This post discusses the eleventh and twelfth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

Halfway through this first season of Veronica Mars, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t necessarily care very much about the cases themselves that Veronica is investigating week-to-week, but that I care a great deal about getting a better sense of Neptune, California. When the cases serve the setting and the characters, I tend to find myself much more engaged by the procedural elements of the show, which happened to varied extents in these two episodes.

The first—featuring a welcome appearance by New Girl‘s Max Greenfield—does that in two different ways. The bar murders that Keith and Veronica investigate open up an area of Neptune’s economy that we haven’t heard that much about before. In addition to being an enclave for wealthy Californians in the tech and entertainment industries, it’s apparently also a tourist haven. “Oh, but it was so important for the mayor and the Chamber of Commerce to put that scare behind us,” Keith complains of the rush by other city officials to pin the earlier stranglings on a suspect whose method was similar, but not identical to, the killer who reemerges. “This is all about tourist revenues? God bless America,” Veronica snarks when the mayor and Sheriff Lamb pull her father back into the case, using him for his knowledge, but without any promising of redeeming him.

The case also provides an opportunity for Weevil to deliver a hilarious, angry monologue at the police station that serves as a distraction, but that’s also a penetrating look into unequal policing in Neptune.
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This post discusses the ninth and tenth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

One of the things I’m coming to really enjoy about Veronica Mars is the way, compared to other television shows and movies about being a teenager, social groups are relatively fluid. This was an insight that Mean Girls, which made its bow in theaters five months before Veronica Mars debuted on television, made brilliantly at its conclusion: that being a Plastic was a temporary condition rather than an ontological one, and it could pass with the end of a school year or on the occasion of a momentous bus accident. Veronica Mars actually takes that idea a step further in these two episodes, which serve as an illustration of how porous the 09ers are as a clique. They’re people, after all, rather than rigid a fraternal order, and their social group can’t actually provide everything they want, whether it’s support in being more compassionate than their parents or someone who’s willing to ante up for a genuinely high-stakes poker game. Veronica herself has always been a reminder of that fact, but these two episodes are a reminder that she’s not an exception—she’s actually more of the rule at Neptune.

The Moon Calves subplot in “Drinking The Kool-Aid” is a little half-baked, unfortunately—it’s an over-the-top way to get at a concept that might have been fleshed out on a smaller scale, that being one of the 09ers, and being part of one of Neptune’s wealthy families, is actually a corrosive and disillusioning experience. Casey (Jonathan Bennett, who played Aaron Samuels in Mean Girls), has come to realize that, as he puts it, “I wrote the Jackass Bible, the Jackass Koran, the Jackass Talmud.” His parents, who have been wealthy their whole lives, let the desire to keep consolidating their wealth corrupt their interpersonal relationships, particularly with Casey’s grandmother. “My parents, who call her Grandmonster behind her back, stopped paying attention to her,” he explains. Having him work out those issues through a cult gives Veronica and her dad a case, but it’s also a kind of quick way to dispense.

By contrast, the person who appears to be working out those issues on a relatively large scale and over an extended period of time is Logan Echolls. The show’s taken time to establish the misery that lies behind the gates to his family home, some of the tension between him and his friends, and the ways in which managing his pain at Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried, another link to Mean Girls) has lead him to tweak Neptune’s establishment by helping Veronica subvert the whitewashed memorial the Kanes had planned for her. And one of the things the show is doing now that we know these things about him is showing how his relationships with Weevil and Veronica, the main people he hangs out with who aren’t 09ers, are shaping up like fencing matches, shaped by the participants’ needs and the ground they’re willing to surrender.

“What if I run into a pack of you white boys on some clean, well-lit street? I could be bored to death,” Weevil tells Logan when he’s trying to get in on his poker game. The language of the negotiation between them is similar to what it was when Weevil was going after Logan’s car in the pilot. “You people can hand-roll like nobody’s business,” Logan tells him of the Cuban cigars he’s passing around, and when Weevil wins big, Logan tells the other player “Sean, the money box so I can pay the pool boy?” But the fact that Weevil’s seeking out the invitation at all, and that Logan’s willing to grant it—and that when the theft goes down, Logan’s willing to let Weevil search his friends rather than calling security and having him tossed out—demonstrates how far the two of them have come. I’m not sure how their relationship will shape up long-term given that there seems to be a great deal we don’t know about Weevil’s relationship to Lilly, and how Logan might react when he—and we—find out what the truth is there. But the fact that they were both drawn to the same girl, that they both have parental figures who are willing to sacrifice them for their own good, whether it’s Logan for his good name or Weevil’s grandmother who believes he can do shorter time as a juvenile, suggests a similarity to them that is obvious to us, even if they can’t see the extent of it.

