Walton Goggins has been the king of HBO this season, colonizing the network with The White Lotus and The Righteous Gemstones much as he did years ago on FX with his series-stealing performances in The Shield and Justified. While The Righteous Gemstones has struggled at times to reach the heights of its inspired, Civil War–era premiere this season, Goggins has thrived as Baby Billy, freelancing his role as a coke-snorting church-TV auteur while the rest of the cast has been wrapped up in larger dramas about Vance Simkins, Cobb Milsap, and other threats to the Gemstone empire. Baby Billy’s success or failure is tangential to the Gemstones at large, so the writing (and Goggins’s performance) can be as liberated as Billy’s ball sack.
As the writer-director-producer-star of Teenjus, a hip period spectacle on a budget, Baby Billy has resembled one of the Movie Brats icons of the 1970s, who were like inmates running the asylum, bending major studios to their will. (They were known to do a little cocaine, too.) He hasn’t been happy with the budgetary compromises to his vision, but the Gemstone kids are so busy with their own nonsense that he’s been given creative carte blanche on decisions like casting himself as a teenage Jesus. The scenes on set in this episode are all comic gold, from Billy dashing to his tent for generous snorts between takes to a musical number that culminates in Teenjus healing a young man who then tosses his crutches away and breakdances. (“I got your miracle right here, nerd.”)
There’s a moment in the episode, too, where Goggins is so funny that he seems to get a genuine laugh out of John Goodman the actor rather than Eli Gemstone the character. As the two share lunch off the Teenjus set, Billy tries to help Eli get over his sadness over breaking up with Lori with the sort of crude counsel you’d expect from a dude in a Judd Apatow comedy: “We just need to get you a layup,” says Billy. “Find you a big girl, a corn-fed girl. Get your ball rolling again.” Goodman cracks up in a way that Eli likely wouldn’t, but he’s powerless against lines that good delivered by Goggins in that honey-dipped southern accent. Just small touches, like Goggins using the word “now” to punctuate sentences, bring special life to his dialogue. And the writers are supplying him with great material, too, like Billy comparing Sola’s pipe-smoking habit to “Bilbo Baggins.” (“This ain’t no hobbit house.”) Though his character has some minor conflict over being an absent father and husband, Goggins’s primary responsibility on the show is to be funny. And he is.
The rest of the cast is funny, too, of course, but in this penultimate episode of the season and series, there’s a lot of narrative business that needs to get tied up. Last week, Vance Simkins’s meltdown at the Top Christ Following Man event seemed to have squashed his ambition to expose the Gemstones and bring his ministry back from financial ruin. (“That’s the face of a beaten man right there,” says a gloating Jesse over news video of the debacle. “I want to make it the damn wallpaper on my home screen.”) Outside of many the budgetary black hole of the Teenjus production, that left Cobb Milsap as the only loose end, and this episode busies itself in tying that up and giving space for Eli and Lori to reconcile. The engineering gets a little strained at times.
Still reeling from the breakup, Eli dejectedly cuts the hair that symbolized his post-retirement bachelor shagginess and returns to the church table so dejected that he barely reacts to Dr. Watson smoking a menthol cigarette and masturbating. (And this after last week’s flashback, when his younger self scolded the kids for using bad language at the sacred space of Jason’s.) For her part, Lori’s failure to reach Eli on his cell phone leads her to humble herself in front of the Gemstone kids in order to get some help in contacting him. The meeting goes about as well as you’d expect (“You betrayed our mama when you started snacking on Daddy’s dingus wing,” says Kelvin), but Lori reminds the kids she was once their mother’s best friend and helped Aimee-Leigh write songs dedicated to them. The kids fold easily. (“The song stories are pretty much working on me.”)
That leaves Michael Rooker as Cobb, a character who hasn’t been conceived with much of a comic spin at all, despite the potential inherent in writing for an Extremely Divorced man who runs a gator farm and serpentarium. That also leaves Seann William Scott, a reliable doofus in the American Pie and Goon movies, in the tough spot of having to play Corey Milsap, who’s stuck in a conflict between his mom and Cobb. A scene at Corey’s birthday party turns ugly when Cobb slaps the birthday boy for not telling him the latest about his mom’s relationship with Eli, but that’s mostly a prelude to climactic showdown at the gator farm. When Cobb kidnaps Eli and Baby Billy from a Cybertruck — if nothing else, the show has proven that the Cybertruck is a comic vehicle in itself — and tosses them in the dank concrete room, there’s some funny material scattered around, like the presence of half-naked, delusional Big Dick Mitch. But, once again, it’s Goggins who gets the best moment when a cowardly Baby Billy snuffs up some powdered courage like Popeye’s spinach and comes rushing to Eli’s aid, only for Cobb to knock him squarely in the face.
The wind-down to the episode, with all the children and significant others rushing to reunite with Eli, Baby Billy, and Corey after Cobb is fed to his prized gator, seems to confirm the optimistic tone that’s been set in the last couple of episodes, where outside events have brought the Gemstone clan closer together. There’s at least one major shoe that could drop — why devote an entire episode to the Gemstone origin story if that gold Bible isn’t going to pay off somehow? — but The Righteous Gemstones loves these grotesque, dysfunctional louts. Perhaps if their enormous sins are forgivable, so are ours.
• BJ is healed! Praise Teenjus!
• As much as Jesse loves Simkins’s comeuppance, he seethes at not getting enough attention for encouraging Kelvin more than his siblings. (“I was the main one doing the pushing. I was the pushing force for sure. Sucks I’m going to get zero public glory for it.”)
• Credit Jesse for his unexpectedly literary comment on Eli’s erstwhile long hair: “Is that Daddy or is that a Shakespeare witch?”
• A bitter end for Cobb, stabbed by a knife from a man who supplied top-quality blades for the Rambo movies.
• Baby Billy not knowing anything about Big Dick Mitch pays off when Eli makes reference to the possibly well-endowed Mercedes salesman in their midst: “That’s kind of a strange thing to comment on, Eli.”
