Review: The Righteous Gemstones, "For Their Nakedness Is Your Own Nakedness" | Season 3, Episode 3
It's an old-fashioned Cousins Night, with Bible quizzing, knife fighting, and fire sword dancing. Just like when we were kids!
Gemstones gets a lot of mileage out of the general childishness of Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin. Last week, for example, Eli’s look of weary disgust spoke for all of us when they pleaded for his help with the ministers by sucking their thumbs and talking baby talk. (Gross.) Tonight’s central setpiece, “Cousins Night,” is practically an age-regression machine, taking all of us back to our middle school days when visiting relatives meant being saddled with kids that were supposed to be automatic friends. If you didn’t get a hot flush of shame thinking about either the way you were treated by cousins, or the way you treated cousins, then you’re a better person than I.
The cousins in question are Chuck (Lukas Haas) and Karl (perennial World’s Strongest Man competitor Robert Oberst) Montgomery, whom the Gemstones retrieved from a motel last week after they fled Peter’s prepper camp. Now they’re staying at the Gemstone estate (don’t call it a compound), dressing in borrowed Gemstone t-shirts, shoveling down mountains of breakfast food, and refusing to go home with their mother because they think she brought the feds down on their dad. The siblings whine to their dad about having to play nice with the cousins, earning that classic John Goodman eyeroll as they aggressively give all the fingers to the Montgomeries peeking out the window.