mixed blessing Whitney and the baby were freed from this insensitive moron.

I am wondering if there is going to be a second season. Not sure how there can be (independent of the flop of the first season), but we're still left thoroughly unsatisfied by the ending of this one. An ending with a hook drives us to want to see what the hook leads to, but this hook seems all barb and little pull. We can perhaps see how Whitney deals with all this, but it would have to meld into a completely different story. Unless there is another trick that defies belief, Asher's presence can only be from the spirit or imaginary world, not unlike the postmortem Norma in Bates Motel.

There was one plus, though. At least we didn't have to get yet another gratuitous view of Asher's penis. We can count our blessings for that, anyway.

Is this ending a ludicrous cop-out? Or is it what the rest of the series should have been all along? Embrace magical realism. To hell with being literal. I think I would have appreciated the series if there had been a heavier hand with the supernatural elements.

The titular "curse" never seemed more than a series of coincidences, mostly in the characters' heads. And didn't sufficiently set up this ending. And a lot of the series seemed mundane and padded. How much more interesting would it have been if we'd gotten other hints that the natural world that we depend on could be upended at any moment. Then this ending would have been a natural culmination.