And that’s also true for Logan and Veronica as well. Of course, they were friends for real, once. And it means that Logan’s willing to let Veronica back in when she volunteers to investigate the poker game theft. “Annoy, tiny blonde one! Annoy like the wind!” Logan tells her, more affectionately than anyone else. “You are a natural at this,” Weevil tells Veronica when they stop by the Echolls’ ill-fated Christmas party. But the truth is that it’s just as normal for Logan to want people like Weevil and Veronica in his life as it would be for Weevil and Veronica to want in to the mansion, with its catering and its horribly over-the-top Christmas decorations. As Sean’s experience faking it as a member of the 09ers illustrates, it’s exhausting and ultimately unsustainable to posture all the time, even when you do have the money and social position to back up your bravado. Negotiating the minefield of high school is tiresome no matter who you are. And sometimes the best friendships can survive in the clandestine spaces in between cliques, where nothing is clearly expected, and as a result, everything is possible.

Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is one of my favorite science fiction movies of the last five years, and his follow-up, Elysium, is probably the movie I’m most looking forward to this year, and I’m glad to see that the first trailer for it doesn’t contain any signs I should contain my enthusiasm:

One of the things that I think the best dystopian fiction gets at is the idea that technological advancements will not be distributed equitably or universally, and in fact, that technology may be used to provide an escape hatch for the most privileged people in society. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the anti-aging treatment that’s developed by Mars’ first settlers goes to the wealthiest people, who are often associated with multi-national corporations, first, while the much larger and poorer segments of the population are denied it. In Alaya Dawn Johnson’s excellent young adult novel The Summer Prince, the main characters live in a society that’s physically stratified, the most powerful living on the highest levels of an enclosed dwelling, and the least on the lowest levels, which are most affected by both sewage and the results of agricultural production. This was something that actually struck me particularly strongly on my trip, which was my first experience with resort travel, a system that, from your pickup at the airport by a preassigned shuttle, to the huge gates you pass through on the way to your actual hotel, is designed to make sure you have as little contact with the actual country you’re visiting as possible.

Given that Blomkamp was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and that his family migrated to Vancouver to get away from South Africa’s extremely high crime rates, it makes sense that he’s particularly attuned both to physical separate by class and race, and the possibility of exit from a system that seems to have failed. It was that awareness that make District 9, in which a stalled alien spaceship united black and white South Africans, who joined together to ghettoize the lost extraterrestrials in a township system like the one that was once used to restrict the movement of black South Africans, such a smart and moving piece of science fiction. In that movie, someone went from the privileged side of the divide to the underprivileged one and discovered that he couldn’t go back again, that there are strict rules for who you have to be to live in a comparative paradise. It looks like Elysium is flipping that divide in having Matt Damon crash the gates of a heaven near to earth, surprising the residents of that gated community with his capacity to get inside. I can’t wait to see what happens when he gets there.

This post discusses plot points from the fourth season of Justified.

I’ve been frustrated at times by the intrusion of Detroit into the hollers of Harlan during the last two seasons of Justified. But the finale of the fourth season of FX’s Western was a lovely hour of television that simultaneously seems to have cleared out the interlopers and showed us what happens when the things that make Harlan so indelibly itself snatch at Ryalan and Boyd. And it was a reminder of just how different Justified is from much of the rest of what’s on television, despite its relationship to anti-hero dramas, and how much it gets out of those differences. Here are five things that other television shows—and networks that are considering what to develop next—could stand to recognize as valuable from last night’s finale:

1. Location, Location, Location: I’ve written before about how dull it is for television shows to rely heavily on New York, Los Angeles, and Miami as settings without considering what it means for the stories they’re telling to be set there. Justified both is refreshing for being set elsewhere, and considering it setting in every decisions its characters make. The development of coal mining, an industry very different from politics, policing, media, or advertising, as a major theme has both provided short-hand for how well certain characters know each other—”I dug coal with him” is a phrase that’s endowed with devastating meaning—and a repeated image of a descent into hell that provided a perfect sense of dread as Boyd’s carefully-made plans to extract himself and Ava from Harlan came unraveled. From Noble’s Holler to Clover Hill, Justified has given us a geography that it’s endowed with rich meaning, so the green vista of a backyard or patched drywall can speak more than any dialogue. And when Brad Paisley sings “You will never leave Harlan alive” as Raylan contemplates Arlo’s grave, we have a sense of what it means for Raylan to have left town, and what it means for him to have been pulled back to it, for Boyd to have dreamed of cleansing his name, and to be left breaking into the dream he once thought was within reach through the front door.

