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In the Flesh: The Curse s1e10 'Green Queen'
🕑 Added 2024-01-20 03:38:25 +0000 UTC“I didn’t really mean it,” Dougie (Benny Safdie) sobs, sitting alone in the middle of the street as fire department personnel, having failed in their attempt to rescue Asher (Nathan Fielder), mill aimlessly around him. “I didn’t mean any of it.” Does he mean the death of his wife in an accident for which he may or may not be responsible? The curse he placed on Asher after they argued a few episodes prior? The lengths he went to in order to paint Asher as unlikable, materialistic, and dense (not a tall order, admittedly) on Green Queen? Maybe it’s all of it. Maybe none of it. So much of the show’s final episode, which shares its name with the in-universe reality program that has come and gone without much fanfare by the time we catch up with Asher and Whitney (Emma Stone), is concerned with this fractal breakdown of reality as the characters react to a sudden Magical Realist crisis. Asher wakes one morning to find that gravity’s pull has reversed itself on him alone, leaving him pinned to the ceiling. Is it the titular curse, or Dougie’s follow-up? Is it something else entirely?
The Curse’s finale isn’t interested in answering questions. Instead we’re presented with Asher’s predicament and then sent spiraling through the reactions of his friends, family, and neighbors with no more information to work with than any of them. We’re right there with Whitney’s doula, Moses (Elliot Berlin), as he cluelessly drags Asher out from under the house’s overhang and nearly “drops” him into the sky. We’re with the pregnant Whitney crawling in terror through the couple’s sterile, lifeless house as Asher babbles about air pockets and pressure equalization. There are no rules here, no formula, only terror at the unfeeling indifference of a world beyond human comprehension. Nala (Hikmah Warsame) doesn’t even appear here, with her father Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) showing up only briefly when Asher and Whitney offer him the deed to his home. Perhaps it’s Asher’s zealous forced selflessness that uncouples him from the Earth. Perhaps God flicks him from its surface like you or I would flick a bug off a picnic blanket.
It’s a bold decision from a storytelling perspective, to wholeheartedly embrace a shift in genre right as it comes into the home stretch. To take an episode that opens with an awkward guest spot by the Siegels on an episode of Rachael Ray featuring Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore and pivot to some kind of José Saramago black comedy nightmare, to take a show about gentrification and end it with a landlord hurtling into space for reasons unknown, freezing to death and curling into the fetal position as miles below his wife gives birth to their first and only child. What are we meant to feel watching Asher’s final moments of terror and isolation as he hurtles flailing through empty air? Perhaps that without property, without the impulse to feed on the poor for his own gain, there’s nothing keeping him bound to the rest of the world. Perhaps we’re meant to imagine what a world with consequences, with cosmic justice, might look like. There’s no single answer. No great story has just one.
