Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for The Righteous Gemstones’ Season 4 premiere.

The fourth and final season of The Righteous Gemstones has finally begun, but those looking for a double dose of Walton Goggins after The White Lotus may have been disappointed, as none of the members of the Gemstone family we know and love make an appearance in the Season 4 premiere. The previous three seasons of The Righteous Gemstones have all incorporated flashback episodes at the halfway point of the season, but this time, Danny McBride kicked off the final season of his hit comedy series with a Gemstone family origin story dating all the way back to the American Civil War. None other than Bradley Cooper stars as Elijah Gemstone, the first in the family line to find his calling as a preacher. “Prelude” not only feels like a standalone film with just a 39-minute runtime, but offers a totally fitting origin story for the Gemstones, whose ancestor only became a preacher via theft and impersonation, incidentally finding God along the way.

“Prelude” Provides a Fitting Origin Story for the Gemstone Family

The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 opens in Virginia 1862, where Minister Abel Grieves (Josh McDermitt) is giving a sermon about how protecting “states’ rights” is part of God’s will, and then passes around the collection plate. Once all the attendees have left, Elijah Gemstone emerges from one of the pews, confronting the minister for taking money from women whose husbands are off dying in the war, before shooting Grieves in the head. After stealing the money and the minister’s gold-plated Bible, a group of Confederate soldiers come knocking on the church door to bring Grieves along as their chaplain, and when Elijah finds out the gig pays $50 a month, he swaps clothes with Grieves and joins the soldiers, assuming his identity. Three weeks later, we learn that not only is Elijah patently unqualified to be a chaplain, but comically ignorant about the ways of Christianity and terrible at pretending otherwise. He spends his nights drinking and gambling, but when it’s time to do what they pay him for – preaching and praying over soldiers on their deathbeds – Elijah struggles to even act like he cares or knows what he’s doing, but is able to talk his way out of a confrontation with a solider who accuses him of lying about his identity.

Over the course of the episode, Elijah discovers that being a chaplain offers him protection that other soldiers don’t get, and that being a man of the cloth will be his ticket to surviving the war. Despite watching dozens of men get maimed and killed around him, Elijah is callous in his interactions with dying soldiers looking for one final moment of comfort, incapable of mustering a convincing-sounding prayer as they take their last breaths. Though he assures them that he’s praying silently in his head for their salvation, really he’s just waiting for them to croak so he can stop pretending to care and go back to counting his money. It’s only when Elijah finds his own life at risk that he starts earnestly appealing to the big man upstairs.

During a surprise attack by Union soldiers, Elijah cowers under a wagon and prays for God to spare him. After the Union soldiers discover he’s a chaplain and spare his life, he’s made to pray over 11 Confederate soldiers who they plan to execute via firing squad, and Elijah has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. It’s the first time we hear him actually praying out loud, and though it gets off to a shaky start, during the prayer Elijah expresses guilt about his immoral, swindling ways, and his words move several of the soldiers to tears before they’re killed. His brush with death and the soldiers’ reactions to his prayer is what motivates Elijah to actually crack open his gold-plated Bible for the first time and see what this whole Christianity thing is all about. It makes almost too much sense that the Gemstones’ distant ancestor would grift his way into becoming a man of the cloth, motivated more by money and self-preservation than religious conviction or a desire to help others.

Bradley Cooper Is Brilliant in His Guest Appearance on ‘The Righteous Gemstones’

“Prelude” is a major departure from what we’ve come to expect from The Righteous Gemstones, and far different from the three other flashback episodes we’ve seen throughout the series. Directed by Danny McBride and written by McBride, Jeff Fradley, and John Carcieri, this well-directed standalone episode could easily be expanded into a feature film, and it’s Bradley Cooper’s performance that really sells it as the perfect Gemstone origin story. Of all the celebrities to have minor or guest roles in The Righteous Gemstones, the 12-time Academy Award nominee is definitely one of the biggest names, and Cooper gives a brilliant performance as Elijah, bringing both humor and intensity to his character that reflects the characteristics we’ve come to recognize as quintessentially Gemstone-esque.

Cooper totally channels the way the present-day Gemstones behave and speak, and some of his funniest lines sound like they could have easily come out of Jesse, Judy (Edi Patterson), or Kelvin’s (Adam DeVine) mouths. When Elijah is seen vomiting at the Confederate military camp, he insists it’s not from the sight and smell of all the blood, severed limbs, and corpses all around him, but due to an unrelated “stomach bug.” And later, when Elijah gives a sermon to a sizable group of soldiers, he delivers a pathetically short and obviously improvised speech before telling them he doesn’t want to take up too much of their Sunday morning.

Elijah’s story is perfectly in line with what we already know about the Gemstones, who prioritize making a buck from their parishioners over actually preaching the word of God. The Gemstones’ money-making schemes, like Eli (John Goodman) and Aimee-Leigh’s (Jennifer Nettles) Y2K survival buckets and a Christian-themed resort, are the most audacious and transparently greedy modern-day versions of the kind of lying and swindling Elijah was doing back in the 1800s. And despite the multi-century gap between his story and the present-day timeline, Elijah truly feels like a Gemstone with his behavior and cadence, thanks in large part to Cooper’s delivery.

Viewers who were looking forward to diving back into the outrageously flashy world of the Gemstone family may have been disappointed, or at the very least taken aback, by this unexpected start to the show’s final season. McBride’s big swing pays off, however, providing a totally fitting and surprisingly elaborate Gemstones origin story with a great performance from Bradley Cooper, who’s obviously gunning for an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.

New episodes of The Righteous Gemstones Season 4 premiere Sundays on HBO and Max.