2. True Love: If Homeland had really wanted to tell an epic love story about Carrie and Brody, they might have done well to take a page from Justified, which is simultaneously one of the most romantic shows on television, and one of the most realistic about the limits of romance when dashed up against the rocks of law and circumstance. “You know that you and the baby are safe, right?” Raylan asks Winona after he takes care of the Tonins and gets his family, such as it is, off the mob’s hit list. “I know,” Winona tells him. “That’s why I love you.” I’m sure she does, but it’s an illustration of the inadequacy of love when the mobsters who held Winona hostage have thought in more detail about what it means to be up nights with a baby than Raylan has. And it’s a reminder that the idea that a man can provide safety to his family is a minimal requirement for a modern, equitable relationship. Boyd’s storyline is a reminder of how hard crushingly hard that obligation, often equated with masculinity, can be to fulfill. He refers to Ava repeatedly as “my woman” in this episode, but he can’t protect her. Raylan won’t let Boyd kiss her goodbye. And when Paxton double-crosses him and gets Ava arrested, Boyd goes beserk at the sight of her on the way to jail, agonized by the sight of her in danger, and by his own failure. “I’m going to get a lawyer, the best money can buy, and I’m going to have you out of here in 24 hours,” Boyd promises her. But Ava sadly, and realistically, tells him, “We both know that ain’t going to happen.” Raylan may be skeptical that that Boyd truly loves Ava, asking him if he loves her “Like how you loved the Lord? Or that lovely white skin? Or Arlo? I know he meant a lot to you.” But Boyd’s been more present for Ava than Raylan has for Winona, dreamed for more of them together, and it makes the pain of his disappointment all the sharper. Justified knows better than any other show how making even the basics of a good life can be an epic challenge.
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This post discusses plot points through the January 27 episode of Downton Abbey.

I was on the road when the January 20 episode of Downtown Abbey aired, so this week, I’ll consider both hours of television together. And while the show does have a tendency to skip around—in time, in location, in tone and quality—these two episodes, taken together, offer up a strong illustration of the difficulties of making yourself heard, whether it’s across the gender barrier, upwards across class lines, or through an arbitrarily-imposed bureaucracy. The consequences of those enforced silences, as we saw this weekend, are fatal.

Anna and Bates’ story has fairly definitively stalled out for me at this point in Downton Abbey‘s run, but Bates’ stint in prison has been a nice little parallel to events at Downton itself. He’s a different kind of downstairs now, bound by a different set of social constraints. Inmates have different routes to influence than they did in the big house, where service to one of the principals of the household gave them direct access to air their opinions, if they were carefully stated. And the principals of the household had been raised from childhood to be used to having power, and to exercising it in certain ways, whether it’s to smooth the advancement of certain members of the household staff within the house, or to make interventions in their health and welfare outside the realm of service, as with the surgery for Mrs. Patmore’s contacts or Cora’s promise that Mrs. Hughes would be provided for even if cancer treatment failed to prove effective. But in prison, the guards and wardens are new to power and are primarily concerned with aggregating it. Where the Downtown residents’ acts of kindness to the people they have power over don’t constitute a wholly reliable social safety net or engine of upward mobility, they at least provide a reliable set of cues about incentives and rewards. In prison, something like the withholding of Bates’ letters is meant to enforce the arbitrary nature of his position, to encourage him to be utterly cowed lest he break an unwritten rule or violate a norm. It’s yet another one of Downton‘s reminder that however limited the opportunities are for people in service, falling out of that hierarchy can be even worse.

But it’s one thing to fall out of a hierarchy that provides you with a minimum of status, and another to reach the top of your privilege and find that some of the marginal gains aren’t worth the sacrifice that goes along with them. After Lady Edith found herself jilted at the altar and committed herself to a useful spinsterhood, I emailed a friend that I thought she might break out of society’s role for her, albeit in a more sedate way than Sybil had by eloping. Some of her initial changes are small. “Why don’t you have breakfast in bed?” Matthew asks her when she comes down to dine with him and Lord Grantham. “Because I’m not married,” Edith tells him shortly. It’s a position that provides her with some embarrassment, but it also puts her in the position of being the lone young woman in company with the men of her household, and in a position to voice frustrations about things like suffrage. “I don’t have the vote,” she tells Matthew, bitterly. “I’m not over 30 and I’m not a householder. It’s ridiculous.” His suggestion that she write to the Times may be flip, but it’s certainly more productive than Lord Grantham’s reminder that Edith really ought to talk to Cora about how she can help with the evening’s dinner. The Dowager Countess may tell Edith that “You’re a woman with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining, and find something to do,” but I don’t know if she recognizes that dinners and local charitable patronage still might leave Edith empty.

