![]() Still, there are grace notes aplenty in this finale to another excellent season of the show. 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. (The authorities appear to be done with him as well, 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. ![]() When Peter’s second truckful 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. 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. ![]() It’s all a bit too tidy for my taste, in part because so little is sacrificed at the altar of a happy ending. Marriages are patched up, families bonded, partnerships affirmed. 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 children 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. 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. ![]() 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. 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. Who knows if I’ll still be invested in a year after I’ve seen a bunch of other stuff. I’m so invested, and I want to see what the fuck’s gonna happen, and now I’ve got to wait a year. 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:īut 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. It would be like Y2K actually sowing enough chaos to justify a large cache of survival buckets. 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. 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. It may be a film about sin, but it is not explicitly or even implicitly a film about spirituality of any kind. 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. (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. stories like his hero Robert Altman did in classics such as Nashville and Short Cuts, when a single event was needed to emphasize that all these characters exist in the same cinematic world. It was Anderson’s way of unifying a series of loosely connected L.A. ![]() 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. ![]()
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