Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Questa Lane’
Near the beginning of this week’s episode of “The Curse,” a scene opens in an elementary school classroom. At the center of the frame is a boy we have never seen before. He is white and attentive, and the camera zooms in on him. He raises his hand, and gets permission to seemingly go to the bathroom.
When he stands we realize he was never the focus of this shot. Behind him sits Nala (Hikmah Warsame), the girl from the parking lot. She has been relegated to the “calm corner,” an area designated by bright colored paper. The teacher comes over: “Nala, do you think you’re feeling better and you’re ready to join the class?” She nods her head.
It is a bit of staging on the part of directors David and Nathan Zellner that is meant to both surprise and challenge the viewer. By lingering a beat too long on the boy, they push you to wonder whether you’re supposed to know him, only to reveal that a character you’ve already met has been there all along. When Dougie encouraged Asher to give money to Nala in the series premiere, she was supposed to be a prop for their HGTV show. But she’s not going to fade into the background of this story anymore.
Titled “Questa Lane,” the episode thrusts Asher and Whitney back into the orbit of Nala, her sister, Hani (Dahabo Ahmed), and their father, Abshir (Barkhad Abdi). While Asher is still unclear whether there is any sort of real “curse” going on, fate has brought them back together.
Asher buys what he assumes is a dilapidated house, planning to wait for the land’s value to increase. But when he drills open the door, Nala and Hani are inside. This is where they have been living.
Asher’s entrance into their home plays like a horror sequence from the perspective of the girls. They are bickering and doing their homework they hear a knock at the door. They freeze. When they don’t answer, a drilling noise starts. Nala looks petrified. As soon as Asher enters they start to run. Asher is a threat invading their space, a weapon in hand in the form of the drill.
As he follows them out into the street, he is the one who looks suspicious: A strange white man chasing two young Black girls. A neighbor restrains him, but when the police arrive, Asher regains his position of power. While the officer is willing to evict the girls and their father immediately, Asher allows them to stay.
This apparent act of compassion finally gives Asher some credibility with Whitney, who dives into the project of assisting the family, suggesting that they renovate the house. When they return with a new lock, Whitney wants to play the perfect altruist but she constantly tells on herself, allowing her prejudices to seep through in small ways.
She asks what Abshir is cooking and when he simply replies hot dogs, she wonders if he’s serving them with rice — assuming because of his foreignness that might be the case. He replies that he’s just putting them in buns. Nala asks if her name is Whitney and she is taken aback, seemingly thinking the girl who cursed Asher might be some sort of clairvoyant. Nala replies that Asher mentioned her name when she walked in.
Whitney’s cringeworthy attempts at buddying up to the girls, however, reveal crucial information. She learns that Nala’s “curse” was actually a “tiny curse,” part of a TikTok trend where kids put “tiny curses” on people. Nothing major, just ostensibly inflicting little inconveniences upon their enemies.
This should be a comfort to Asher and Whitney. All their (completely unjustified) fears could be explained away by social media. Instead, the specificity of what Nala wished on Asher sends him spiraling. She cursed him so that his dinner wouldn’t have chicken — specifically his chicken spaghetti. And the night of the curse Asher discovered there was no chicken in his chicken penne.
Asher refuses to write this off as mere coincidence, and keeps dwelling on it even as, back home, Whitney tries to orchestrate a cute moment for Instagram. He thinks the girls might have somehow been spying on him or going through the garbage and mentioned the missing chicken to mess with him. Whitney charges him with thinking that “that every disadvantaged person is just like a wild animal going through our garbage,” which sets off a screaming match in which they both accuse the other of making racist assumptions.
It is Asher who is more furious, however, shouting about Whitney’s refusal to “validate” him. In the middle of the fight, they realize her phone is still recording. This is the real version of Asher and Whitney — a broken couple who invoke who I assume is a therapist named Lisa during their battles.
But now their messy lives are intertwined with the lives of Nala, Hani and Abshir. They have inflicted their own chaos upon people who never asked for their charity but are now reliant on it, because Asher and Whitney literally own their home. And while Asher is suspicious of Nala and her “tiny curse,” Nala has far more reason to be suspicious of this man who can put her out on the street if he feels like it.
Notes from Española
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The episode ends on a freeze frame of Fernando, gun on his back, settling into his new job as a nighttime security guard at Whitney and Asher’s plaza. It is almost as if he’s staring down the audience, and I’m curious as to what it portends.
Esther Zuckerman
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