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**The Righteous Gemstones Season 1, Episode 2, “Is This the Man Who Made the Earth Tremble?” Spoilers Ahead**
We finally know who blackmailed Jesse Gemstone (Danny McBride). The Righteous Gemstones Season 1, Episode 2, “Is This the Man Who Made the Earth Tremble?” opens with a different POV on last week’s harrowing events. We meet a bumbling trio of blackmailers, and the big crazy twist isn’t that they all survived. It’s that the mastermind of the plan was the sweet prodigal son of Jesse. That’s right. At the end of the episode, it’s revealed that rising star Skyler Gisondo is playing Gideon on The Righteous Gemstones.
Lucy (Virginia Gardner) and Scotty (Scott MacArthur) are a dysfunctional couple whom Gideon Gemstone has teamed up with. It was Scotty who was initially run over by Judy Gemstone (Edi Patterson) and Lucy was hurt by Jesse. Meanwhile, Gideon was hiding in the van the entire time. Everything quickly goes south for this team when Lucy destroys the backup of the video they have in order to exact revenge on Scotty for throwing her in a ditch. Lucy leaves them, and then Scotty fights Gideon because the younger man told Lucy the truth about how she wound up in a ditch. Left without leverage against his family, Gideon goes home.
Gideon’s return home presents an obvious dramatic wrinkle. Obviously, Gideon is secretly plotting his family’s downfall, but there’s an extra emotional stake. We know that the one thing addling Jesse Gemstone is the fact that his oldest son left home. Now that the prodigal son has returned, it will be interesting to see how it emotionally affects Jesse.
When Decider sat down The Righteous Gemstones‘ directors and executive producers Jody Hill and David Gordon Green at Summer TCA, they revealed that Gideon’s character was shaped by casting Skyler Gisondo.
“Initially, I think the thought process was more of a hardened type character, like a harder son who’s seen some shit,” Hill said. “Something didn’t ring true when we saw other people [for the part]. And like Skyler really just brought this sensitivity to it, and what that did was it made their falling out seem…it put more of the emphasis and responsibility on Danny’s character. It really got to the heart of what his character’s struggling with.”
Skyler Gisondo is something of a breakout comedy star. He dazzled audiences with a stand out performance in Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet, and was one of the best parts in the critically acclaimed summer comedy Booksmart.
The Gideon twist isn’t the last shocker that The Righteous Gemstones team have planned for audiences. David Gordon Green said, “I think by the time you get through the season, you’ll have a lot of surprises and things happen unexpectedly.”
Next week on The Righteous Gemstones, viewers will finally meet one of the most hyped characters of the series: Walton Goggins’s deranged preacher Baby Billy.
