Gideon Gemstone Memes: impressing a cute boy, a hung Keefe, and Skyler's first clothed scene in five years

This is a series of memes -- jokes -- featuring Gideon of The Righteous Gemstones, and friends.  Most don't require you to have any background knowledge of the show.

1. Some friends

2. We've all been there

Teenage Gideon at the sleepover: "This is fascinating.  Reminiscent of the early Faulkner, with the homoerotic subtexts that one often finds in Southern Gothic fiction."

The cute boy he's trying to impress: Dude, that's a blank scrapbook.

3. Perform with your shirt off.  No one will notice.

Gideon: I'm sorry, I'm not up to performing in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  Tell my understudy that he'll have to do it.

Keefe: This is NOT a coat of many colors.  Three, tops. Call Gideon again.

4. Room for one more.

When Gideon invited his buds to the sleepover, he didn't mention that they would be sharing one single bed. Not that they minded.

5. Upset that he wasn't invited to the sleepover.

More Gideon after the break

Carlin James: The third thug, a gay three-way, a queer romance, and Pretty Dudes.

In Episode 4.5 of Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spin-off starring Bob Odenkirk as a sleazy lawyer, a flashback to 2003 shows the young Saul/Jimmy McGill working in a cell phone store.  He starts a side-business selling stolen burner phones (popular with drug dealers, gang members, cheating husbands, and so on). 

While scoping out customers at the Dog House, a sleazoid-favored hot dog stand, he approaches teen thugs Peewee, Skipper, and Scooter. They don't need any phones, but they'll wait until he's done for the evening and beat him up for his profits. Jimmy kicks himself for not being able to foresee that the interaction would go bad.

In the next episode, Jimmy approaches the guys at their laudromat-hangout and offers to give them a cut if they let him sell without harassment: a more reliable dividend stream than robbing him just once.  They decide that they prefer robbery, and chase him -- into a trap!

Jimmy's allies, Huell Babineaux and Man Mountain, tie them up, gag them, and hang them upside down in a piñata warehouse.  They begin smashing the piñatas with baseball bats.  Jimmy asks the teen thugs if they prefer to be smashed to death quickly or slowly.  

The thugs are so terrified that they promise not to bother Jimmy anymore, and to tell all the other thugs to leave him alone.  He calls off the smashing, but his goons pretend not to hear him until the bat comes withn inches of Peewee's face.  "You get one warning," Jimmy tells him as he whimpers.  "And that was it." 

Other than the gay-subtext potential of the three guys hanging out without chatting up girls, I was interested in this scene because I have profiles of two of the actors: Tommy Nelson, left, and Cory Chapman, center.  

Both would go on to roles in The Righteous Gemstones, but in different seasons, and both have a substantial amount of gay and gay-subtext work.  

So what about the third thug, Scooter?  

He's played by Carlin James, a Filipino-American actor from Long Beach.  His on-screen career begins in 2009-11, playing college students in dramatic shorts and guys who get killed in thrillers.

His first mainstream role was in a 2016 episode of  How to Get Away with Murder: he plays Martin, one of the guys that main character Connor, played by Jack Falahee, invites home for a three-way.

More Carlin after the break

Lucien Laviscourt: Shirtless in soaps, romcoms, Shakespeare, Archie comics. With a j/o video

 

In 2020, during the COVID lockdown, everybody watched the Netflix series Emily in Paris, because they couldn't get to the real Paris. Surprise -- it's still streaming, with Season 4 coming up. The hapless social media content creator and her friends are still falling in love at the drop of a script, with Lucas Bravo, Charles Martins, Kevin Diaz, Paul Forman, and most recently Lucien Laviscount.

The British actor -- I know, I thought he was French, too -- has 43 credits listed on the IMDB, beginning with Clocking Off, 2002.

The interconnected lives of Manchester mill workers.  I wonder if they do a Full Monty.

Soap stud roles followed: 13 episodes of Grange Hill, 34 episodes of  Coronation Street, 18 episodes of Waterloo Road.  Plus guest spots on Life Bites, Father & Son, New Tricks, Shameless, Mount Pleasant...well, the list goes on and on.

I might want to see Still Star-Crossed, set in Verona shortly after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, with new Montague-Capulet lovers investigating political machinations. Lucien plays Romeo in a flashback.

Plus a lot of modeling, here for Tommy Hilfinger.  I guess they're supposed to be very close teammates, not boyfriends.  But you never know.

The Bye-Bye Man, 2017, is Lucien's first starring role: "three friends stumble upon the horrific origins of a mysterious figure they discover is the root cause of the evil behind unspeakable acts."  

 Got all that? A bit overblown, with way too many adjectives, but I gather that we're working down from unspeakable acts caused by an evil caused by a mysterious figure who has horrific origins. 

Ulp. All you really need to know is it's all straight people, and Lucien shows his butt.

Another starring role in Snatch, 2017-2018, about...well, the IMDB description is suffering from adjective overload, but it's about con artists who get in over their heads.  The guys, Lucien and Rupert Grint, have a gay-subtext buddy-bond that gets ruined when they both fall in love with The Girl.

Katy Keene, 2020-21, was an ill-fated attempt to hit Riverdale gold by shoving minor Archie Comics characters like Alexander Cabot III into modern-day New York.   

More Lucien after the break