[The following article contains life-or-death spoilers for the Righteous Gemstones series finale.]
Mama won’t you look how I’ve been good now. I’m behavin’
Daddy won’t you listen, don’t go missin’. I’m behavin’
–Aimee-Leigh Gemstone and Baby Billy Freeman, Misbehavin’
Like many people, I’m split on the Righteous Gemstones series finale. The Gemstone kids learned some lessons, but a story about a secretly debaucherous family of megachurch-owning monsters should probably have ended with real justice!
Much like he did with Vice Principals, Danny McBride frontloaded The Righteous Gemstones. The first season’s resolution was wonderfully tense—Gideon was welcomed back to the family, sure, and Jesse and Amber were working on their (and countless people’s!) marriage, but the megamanipulation continued. Jump ahead a few seasons, and even though they continue to mass-market religion for their own profit… Kelvin has come out as gay, Gideon’s a pastor, Judy’s had a kissing-only affair, Jesse’s in a secret society, and Eli is finally moving on from Aimee-Leigh.
Just about everything that can possibly be used for shock has been used for shock, another classic emblem of McBride’s storytelling style. Threats of murder and rape haunt the Gemstones at every turn. I truly cannot decide if I like it. I like that it’s different! The series finale is overpacked, so I will recap the part most important to me: the lakehouse trip.
At the lakehouse, the Gemstones kids’ childhood friend (and sometimes victim) Corey is very distraught. He is reckoning with having killed his own father to protect the Gemstones’ father and uncle and stop their cycle of jealous murder of his mother’s boyfriends.
On a lakehouse trip with both of their families, Corey asks the Gemstones for seven million dollars. He wants to buy his father’s gator farm. The Gemstones deny him the money. Jesse sends the rest of their family outside, and invites Corey to play cornhole with him and the other siblings.
A vision of Aimee-Leigh appears to Kelvin when he goes inside to change his shirt and guides him into Corey’s room. He snoops through Corey’s things and discovers the Gemstone family heirloom gold bible, the one stolen by Elijah Gemstone in the season premiere, and then again by Corey’s father in Interlude IV.
When Corey’s secret is revealed, he turns the music up on the stereo. The rest of the family, safe on the boat, kind of enjoy it. It’s clever cover: Corey wants to shoot the Gemstones. Judy first. When we see her again, it looks like it’s in her shoulder. Corey shoots Jesse three times through a closet door, and Jesse slumps lifelessly to his knees, then collapses face first onto the floor. He looks for Kelvin under the bed, and we remember in [earlier episode] when Kelvin hid under the bed to hide from Corey’s father when he robbed them so many years ago. Not a scared kid this time, Kelvin jumps out at Corey, who promptly shoots him.
Corey assumes, like I had when I watched it, that the Gemstone siblings are dead. But they’re not dead.
Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin are alive, barely. They crawl to each other, and I really believe they are going to die there, bleeding out on the floor of their lakehouse in their designer clothes. To me, that is the most fitting end for the Gemstones: a shocking betrayal. Finally, someone to do unto them as they do unto others…
Judy calls on her rival, Dr Watson, the monkey doctor who’d helped BJ in his recovery from paralysis. He brings Jesse’s gun to them, and Jesse shoots Corey with it when he walks back in.
When Corey bleeds out, he asks the Gemstone siblings not to try to save his life or call for help, but to pray for him. Jesse starts out quite stilted, but as they pray, the kids’ prayer becomes more and more authentic. For once, I truly believe they are in touch with God. They forgive Corey.
The rest of the finale happens fast… it fits the rest of the episode: so much plot you wonder why the rest of the season was so fucking slow. And the ending is so happy, you wonder who it’s happy for. The Gemstones don’t deserve it, but maybe that’s just life. The very rich can, and do, get away with murder. Even Jesse’s petulant sons find their places in the family’s congregation, but it’s not about the importance of family: it’s about the benefits of conforming to upper-upper-upper-class life.
A show that began as a clear condemnation of extravagant wealth and megachurch financial abuse resolved everything but that crux, and let its evildoers off the hook for the price of minor growth. They don’t learn much, it’s no Schitt’s Creek, but the characters do become slightly less evil. In many ways, this finale was a grand disappointment. A happy ending for miserable people.