In the Flesh: The Curse s1e07 'Self-Exclusion'

Does Nala (Hikmah Warsame) have psychic powers? The show plays with the idea in its opening and closing sequences, depicting the alienated young girl attempting to curse her bully during a rope climbing exercise, to no avail, and later watching  warily as the other girl trips and badly scrapes herself on the playground. It’s an interesting exercise, inviting us to indulge in the same kind of racist fantasies we’ve seen Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher (Nathan Fielder) succumb to at various points throughout the series. It’s tempting to imagine the show might veer into the fantastical, but isn’t it more likely we’re seeing a kid with a perfectly normal fixation on the morbid indulging in fantasies of her own? Fantasies of empowerment and revenge? We also have Abshier’s (Barkhad Abdi) warning to Asher a few episodes prior, in which he implied that Nala is prone to obsessive fixation, to refer back to. It’s preposterous to imagine this little girl has some kind of Akira-esque ability to manipulate reality, but by approaching the idea not just through racialized paranoia but through Nala’s own preoccupations, The Curse manages to bring us within spitting distance of a profoundly ugly thought and to leave us alone with our own feelings and connections to it.

The system’s disinterest in human suffering forms the spine of ‘Self-Exclusion’, an episode titled for the legal practice of allowing gambling addicts to ban themselves from casinos. The Nevada gaming commission has no interest in enforcing these rules except where it can cynically use them to protect itself, as when supervisors knowingly allow a self-excluded addict to win nearly seventy thousand dollars before stepping in to confiscate her winnings and eject her from the premises. Nala’s gym teacher’s indifference to her bullying at the hands of white students mirrors this unofficial but omnipresent policy of institutional neglect. “Believe in yourself,” he replies, obviously out of his depth and uninterested in fixing anything with which he’s being confronted. Then there’s Asher, whose amusement over the gambling addict’s woes is caught on tape in the very film he furnishes to reporters to get himself out of hot water over the footage from the pilot’s interview scene.

Asher’s excuses to an outraged Whitney as to why he didn’t step in are weak borscht, but no weaker than her contention that she made him do the right thing. Whitney only proffered the idea of breaking the story because the two of them would have faced negative publicity. “You’d never do anything good if I didn’t make you,” she tells him through a closed door. Throughout the episode you can see her armoring herself against him, preparing to hurt and alienate him through the show by getting to their mutual acquaintances first, by rationalizing their shared misdeeds as his alone. Her sudden efforts to bond with Dougie and Cara (Nizhonniya Luxi Austin) take on a more cynical tone in this light. As in the distorted mirror shots used throughout the series and in its title sequence, the identities of the show’s characters are in flux, transforming not just internally but in relation to each other.