And so there’s something tremendously exciting about seeing Edith take Matthew’s advice, and for once, get rewarded for making extra effort by the Times, if not by her family. “No lady writes to a newspaper,” Violet declares, before amending that statement to remind Edith that one who does is “A Churchill. The Churchills are different.” Cora tells Edith that “It’s good to have strong views, but noteriety is never helpful.” In other words, Edith is entitled to her feelings, but not the exercise of them, and should accept her gilded cage. And when the letter is published, under the title “Earl’s Daughter Speaks Out For Women’s Rights,” Edith may still be categorized by her relationship to her father, but for once, she’s using that power to get what she wants, instead of letting it define her sphere of influence. So what if “That’s what he’s buying, your name and your title,” as Lord Grantham puts it: Edith is getting something out of the bargain, too.

And as it turns out, “the problems faced by the modern woman rather than the fall of the Ottoman Empire,” aren’t an “even so.” They become urgent when Sybil goes into labor and Lord Grantham quashes the voices of women and Dr. Clarkson when it comes to their care, opting for class and gender solidarity instead. It’s awful to hear Lord Grantham say “I don’t want to hurt Sir Phillip’s feelings,” as if that were the most important issue at stake here, even when it seemed like Sybil’s delivery would go normally. And it’s worse to find out that Sir Phillip is essentially in agreement with Lord Grantham on the importance of his own expertise and status. His snapping at Dr. Clarkson, who has know Sybil her entire life, “Maybe she has thick ankles. Lots of women do,” is the Downton equivalent of advocating an aspirin between the knees as a contraceptive. It’s a refusal to see Sybil as a specific person, and to embrace the actual practice of medicine in favor of the performance of sagacity. And it kills her.
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(L to R) Rebel soldier Mira, lovers Agron and Nasir, Spartacus, Oenomaus, and Crixus.

Spartacus, a retelling of the famous slave rebellion currently airing on Starz, somehow never seems to get mentioned in conversations about “prestige television.” While a few critics (and a decently sized audience) champion the show, the premiere of its final season this Friday isn’t being greeted with anything close to the fanfare accompanying, say, Game of Thrones, the show’s most natural peer.

That’s a shame. Over the course of its past three seasons, Spartacus creator Steven S. DeKnight (of Buffy and Angel fame) and his team have developed one of the most insightful progressive social critiques on television, blending a bone-chilling depiction of the effects of structural oppression on individual lives a society with a quietly egalitarian take on gender and sexual orientation.

Spartacus’ basic approach is that gladiators aren’t, aside from their combat skills, all that special: they’re one type of slave in a society constructed around human bondage and class oppression. As one Roman puts it, Spartacus is “admired as a gladiator, yet despised as a slave” — someone whose bloody exploits are to be celebrated but, when push comes to shove, exists to be used and abused in the same way as any other kind of slave.

The systematic abuse inflicted on slaves motivates the main plot arc, the gladiator revolt and its growth into a real military challenge to the might of Rome. But the show’s dynamic isn’t as simple as “Romans are evil, hence slaves rebel.” Each of the main rebel characters is vividly drawn, fighting despite hopeless odds for their own reasons — reasons that are themselves provided by machiavellian Romans.

In a twisted way, the Roman oppressors are as, if not more, interesting than the gladiators and other slaves. Roman society is depicted as an unending quest for social standing, where those lower on the totem pole are targets of constant abuse by their so-called betters. While not subject to the routine, legally sanctioned murder and rape that marks the lives of the show’s slaves, wealthy Romans experience everything from petty social humiliation to the extra-judicial slaughter of their entire households by a rival for power. In Spartacus‘ Rome, standing is worth everything – up to and including your life.

In that world, cruel abuse of slaves is made brutally rational. Because currying favor and building alliances with Romans who can secure your standing can make-or-break your family’s fortunes, it makes sense (from the point of view of the Romans) to use every tool at your disposal to do so. Slaves are unique in that they are human, and hence can be used to put on glorious, bloody spectacles or to satisfy the most depraved sexual desires without any legal recourse. So when powerful Roman Varis asks that gladiator Oenomaus’ best friend (Gannicus) and wife (Melitta) have sex, the Roman who owns them, Batiatus, has little choice but to accept, as doing otherwise would lose him the favor of a social better. Even if Batiatus cared that he was forcing his slaves to rape each other (though he probably didn’t), the class structure of Roman society forced his hand.

