So if curses aren’t real, then what actually sent Asher flying off into the sky? Honestly … beats us. We really don’t know the scientific or magical mechanism that did the trick. What we think we do know, however, is the thematic reason for Asher’s sudden weightlessness.
By the time the final episode rolls around, there is quite simply nothing left to Asher Siegel. He has always suspected that he was supremely inferior to his wife and nothing that happened in the preceding nine episodes disabused him of that notion. Dougie isn’t his friend, but his childhood bully. Test audiences hate him. He flunks even the most basic “comedy in the workplace 101” classes. The name of the show he worked so hard to produce, Green Queen, doesn’t even acknowledge his existence.
Asher isn’t fighting against these realities anymore but accepting them. The end of episode 9 even finds Asher surrendering his entire personality to better live in peace with Whit. Instead of reacting with pain and horror upon learning from Whit really thinks of him (re: he sucks) he begs for her forgiveness and cedes any remaining bit of power to her.
Literally kneeling before her, Asher begs: “There’s not some curse, I’m the problem! It’s not magic, it’s me. I’m a bad person and I’ve been dragging you down with me. I’m all in on you. I’m all in on Whitney. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it. And you won’t even have to tell me anymore because I know and I won’t be guessing. Because I know you, baby. If you didn’t want to be with me and I actually truly felt that, I’d be gone. I’d disappear. You wouldn’t have to say it. I would feel it and I would disappear.”
It seems as though that speech works in the moment. For, despite Asher’s pathetic nature being what turned Whit off in the first place, this level of nuclear patheticness and subservience might actually work for her. But can it work forever?
Probably not. Because after period of extended Asher uselessness, including giving away the Questa Lane home for free and fumbling through an analogy of how The Producers reminded Jews that the Holocaust was funny, Asher floats away. In other words: he disappears. It’s not a curse and it’s not magic but it is a promise. He promised that if Whit didn’t actually want to be with him he would know and he would be gone. So now he is.
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