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The Righteous Gemstones
Wonders That Cannot Be Fathomed, Miracles That Cannot Be Counted
Season 3
Episode 9
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Jake Giles Netter/HBO
For precedent on the plague of locusts that descend on the ministry in the finale of The Righteous Gemstones, the obvious touchstone is Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 drama Magnolia, which climaxes with a Biblical rain of frogs tumbling down from the sky. It was Anderson’s way of unifying a series of loosely connected L.A. stories like his hero Robert Altman did in classics like Nashville or Short Cuts when a single event was needed to emphasize that all these characters exist in the same cinematic world. (In Nashville, all parties converge at the Parthenon for a concert disrupted by gun violence; in Short Cuts, it’s an earthquake that the characters huddle together to survive.) The frogs in Magnolia, referencing Egypt in Exodus, have the effect of restoring order under God’s all-powerful hand and enforcing a kind of quiet and humility in the lives of people who are struggling with tumultuous events.
Part of what made the frog storm in Magnolia such an audacious, polarizing gamble is that it more or less comes out of nowhere unless you’re somehow so attuned to Easter eggs that you notice the “8-2” references (i.e. “Exodus 8:2”) leading up to it. It may be a film about sin, but it is not explicitly or even implicitly a film about spirituality of any kind. The Righteous Gemstones, on the other hand, is about characters who pray and preach about God’s interventions all the time, as evidenced by the title “Wonders That Cannot Be Fathomed, Miracles That Cannot Be Counted,” which comes from Job 5:9. We should not be that surprised to witness the heavenly intervention that ends the third season, though so much of the show is about the charlatans who make money off the idea of God’s miracles that to see one feels shocking nonetheless. It’d be like Y2K actually sowing enough chaos to justify a large cache of survival buckets.
In an interview with Danny McBride that Roxana Hadadi did for us last season, he talked about not liking the idea of ending seasons on a cliffhanger:
But there’s always been something for me about cliffhangers at the end of a season that I’ve never really loved as an audience member. I’m so invested, and I want to see what the fuck’s gonna happen, and now I’ve got to wait a year. Who knows if I’ll still be invested in a year after I’ve seen a bunch of other stuff. With this show, I like the idea that every season is its own story with its own set of villains and side characters, and giving the people a full experience so that when it’s done, it’s done.
Yet the holy intervention that wraps up season three without a cliffhanger — to the point where it felt like a series finale to critics until news of a season four renewal dropped earlier this week — feels unfortunately like a clunky deus ex machina here. The Righteous Gemstones had gotten itself into a narrative tangle and the locusts give the show a super-mega-happy ending that seems more touched by scriptwriters than touched by an angel. A host of ongoing conflicts are ended at once: The rift in the Montgomery family between May-May and Karl on one side and Peter and Chuck on the other; the rift in the Gemstone family between Eli and his adult siblings over Eli refusing to pay the ransom; and the rivalry between the Gemstone and the Simkin ministries over the support of NASCAR legend Dusty Daniels and the untold millions in his estate. Marriages are patched up, families bonded, partnerships affirmed.
It’s all a bit too tidy for my taste, in part because so little is sacrificed at the altar of a happy ending. When Peter’s U-Haul explosives are detonated in a department store parking lot, it leaves a crater where Chuck presumably still sat, but he turns out to be okay, as do the shoppers we are later assured were escorted out of harm’s way before the blast. When Peter’s second truck full of explosives goes off in the woods outside the Gemstone studio parking lot, Peter survives that blast, too, and is reunited with his estranged kin in the end. (The authorities appear to be done with him, too, despite the dragnet on his militia and his appearance as a person of interest on a Fox News broadcast.) Perhaps there’s a hidden message to glean about how the sins and indulgences of megachurch grifters like the Gemstones are never punished, but that’s a stretch. The emphasis here is on the theme of second chances and reconciliation and how forgiveness is always possible, even when it seems as unlikely as a localized plague of locusts.
Still, there are grace notes aplenty in this finale to another excellent season of the show. Walton Goggins did not get a lot of scenes relative to previous seasons (more on that in the bullet points below), but Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers is a triumph of incredible showmanship over wonky game design. (Baby Billy only watched enough Family Feud to steal the buzzer idea, but there’s no board for the families to win. It’s just one buzzer square-off over Bible questions after another.) The singing, the “hurricane booth,” the deranged Oompa-Loompa dancers, the pre-show zingers (“If Noah was alive today, he couldn’t make an ark out of wood. He’d have to make a dingy.”) — all marks of a true entertainer. Maybe Baby Billy won’t get the “reshoots” his production needs, but he will have earned them.
And even if the climax feels too engineered, the denouement, set to Dolly Parton’s cover of Collective Soul’s “Shine” — Exhibit A in examples of cover songs being better than the originals — is an elegant bookend to the opening of the season, when The Redeemer was first introduced at a monster truck rally. At the time, Aimee-Leigh was embarrassed by the degree to which the family had sold out its values for money by staging this vulgar affair. (And hawking beer, too!) Now she’s shown giving her heavenly endorsement of a family event where everyone gets their turn at crushing stuff in The Redeemer. This vehicle that once represented greed and corruption is now a vehicle for redemption, just as its name prophesied.
As Eli says, “God moves in mysterious ways.” And as the late Dusty Daniels once said, “Whoo-whee, sucker!”
• The Gemstone siblings show immediate signs of working efficiently as a team by tagging off each other in preemptively burning Baby Billy for his latest pitch. Judy: “Lionel need gold baby teeth or some shit?” Jesse: “Let me guess: This time you want a harem full of professional rub-and-tugists from Thailand.” Kelvin: “What do you want to ask permission for people to dig up momma’s grave and pee on her?”
• As it turns out, Baby Billy has a wonderful story to tell about a Y2K party in Monaco with Dusty Daniels where they may have “touched dicks.” (“Y2K, we threw caution to the wind, boys.”) Baby Billy probably didn’t need to tell that whole story to make the point that the two men are close, but it’s wonderful that he did.
• Jesse quietly bringing up the Bible Bonkers competition while the family mourns over Chuck’s presumed death (“We could do an in memorandum in the credits for him”) is respectfully tasteless.
• Kudos for the entire montage of Jesse’s quiz preparation being him doing the “[SADLY GO-KARTS]” meme to “Stand On Your Own,” the theme to the 1985 martial arts non-classic No Retreat, No Surrender.
• The back-and-forth between Baby Billy claiming to be the Gemstones’ real “daddy” is a beautiful echo to the back-and-forth last in the last episode between Peter and Marshall over which one was acting “like a woman.”
• Wondering why so little Baby Billy this season? From Roxana’s interview with Goggins: “I had been working on something else, so my time on the show this year was limited; I wasn’t able to be there as much as I would have liked to have been. But Danny writes to people’s availability and what they can give.”
• From Judy’s endorsement of The System: “Trust me, I did not think The System would be any good at all. Getting handed this box of The System, we were so mad. We wanted to kill. We thought, ‘What is this scam? Why is it $500? What is Amber doing at our house giving it to us? Everything about this is shady.’”
• Kelvin and Keefe opting against raiding another sex shop is a progressive moment where he wonders if they should be judging “what people do in their bedrooms behind closed doors” and if perhaps there were “other ways to serve the Lord.” It’ll be interesting to see if the show follows through on that idea and the possible consequences of Kelvin and Keefe having a romantic relationship. For now, it expresses some hope that younger generations may be inclined to turn the page.
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