As Whitney gives birth, Asher rises out of the world and disappears into the sky. It is a startling image—and, in Alan Sepinwall’s view, a deeply frustrating ending to The Curse: audacious as spectacle, but poorly connected to the show’s stories about marriage, reality television, gentrification, and ethical hypocrisy.
What happens in “Green Queen”?
“Green Queen” is Season 1, Episode 10, and the first-season finale of The Curse. Paramount+’s U.S. listing is dated January 12, 2024, and describes the episode as taking place “Months later…” Availability and listing dates can vary by territory. Paramount+ episode listing.
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Whitney is heavily pregnant, and the couple’s television show has moved forward. Asher wakes to find himself apparently subject to reversed gravity. He rises to the ceiling, escapes the house, and becomes caught in a tree. When people try to help, he is thrust upward and vanishes into the atmosphere. Whitney gives birth as producer Dougie watches and reacts to Asher’s fate.
Why does the finale feel so disconnected?
Sepinwall’s objection is not simply that the ending is strange. He argues that the supernatural turn breaks sharply from the season’s established concerns without showing how it grows out of them. The series has followed Whitney and Asher Siegel, newlyweds pursuing eco-conscious housing in Española, New Mexico, while Dougie sees their story as material for reality television. A24’s series synopsis.
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- Factory sealed DVD
Across that setup, the show has explored the performance and artificiality of reality TV, gentrification, cultural appropriation, ethical capitalism, and the couple’s troubled marriage. Sepinwall’s criticism is that the finale’s cosmic event takes over rather than bringing those threads into a meaningful resolution. It leaves the viewer with the spectacle of Asher’s disappearance, but little sense of how the season’s social and domestic conflicts led to this outcome.
Are there clues that connect Asher’s fate to the season?
There are lines that can be read as thematic echoes. Earlier, Asher promises that he will “disappear” if Whitney still does not want him. He also says, “Sometimes, you have to go to extreme lengths to make your point.” His eventual disappearance makes those words newly resonant, and the scale of his departure is an extreme way to make a point.
Those connections offer a possible reading, not a confirmed explanation of the ending or the creators’ intent. For Sepinwall, the echoes do not settle the larger problem: a callback can make an event feel deliberate without making it a satisfying culmination of the stories that came before.
Does Whitney’s childbirth resolve her story?
Sepinwall questions whether the birth provides convincing emotional closure for Whitney. The finale places a major life event beside Asher’s inexplicable departure, but that juxtaposition does not necessarily answer what Whitney wants, how she has changed, or what her marriage has meant to her. The episode leaves those questions open rather than clearly resolving them.
Rank #3
- Factory sealed DVD
Dougie’s reaction is also part of the unease. Sepinwall finds him difficult to understand, so his presence at the climax does not supply a clear interpretive guide. The audience is left watching an extraordinary event through a character whose motives and response remain hard to pin down.
Is “Green Queen” meant to be confounding?
The episode’s shock and its unresolved meaning are not the same thing. “Confounding” is a useful description of the reaction Sepinwall discusses; the Associated Press described the show as “polarizing,” not as a matter of measured audience consensus. In its January 12, 2024 report ahead of the finale, the AP quoted Benny Safdie on the response: “I want to know what it is that we actually did.” Associated Press report.
Rank #4
That uncertainty leaves room for viewers to see Asher’s ascent as a symbolic extension of the show’s themes—or as a rupture that abandons them. Sepinwall’s review lands on the latter judgment: the ending is memorable, but its audacity does not, for him, make the season’s thematic and emotional questions cohere.
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Paramount+ lists “Green Queen.” Access and plan requirements may vary by country and can change, so check the service’s local listing. Paramount+ episode listing.
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