The Righteous Gemstones Recap: That Gemstone Temper

The midseason “Interlude” episodes of The Righteous Gemstones tend to be among the strongest in the series and the most important, too, in turning back the clock and getting close to the roots of everything wrong in the Gemstone family. And they tend to pivot around Jennifer Nettles as Aimee-Leigh Gemstone, the honey-voiced true believer who may be remembered as a golden-hued avatar of goodness and decency but has emerged more as a bellwether for the family’s corruption. Don’t forget that season three opened in a flashback with May-May attacking Aimee-Leigh with a giant wrench before moving forward to a present where Eli improbably agrees to do his sister a favor. Was this an act of grace on Eli’s part to mend fences with the sister who had tried to cave in his wife’s head? Maybe. But it may also be an acknowledgment that May-May wasn’t wrong to be angry.

We’ll get into that more later, but the main origin story in “Interlude III” concerns Judy, whose singular mix of brash hotheadedness and deep insecurity was evident as early as high school in the year 2000. Money seems to have taught her that she can have anything she wants and has given her the irrational self-confidence to dress in colorful, formfitting hot pants and make her move on the most popular boy in school by unfurling her hair on his desk. (“You’re getting dandruff all over my worksheet.” “You know you like it, stud.”) When she’s rejected and humiliated in front of the whole class, young Judy answers with trademark Gemstone belligerence: She barrels into band practice and destroys the kid’s saxophone. (And that’s not even the end of it for him.)

The Righteous Gemstones doesn’t try to use “Interlude III” as too tidy an account of the adult Judy, but it does show what a misfit she remains as the middle sibling and only girl in a family whose business doesn’t have a succession track for women. Her answer is to vie for attention and to be the loudest voice in the room. She far outstrips her brothers in her gift for vulgarity, even Jesse, whose crudeness is blunter but not as extreme or comically inventive. When the two get locked in a dinner-table fight that inevitably leads to each inviting the other to suck their dick, Judy gets the last word: “I want a meal, boy, not no snack.” That’s enough to earn her mother’s disdain, which is a small victory. In the Gemstone family, there’s no reward for being a shrinking violet.

In a certain respect, young Judy is a hick televangelist debutante version of a My Super Sweet 16 monster dolled up and angry over not receiving every single thing she feels entitled to. The cutest boy in school should be hers, of course, and a trip to the mall gives her access to whatever she wants, to the point where her shoplifting is so brazen it’s as if she genuinely believes she doesn’t have to pay for anything. To the degree that she’s aware of her own privilege, Judy uses it to hammer Jesse’s promising new squeeze, a country girl named Amber, for being a gold digger. “You couldn’t afford this if you sucked every dick in the hills and hollers of Kentucky,” Judy screams. (That she and Amber can still reconcile after an insult this vicious synchs with the unofficial Gemstone credo that nothing is unforgivable.)

But as much as Judy shocks her parents at the dinner table and beyond — she’s hurt, in the end, by overhearing them talk about her “minor undiagnosed mental problems” — she is still very much the product of Eli and Aimee-Leigh’s marriage. Judy dismissing Amber as poor Kentucky trash is a less subtle and far less devastating echo of how her parents treat Peter and May-May Montgomery in the flashbacks. The Gemstones have made a fortune grifting their followers with a Y2K survival kit they were both secretly, quietly certain would not actually be necessary. So in the months leading up to the apocalyptic turn of the millennium, which was supposed to upend our entire economic system with coding errors, the Gemstones ran ads promoting a freeze-dried soup mix and other survival buckets. “If I knew I could care for my family in an uncertain and terrifying time with just a bucket or two,” says Aimee-Leigh in the commercial, “well, I would be running to my pocketbook.”

Peter ran for his pocketbook too in investing his family’s entire nest egg, $25,000, in what turned out to be a storage garage full of unsellable survival buckets. And so, in a flashback, he has to go through the sad ordeal of pleading with his brother-in-law for help to bail him out before May-May catches wind of his bad investment. Eli doesn’t mind playing the benevolent savior in this scenario, but when May-May finally goes to hear what happened, she sees right through her brother. He knew full well he was scamming Peter and everyone else who was buying Y2K gear, and he wasn’t going to bring him in on the grift. Eli understood Peter as a common sucker, no different from all the other suckers pouring money they don’t have into the church.

“Let us help, May-May. We’re family,” pleads Aimee-Leigh. But May-May again sees through the Gemstones’ hypocrisy. Aimee-Leigh needs to see herself as a benevolent figure just as Eli does, and they have the resources to maintain their image as generous people. (There’s a great voice-over bit in The Wolf of Wall Street about how money makes you a better person: “You can give generously to the church or political party of your choice. Save the fuckin’ spotted owl with money.”) But the offer to help the Montgomerys really serves as a means for Aimee-Leigh to launder her own guilt and for the Montgomerys to become docile charity cases.

In the end, Peter winds up shooting a security guard in what appears, from a distance, to be the most inept bank robbery in history, and the Montgomerys are permanently broken as a family. It’s little wonder that Eli is willing to do his sister a favor decades later. It’s also little wonder that Peter and their sons still hold a grudge.

Uncut Gemstones

• Judy referring to her hair as her “luscious fluffs” recalls the dreadful Black Eyed Peas hit “My Humps” in that no woman has ever referred to that part of her body with those words before.

• “Is that human hair, Country? Are you wearing a horsehair wig?” Judy taunts Amber. The tables turn in that relationship later, once again courtesy of money.

• After his Y2K losses, Peter changes his sermon to a bitter reflection on material things: “That stuff don’t mean nothing to the Lord. So why does it mean so much to us?” He wanted a piece of what the Gemstones have for the very human reason that it’s hard to see your kids living in poverty.

• Aimee-Leigh’s guilt over the Y2K scam extends to the Gemstones’ entire way of life, which she does seem to feel is wicked. Wealth has corrupted them, and going back to a “simpler way of life” is a fantasy she can’t realize.

• Love the sibling bond between Jesse and Judy when Jesse realizes Judy’s really feeling low. They’re the same type. Their “motor runs hot.” So Jesse shows his support with reassurance (“Winks and wieners don’t like you, but who needs them?”) and extreme violence.

• Incredible early Bee Gees needle drop in the closing credits, “Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You.” It’s from the band’s third album, confusingly titled Bee Gees’ 1st.