This week he was humiliated by his comedy teacher, who insisted that Asher tell a small-penis joke that Asher deeply did not want to make.

They’re awkward as hell, but not in a way that really lingers. At this point, scenes involving Asher on his own strike me as completely superfluous. That might be a compelling experiment for the people who make the show, but as a viewer, it can be alienating. By contrast, I feel like I understand The Curse less and less. Most shows teach you how to watch so that, by the end of a series, you begin to sense the moments of significance. I’m not saying I wanted to see a single father stroke out on the exam table, but the chiropractic scene was the most tense few minutes of TV I’d seen in weeks and nothing has come of it. The bad news is that The Curse has developed the habit of not following through, which makes it hard to watch on with much excitement. I could only climb “the blue rope” - the one in which knots had been tied a few feet apart to serve as footholds for the kids with little upper body strength. I, for one, never got to the top of the rope in all my years of public schooling.

Surely, the recently orphaned are exempt from that particular timeworn American trauma.

If Abshir was dead or even just gravely injured, I doubt the series would have spent such an agonizing amount of time on whether Nala could climb the rope in gym class.

I was worried that Whitney’s chiropractor had killed Abshir in the comments section, several of you seemed certain that Abshir had been paralyzed by the man’s unforgiving neck adjustments. Thinking about watching it made me nauseous. I procrastinated watching this week’s episode of The Curse as long as I could (while still having any chance of hitting my deadline).

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