Hawk Ripjaw
The following recap contains spoilers for The Righteous Gemstones S4E1 “Prelude” (written by John Carcieri, Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride and directed by Danny McBride).
After a long wait, the fourth and final season of The Righteous Gemstones has arrived! Through the first three seasons, we’ve seen the spectacularly raunchy Gemstone family weather scandals, murder plots, and interfamilial turmoil, but always come out on top with some character development to make them better people, and a more cohesive family unit. But what will this season bring?
We open on a church in Virginia in 1862, as a priest (Josh McDermitt) speaks from the pulpit about States’ rights and the honor of being a Confederate. The priest then lifts up the collection plate, and everyone, including the children, digs into their purses and pockets to add to it. After everyone has gone, the priest greedily dives into the plate to add to his pockets. But not everyone is gone: a stranger (Bradley Cooper) pops up from the pews, and engages in polite verbal confrontation with the priest, calling him out on pillaging the tithes. Attempting to end the conversation, the priest firmly states that he’s done for the day. “I’d say you are,” says the stranger, before drawing his gun and shooting the priest in the head.
The stranger begins stuffing his own pockets with the donations and claims a small gold-plated Bible from the priest’s body before hearing a knock at the church door. He answers it to find a group of Confederate soldiers. Believing the stranger to be the priest, they order him to join them as their chaplain. He asks for a moment and retreats back into the church, removing the priest’s vestments and giving him his own jacket before hastily scrawling a note reading “Here lies Elijah Gemstone.” The stranger is our original Gemstone! He signs the note as the priest, Abel Grieves, taking the priest’s identity and covering his own tracks, and joins the Confederates as their chaplain.
Elijah spends the majority of his time drinking and gambling with the soldiers, presumably cheating at cards—given that one of the soldiers loudly complains that Elijah always wins when he’s the one handling the deck—before excitedly returning to his tent and collecting his winnings into a box. After a man in the camp recognizes him from his past, they spend a night winning everyone else’s money before Elijah murders him to tie up the loose end.
Elijah is called to pray for a couple of mortally wounded young men, but he offers only half-hearted attempts to “pray” with the terrified youngsters on the verge of death. Unversed in the cloth, Elijah pussyfoots his way through these prayers and his service to the soldiers (in a couple of darkly hilarious scenes), not only unwilling to consult the gold-plated Bible but not even giving a second thought to delivering a significant service to his fellow Confederates.
One day, marching through the forest, the battalion is suddenly ambushed by a group of Union soldiers. It’s a bloodbath, with most of the Confederates gunned down and the rest captured. As the bullets whiz around him, Elijah finds himself genuinely reaching out to God, begging for protection. As he stands before his downcast comrades, Elijah, at the Union general’s insistence, ends up saying a final prayer for the doomed soldiers. It’s a great scene, and a turning point for Elijah. His words, Cooper’s performance, and the way the camera frames Elijah’s face all but confirm that this is a genuine attempt at a prayer. It’s sloppy, sure—Elijah clumsily delivers a message of forgiveness (a core component of the show) and of humanity’s tendency to fall short of goodness—but it feels real, like he’s honestly vouching for the salvation of the soldiers before him.
Things still feel somber as the Confederate soldiers are hooded and lined up, and the sound of the Gatling gun cuts loudly through that somberness as they are violently killed, with one struggling survivor coldly executed with a musket shot. The Union soldiers disperse, leaving Elijah with a row of bodies. He removes the hoods from his deceased comrades (something I found oddly humanizing) and loads them onto a wagon, riding it slowly back into the Confederate camp. The soldiers ask why the Union army spared him, and Elijah counters that it was God that saved him.
Returning to his quarters, Elijah finally sees his small, gold-plated Bible as more than a valuable keepsake or tangible symbol of his greed. He opens it to the first page, the first verse of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, and begins to read aloud, softly, with a look of genuine wonder and interest on his face, before a cut to black.
While it was certainly a bold choice to not only delay the continued antics of the modern Gemstone family by a week, but also to start with an episode decidedly more dramatic in tone, this was a solid start to the season and a very compelling episode. Bradley Cooper, in particular, reliably delivers a strong performance as the original Gemstone, but he’s flanked by a number of great supporting actors. It was also very interesting to see the beginnings of what the Gemstone empire would become, with the redemption arc of a simple, greedy conman seemingly buying into the faith. With what we saw in the first season of the show, that greed is generational, but as we see in the following seasons, there is goodness to cut through it. What broad tapestry is Danny McBride assembling for this final season? We’ll probably see more of it come together next week and beyond.
The Righteous Gemstones airs on Sundays on HBO at 10pm ET, and is streaming on Max.
