At first, I thought the entirety of episode six might be a full episode of Flipanthropy, and I was here for it. Janice and Pascal, the fake pregnant couple who absolutely did not buy an eco-home in Española but were paid 50 bucks to pretend they did, are pretty good TV. They don’t even crack when Whitney, in the process of gifting them an “heirloom” piece of Native American pottery, explains that a bowl can also serve an unspecified “social function,” presumably by holding stuff. Janice and Pascal pick up their rollers and venture into the New Mexico heat to cover graffiti with recycled paint. (“I was surprised the paint dried so fast,” Pascal gamely contributes.) Anyone who has seen an episode of House Hunters will recognize the painful coda: a scene of forced socializing between the new kids in town and their neighbors.
No, it wasn’t until the neighbor-man explained that the weather would probably be hot for a few days, then cool off, that I no longer believed I could survive a full hour of Flip. Mercifully, Whitney, watching the rough cut with just Dougie and their editor, is finally willing to admit that “something feels off” with the show — a show that features a literal close-up of paint drying.
Dougie is impressively diplomatic as he explains that the issue with Whit’s series is that it’s the most boring, inert, frictionless piece of shit ever made. And he would know because, lest anyone forgets the car crash that is his burn-victim dating show, he’s made bona fide shit before. But he understands, Dougie tells her, why she doesn’t want to go negative on Española, why she doesn’t mention the crime rates or the racial tension. And HGTV has made it clear that the “perils of gentrification” isn’t exactly on brand for the network. Which only leaves one potential source for conflict: Asher and Whitney’s discomfiting marriage.
Dougie quickly grabs some iPhone footage of Whit deriding Asher for holding his cell in hand while bestowing the aforementioned socially utile bowl (to be honest, it was gauche) and edits her sniping into the episode. Comparatively, Dougie’s version of Flip is metal. If focus groups are already wondering why a gorgeous ecowarrior with artistic architectural vision is married to a walking micro-peen like Asher, why not play up the odd-couple dynamics?
It’s like Dougie has unlocked the key to Whitney and her secret thoughts and ambitions. She goes from “woman with something to hide,” which is how Dougie has historically seen her, to his eager co-conspirator. For Flip to work, they decide, it has to be a show about remaking Española sustainably and about mocking Whit’s husband’s awkwardness. And while they’re at it, Whitney suggests retitling the series Green Queen. I can’t tell how much Dougie is working Whit when he tells her the new name is fucking fire, but it does sound more compelling than Flipanthropy ever did. But if Whit is the reigning monarchess of zero-waste, carbon-neutral, gas-free living, does that make Asher the king? LOL, no. A knight in shining armor? Stop it. The page? The jester? “The village idiot,” Dougie suggests, to Whitney’s delight.
The freshly anointed idiot, meanwhile, is growing stranger and more aloof. When a bowling buddy named Bill blanks Asher at the hardware store, he stalks him down the aisles and eventually to the cashier. Take a hint, dude. At work, he can barely pay attention to the segment that they’re filming at a local fire station the Siegels outfitted with solar panels. (Spoiler alert: Now the electricity cuts out intermittently). So distracted, so consumed is he by the fact he found some loose chicken on a firehouse counter that he enlists a firefighter to pull up security footage so he can see every person who has visited the restroom since its last cleaning. He’s lost his mind — the chicken went missing from his carbonara one time! Curses are probably not real, but bad luck is. Move on.
Whitney may be boring on-camera, but Asher is just straight-up boring. He calls coffee “java.” I was hoping we’d see Whitney visit the bathroom and leave the chicken just to fuck with her husband, but alas, the videotape is inconclusive. By the time Whitney goes to film the station tour, Asher has so deteriorated that he doesn’t bother to leave his battle station at the CCTV desk.
Which I suppose is just as well, because Dougie and Whitney are now full-on colluding to make Asher look like a drip. They’re emitting the same exact bitchy energy as the girls who were popular in high school. Dougie encourages Whit to flirt with the firefighters, then encourages the firefighters to flirt back. It’s stunning TV. If I were watching at home, which I suppose I am, I would absolutely hate Whitney, which I suppose I do, and at the same time I would eat this show up, which I suppose I have been.
Sadly, it’s game over for the Siegels, and here’s the moment I became absolutely sure of it. As Dougie and Whitney sit in their director’s chairs, gossiping about Asher and the chicken, Whitney invites Dougie to confess he planted it. “You can tell me,” she says to the man she believes to be her husband’s tormentor. “I’m not gonna tell him.” You can tell me. I’m not going to tell him. YOU CAN TELL ME. I’M NOT GONNA TELL HIM! This relationship is dunzo. Asher has basically been cuckolded. Forget the little chicken curse, man. Right now, a shirtless firefighter with decent chat is showing your wife around the gym while you watch an assistant producer head to pee “frame by frame.”
But instead of getting his house in order, Asher visits Nala to see if she perhaps put the raw chicken on the fire station’s bathroom vanity with her teenage mind. She did not, she says. And though Abshir has already cautioned Asher about talking hexes with his young, impressionable daughter, Asher doesn’t listen. He travels back to 1986 to buy Nala a tetherball pole, which is when they were last available in stores, and then magically brings it back to 2023 with him, where he asks her to prove her witchy potency.
He tests her abilities by having her guess the number of nails he’s hidden under a bucket. Nala knows when Asher has three nails in the bucket. She knows when he has two nails in his hand. And she knows when a grown man asking her creepy questions has crammed so many nails into his own fist that there’s blood running down his wrist. So I guess she’s a sorceress! Nala ends the encounter completely freaked out that maybe she did accidentally cause her landlord harm telepathically, and Asher appears poised to walk out of frame to Google “stigmata curse Africa real or fake.”
But I’ve said it before and I stand by it: Whitney and Asher are the only real curse. In “The Fire Burns On,” Abshir visits the chiropractor that Whit recommended for his neck pain, but he’s visibly uncomfortable with the all-expenses-paid appointment from the get-go. And when Abshir’s clearly in distress, he tells the “doctor” — Are chiropractors doctors? Is this medicine? — and I quote, “I think you should stop.” For most people, this would be a clear signal to stop, but the chiropractor pushes on despite Abshir’s intensifying moans and groans. He pushes the father-of-two’s head this way, then tugs it that way. Eventually, he lies Abshir down, where the man’s face twitches and then goes disturbingly still.
I watched this interminable scene through my fingers. In truth, I barely watched this scene at all. When the credits finally rolled, I did what I imagine we all did. I picked up my phone and Googled “chiropractic adjustment death real or fake.”
