Diksha Sundriyal
Peacock’s comedy-drama series, ‘Laid,’ starts Stephanie Hsu as Ruby Yao, whose life takes a very unexpected turn when she discovers that her ex-boyfriends are dying. The first couple of deaths seem like a coincidence, but the more people start to die, the more Ruby realizes that they have all had a connection with her in the past. While she tries to figure out why this is happening, she also falls in love with Isaac. She’d taken over the job of arranging his parents’ wedding vows renewal ceremony, but the more time she spent with him, the more she wanted to be with him. But the fact that anyone she sleeps with is dying makes things very complicated for her. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Who Does Ruby Transfer the Hex To?
Ruby is disturbed by the fact that all her exes seem to be dying one after another, but she gets particularly concerned after she sleeps with Zach, her best friend AJ’s boyfriend. If the trend continues, Zach will also die. Moreover, she also needs to find a way to stop this from happening because until the problem is solved, she cannot be with Isaac, as it would literally kill him. As they make their way through the list of people she has slept with, Ruby reveals that she can’t remember whether she slept with her colleague, Brad. She asks him if something sexual ever happened between them, but he reveals that they never slept together, though they did make out a couple of times. While Ruby is relieved to hear this because it means Brad will not die, when she mentions all the deaths to him, he is shocked.
Brad reveals that the deaths are happening because he put a hex on Ruby. Or at least, a woman he met in a bar with did. It turns out that Brad had been very unhappy with the way Ruby treated him, and one night, he got extremely drunk and ended up at a bar, sitting next to a mysterious woman to whom he told everything he felt about Ruby. The woman offered to put a hex on Ruby, and Brad agreed to it. However, he never thought it would work. As months passed and nothing happened, Brad thought that the woman had messed with him and there was no hex. But when Ruby comes to him with the news that her exes are dying one by one, he realizes that the hex has been working in the background.
With AJ’s help, Ruby finds the woman who put the hex on her. The woman reveals that she cannot take back the hex, but there is a way to get rid of it. She tells Ruby a series of things that she must do to pass on the hex to someone else. Now, Ruby finds herself in a moral dilemma. If she doesn’t pass on the hex, her exes, including Zach, will continue to die. But if she passes it on to someone else, that person’s exes will start to die, and the deaths will still happen. After a lot of back and forth on the idea, it is eventually decided that the hex should be passed on to someone for whom the exes dying wouldn’t be such a big deal. Eventually, they decide on Jill, the old lady who lives in the apartment above them and who has always been a bit rude to them.
Ruby does exactly what the hex lady told her, and it is decided that they should wait a month to see if the hex will work. There is only one man before Zach whom Ruby slept with: Jason. If Jason survives, the hex is broken. A month later, when Ruby finds Jason, he is alive and well. She is ecstatic to realize that the hex has indeed broken. As if to confirm things, she and Isaac see an old man die in the middle of the street. Ruby knows for sure that she had nothing to do with that old man’s death. If anything, it seems he might be Jill’s ex, and if Jill’s exes have started dying, it means that the hex has been passed on from Ruby, and she is finally free, or so it seems for a minute.
Do Ruby and Isaac End Up Together?
Before Ruby realizes that she may have a curse, she meets Isaac, with whom she falls in love. Even though he has a girlfriend, the chemistry between them is so undeniable that he eventually breaks up with his girlfriend. Ruby is glad to discover that he feels the same as her, but she cannot be with him because the moment they sleep together, he is going to die. Due to this, Ruby decides to deal with her curse before taking things forward with Isaac. But Isaac doesn’t react well to this self-imposed distance. When Ruby tells him about her exes dying, he takes it as a sign that she is not interested in him, but in the end, he discovers that she is indeed telling the truth.
Now that he knows the truth, Isaac is ready to draw a line when it comes to sex with Ruby. Still, he doesn’t think that the curse should keep them from each other. They can be with each other, even without sex. Fortunately, they eventually find the hex lady, who tells Ruby the solution to her problem. One month later, when Ruby discovers Jason is alive and the hex is broken, she and Isaac run to each other. This is something they’d been waiting for a long time, so the moment they think the curse is broken, they have sex. It seems that they finally have received their happy ending and can now look forward to being a proper couple rather than worrying about her exes. But then, AJ discovers that Jason died shortly after they met him that morning, which means that the hex has not been broken.
Considering everything, the hex might not be the only thing that casts a shadow on Ruby and Isaac’s romance. In her effort to find the solution to her problem, Ruby reconnected with Richie, with whom she’d had such a heated discussion about the plot of ‘Malignant’ that she saved his name as Gabriel in her phone. When he decides to help her find her exes and warn them about what’s coming, he and Ruby grow closer and see a very different side of each other. Moreover, Richie is Ruby’s only ex who hasn’t died so far. There is no explanation as to how, but he is the only loophole and, hence, might be the key to breaking the curse.
What’s more important here is that Richie and Ruby develop real feelings for each other during the course of their time together. Or at least Richie does. Ruby is completely overtaken by her feelings for Isaac, and his confession of love sweeps her off her feet so much that she completely disregards Richie’s words of affirmation that she’d received shortly before Isaac’s speech. Still, she hasn’t completely forgotten about him, and now that the hex is back in play, she will have to bring Richie back into her orbit, especially if she is to understand why he is the loophole and how Zach and Isaac can be saved from dying next.
Who Sends the Letter to Ruby’s Father? Does He Also Have the Curse?
Even before she had the hex, Ruby didn’t have much luck in relationships. She dated a lot of people, but things never seemed to work out with anyone. There was a time when she and her friends thought she’d finally found the one she could settle down with, but he broke up with her and got married later before he died of the hex. In her therapy sessions, which she mostly takes through a video call that she attends in her car in the parking lot, she realizes that her failed relationships might have something to do with her father walking out on her after her mother’s death.
The fact that her issues with her father were never resolved remains a huge factor that influences Ruby’s relationship. On her therapist’s advice, she writes the letter, but she doesn’t send it. The letter is left behind in Richie’s apartment, which he finds after she has chosen Isaac over him. Still, he knows how important it is for her to send that letter and find some closure with her father. So, he mails it to her father. He doesn’t tell her because, by that time, they had fallen out, mostly because they hadn’t resolved things between them either. Richie had started to like Ruby, and he thought she liked him too, but when she chooses Isaac, he is heartbroken, and instead of coming clean about his feelings, he fights with Ruby.
When Ruby discovers that Richie sent the letter, she is moved, but she doesn’t have much time to thank him. Moments after her father knocks on her door, she discovers that her ex, Jason, is dead, which means the hex never went away. Worse, it means that now Isaac is also on the list of the people who will die because they had sex with her. While she is still trying to process this development, her father tells her he knows what’s going on with her. At first, she ignores him because how could he possibly know what’s going on with her, considering that he had been absent from her life for all these years. But then, he reiterates and reveals that he knows it because it also happened to him.
From Ruby’s father, it is confirmed that the hex is not the reason why Ruby’s exes are dying. It might be something that runs in the family because her father claims that the same thing happened to him. If he is telling the truth, it explains why he disappeared after her mother’s death. He must have been devastated to lose the woman he loved due to a curse on him, and this grief and heartbreak might have been the things that forced him to leave his only daughter behind. Still, he could have come forward with this revelation earlier, or he could have tried to be in Ruby’s life and prevent her from making the mistakes that ruined her relationships. Anyway, he is back now, and perhaps, he might have the solution to Ruby’s problem. Either this, or he will be the confirmation that there is no cure to this curse and she must prepare herself to lose Isaac.
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