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Photo: Jake Giles Netter/HBO
Danny McBride is a blunt comic instrument. Though series like Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones have plenty on their mind about particularly American strains of ambition, greed, narcissism, and toxic masculinity, McBride himself puts very little spin on the ball. You always know how a McBride character feels because he will simply come out and say it without coded language or any suggestion of a more ambiguous inner life. That isn’t to say that his characters are incapable of surprise, exactly, but they tend to speak in declarative statements, and they love to hold court. Everyone must understand how they feel at all times.
As McBride’s Jesse returns home after a harrowing — or, perhaps more accurately, annoying — ordeal on Peter’s compound, where he and his siblings were held for ransom, he wants his family to know that he’s a changed man. This revelation cannot happen in any kind of normal way. It is an event as big and splashy and stupid as one of the Gemstones’ Sunday services. The family walks out to a fleet of shiny new four-wheelers, which obliges all of them to pay attention for a minute while dad unleashes his oratory. Jesse regrets not sharing the stage after taking over the ministry from his father. “I was a being a shitty little bitch about The System because it’s a hit,” he tells Amber. “I was afraid it was going to take some of your attention away from me, but that’s a fucked-up way to think.” Then Jesse, with his peacock pride, thanks her for having patience and for making him “the man I am today.” It’s a beautiful thing to see McBride in this moment, looking as if he’s scaled the peak of some invisible mountain. He’s a better man now — and he was pretty damn great before.
Certainly better than his own father, whose failure to pay Peter’s $15 million ransom demands is not sitting well with his children. “Pretty bold move not to make that ransom payment, Dr. Elijah Gemstone,” says Jesse after the Gemstones’ brief stay in a hospital emergency room. In his gentle way, Eli tries to explain that he thought Peter was bluffing because the Peter he remembered wouldn’t be capable of harming them. But the siblings have a solid counterargument. Peter went to jail for an armed robbery that ended in his shooting and killing a security guard, which may speak more to his incompetence than his malice, but it makes him dangerous regardless. And this is to say nothing of the armed-to-the-teeth Christofascist militia that stands ready to commit violence with or without Peter’s approval. At the time, the siblings treated their captivity like a joke — they continued to mock and attack Peter and his sons for doing it, even while tied up in a silo — but they’re right to believe that they were in real peril. Eli paying up would have ensured their safety.
So why didn’t he pay? The charitable view, suggested by Eli, is that Peter and his sons could never hurt members of their own family. “I guess I still remember the old Peter,” says Eli in his lilting drawl. But when he’s talking about the old Peter, he’s talking about Peter before the Y2K buckets drained his savings account, ruined his marriage, led him to kill a security guard in a bank robbery attempt, and sent him to prison for years. Any reasonable person would suspect the old Peter would have changed, even if he hadn’t assembled a militia out of violent ex-cons. Yet it doesn’t seem likely that Eli acted out of greed, as Jesse and his siblings — and their representative and intermediary, Baby Billy — seem to believe. When Eli claims that he’d have paid up if he thought they were in real danger, he seems to be telling the truth.
The more likely explanation fits with what Eli has been banking on all season: That his kids, having been bumped out of the golden family nest, will learn to work together and handle their problems on their own. The irony is that they could not have united on their own. It was a gift of fate that Peter chose to abduct them when he did because they had floundered badly in Eli’s absence and needed the Lord to stage an invention. Whether their alignment will actually hold is another question — Jesse is excited they get to play “the victim” for once, as opposed to the entitled losers who inherited the job — but Eli seems genuinely pleased when they reject his explanations in unison in the end. “You’re doing it,” he says. “You’re working together.”
But the trouble isn’t over for the Gemstones yet. Peter and Chuck are still out there in a U-Haul filled with dynamite and the ammonium nitrate fertilizer the Montgomeries boosted from the Gemstone compound. Peter had tried to keep the militia together in the wake of his $15 million bag fumbling, but when that failed to stave off a mutiny, he was freer than ever to shift to Plan B. Chuck’s wavering loyalty to his dad seems like the most obvious hope for curtailing an act of domestic terrorism of Timothy McVeigh-like proportions. The old Peter doesn’t seem likely to stop the new Peter, who’s piping mad every single second of the day now. He doesn’t have to worry about indulging his followers’ wishes to protest statue protestors or poison the water of liberal cities. He has all he needs for his true mission.
Before the walls come literally crumbling down at the Gemstone church, however, let’s celebrate the end of the unrequited sexual tension between Kelvin and Keefe. It seemed like the show was going to let that homoeroticism hang in the air forever between these two, with their God Squad workout sessions and their vigorous massages. But Kelvin’s liberation from the militia silo has freed him to take another chance, too, and it would appear that his siblings and everyone else are just as relieved that it finally happened. Surely this will go over fine in an evangelical community, right?
• Eli is on the outs with his kids, but he and May-May are bonding, in part because she knows what it’s like to have your children turn against you. They also have the ability to survive some low moments together, which is a Gemstone trademark. “We just don’t blow smoke each other’s butts like other people do,” says May-May. “That’s all. I don’t begrudge you for that.”
• Hilarious exchange between Peter and the mutinous Marshall over which one is acting “like a woman.” Steve Zahn’s tantrum-throwing as Peter has been a delight all season — witness his whipping of a folding chair later in the episode — and here he channels that anger into ever more vigorously ridiculous readings of the word “woman.”
• “You’re the best fucking husband I could have imagined. And believe me, I imagined quite a few. Ryan Phillippe, Savion Glover, the tap dancer. But you’re better than all of them.” Judy and BJ reuniting in the tub.
• BJ’s line about how “the best way to reset is with a really good, deep fucking,” is basically a wordier version of Nicole Kidman’s last line to Tom Cruise in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Both couples are getting their marriages back on track.
• The conversation Eli has with Gideon in the car more subtly suggests Eli’s misreading of the situation. “I can see why you want to get away from this family from time to time,” he tells Gideon. “Without your grandma, it’s a pretty toxic affair.” To which Gideon replies, “It’s not that I want to get away from the family. I just want to carve my own path.”
• There hasn’t been enough Baby Billy this season, but Walton Goggins certainly makes every second count. His moonwalking out of the meeting between the Gemstones feels like a weird, inspired improvisational moment that stayed in the cut.
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