![]() ![]() We should not be that surprised to witness the heavenly intervention that ends the third season, though so much of the show is about the charlatans who make money off the idea of God’s miracles that to see one feels shocking nonetheless. The Righteous Gemstones, on the other hand, is about characters who pray and preach about God’s interventions all the time, as evidenced by the title “Wonders That Cannot Be Fathomed, Miracles That Cannot Be Counted,” which comes from Job 5:9. It may be a film about sin, but it is not explicitly or even implicitly a film about spirituality of any kind. Part of what made the frog storm in Magnolia such an audacious, polarizing gamble is that it more or less comes out of nowhere unless you’re somehow so attuned to Easter eggs that you notice the “8-2” references (i.e., Exodus 8:2) leading up to it. (In Nashville, all parties converge at the Parthenon for a concert disrupted by gun violence in Short Cuts, it’s an earthquake that the characters huddle together to survive.) The frogs in Magnolia, referencing Egypt in Exodus, have the effect of restoring order under God’s all-powerful hand and enforcing a kind of quiet and humility in the lives of people who are struggling with tumultuous events. ![]() stories like his hero Robert Altman did in classics such as Nashville and Short Cuts, when a single event was needed to emphasize that all these characters exist in the same cinematic world. It was Anderson’s way of unifying a series of loosely connected L.A. For precedent on the plague of locusts that descend on the ministry in the finale of The Righteous Gemstones, the obvious touchstone is Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 drama, Magnolia, which climaxes with a biblical rain of frogs tumbling down from the sky. ![]()
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