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The final season of The Righteous Gemstones premiered on March 9, 2025, with its first episode, Prelude. Directed by Danny McBride— the show’s creator, co-writer, and star— this highly anticipated episode takes us back to the beginning, offering a long-awaited glimpse into the origins of the Gemstone family.
In a well-kept surprising role, Bradley Cooper portrays a young Elijah Gemstone in the first episode of The Righteous Gemstones. The episode takes us back to Virginia in 1962, during the Civil War in America, and showcases the transformation of a crooked Gemstone into a man of God.
The episode starts in a church where we first meet Elijah Gemstone, who is not yet acquainted with God and kills a preacher to steal the money and his gold-plated Bible. He is then taken to a Confederate camp as their new chaplain who preaches to the soldiers and prays with them in their dying moments without knowing a single word about God and the Bible.
More on this in our story.
The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 Episode 1 recap: Elijah Gemstone accidentally becomes a man of God
Episode 1 of The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 starts in a church in Virginia where pastor Abel Grieves ( Josh McDermitt) is giving a sermon. Bradley Cooper’s Elijah Gemstone stumbles into the church and quips pastor Abel of having a nice dinner with all the money that the people gave to the church. Abel denies it but is shot in the head by Elijah, who then steals all the money and the gold-plated Bible from the pastor.
As he tries to flee the scene, some Confederate soldiers come and take him to their camp as their new chaplain. But before leaving, Elijah leaves a handwritten note about the murdered pastor being a handsome thief and then brutally disfigures his face so that no one recognizes him.
In the Confederate camp, Elijah is tasked to say prayers with the dying men, which he usually avoids by waiting too long until the men die so that his cover of not being a clergyman remains. Other than that, he also preaches the Sunday sermons, which are mostly funny and only incorporate generic phrases like Bless the lord, friends, and Jesus Christ.
However, everything doesn’t go as smoothly as people start to question his gambling habits. But Elijah shuts them up by telling them a made-up lie that questioning a clergyman might send them to hell.
The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 Episode 1 recap: Elijah Gemstone experiences a divine intervention
His act of being a godly man stumbles upon a hiccup named Ned Rollins, who recognizes him from before the war and knows his true identity. As he tries to kill him, Ned strikes up a deal with him to become his partner and win all the money from a Confederate major in gambling.
As expected, Elijah and Ned win against the major, but he knows that Ned might someday blow his cover, so he strangles him to death and places his body in a dead soldier’s coffin to make sure nobody knows about him.
However, killing Ned isn’t enough as he and the other soldiers are taken hostage by the Union soldiers who are about to kill all of them. But thanks to Abel Grieves’s gold Bible, Elijah is spared as they don’t kill the clergymen.
He is then tasked to deliver the heartbreaking message to the soldiers that they will now be killed, and they ask him to pray with them for one last time. Although his sermons until now had been forced and meaningless, here he actually speaks from his heart and delivers somewhat good preaching and then watches them die.
The events of being fired at and being captured by the Union soldiers force Elijah Gemstone to pray to God to save his life, and later, he is saved because of a Bible he had stolen after murdering a pastor.
Seeing the soldiers die in front of him changes something in Elijah as he collects all the dead bodies and takes them back to their Confederate camp. When asked about how he is the only survivor, he replies that he was saved by God himself, which happens to be true in his case.
Later that night, he begins to read the Bible aloud in his night, showing us the origin of how the crooked Gemstone became a righteous one.
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Catch new episodes of The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 every Sunday on Max.
Read More: The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 release schedule: When do new episodes of the comedy drama drop?
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