By treating oppression as something that’s basically structural, rather than a thing inflicted by individual bad apples, Spartacus gives flesh to a core progressive insight about the power and character of social oppression. Progressives often speak about racism, sexism, and classism as impersonal forces, things that exist in the world independent of how individual people think about them. It can sometimes be hard to connect concrete acts of discrimination and violence to this airier description. But Spartacus is a vivid illustration of how a system founded on a particular form of classism directly, inevitably leads to individual acts of brutality. The social logic of Rome corrupts people’s incentives, giving even Romans capable of extending sympathy to slaves (like Batiatus’ wife Lucretia) cause to treat them in the most inhuman fashion imaginable.

Spartacus‘ critique isn’t just limited to class. The show’s Rome is unmistakably gendered: Roman women, denied prestigious posts in the military and the Senate, can only exercise power indirectly, participating in the struggle for social power through behind-the-scenes politicking. These Roman women are by no means helpless damsels — perhaps the two most effective, intelligent operators on the show are Lucretia and the high-born Illythia — but when they attempt to assert equality in familial or political decisions, they run up against the limits of what Roman society will allow them to do. And while slaves male and female are both subject to sexual abuse by Romans, there’s no doubt that female slaves bear by far the worst of it. One of the clearest markers of the rebels’ moral superiority, by contrast, is their comparatively egalitarian approach to gender. The season 3 relationship between rebel gladiator Crixus and Naevia, a survivor of repeated sexual assaults, is an honest, touching depiction of a supportive partnership. The rebel army also allows women to serve as equals in combat, to deadly effect.

The show’s method of challenging other sexual norms is more indirect. Two of the most formidable gladiators we meet, Barca and Agron, are in what are almost certainly the most consensual, loving relationships ever to show up on the screen — with other men. In Barca’s case, at least, it’s clearly depicted as an orientation. But no one on the show treats this as wrong or strange; LGBT relationships are treated in the same fashion as heterosexual ones. That homosexual partnerships are seen as unproblematic in Roman times serves to point out how arbitrary the elevation of heterosexuality as morally unique in some contemporary circles really is.

That’s not to say the show doesn’t have its rough spots. The pervasive, graphic violence and nudity — really, it makes Game of Thrones look like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood — arguably undermines the show’s critique of deriving pleasure from the pain and humiliation of others, especially in the first few episodes where that theme wasn’t particularly well developed. But there’s an equally persuasive case in the reverse. Spartacus is, in my view, asking its audience to reflect on why it likes seeing sex and violence packaged together, and what the relationship is between today’s television viewer and the vicious Romans they’re ostensibly rooting against. That one of the second season’s most emotionally satisfying moments involves the destruction of a gladiatorial arena, with spectators lining the stands, sharpens the point.

So Spartacus doesn’t deserve the 300-lite reputation it has in some circles. It’s one of the most deftly executed, socially conscious shows on television. And it’s certainly worth your time.

This post discusses plot points from the first episode of the third season of Downton Abbey. If you’ve seen subsequent episodes aired in the UK and want to discuss events that happen in them, please flag your comments as such.

Much of the discussion of the residents of Downton Abbey, the great house at the heart of Julian Fellowes’ series of the same name, is whether things ought to change. Much of the tension of the series comes from the fact that, no matter what anyone might wish on the subject, change is coming anyway. And after a season of Downtown Abbey that felt stuck, and in some cases silly, I’m glad to see change, both much-desired in the form of Mary and Matthew’s wedding, and greatly feared in the form of the loss of Cora’s fortune to a bad investment, come to the characters and the series itself.

One of the most intriguing new additions to the show in this episode was the discussion of Downton’s role in the larger economy of the region. It’s telling, of course, that the characters themselves have never really discussed their larger obligations as job creators until they’re faced with an existential threat to the continuation of their own privileges—much like the billionaires who found themselves deeply aggrieved by the tone of the latest presidential election. And it’s even more intriguing that Downton Abbey itself, despite its continual feints in the direction of class, has avoided this obvious source of both personal and societal drama until now.

But it makes sense that we’ve gotten there, even by a belated way. If life at Downton Abbey seems feudal, that’s because in a fundamental way it is. Robert may not be directly renting land grants and cottages to villagers in exchange for silver pennies and chickens, passing some share of the profits up to the king in the form of wax candles, grain, and coin, as his ancestors would have done. But he’s overseeing an estate that is meant to be a linchpin in the local economy, and an economic intermediary between the people and their government. And in his meeting with his banker in London, it’s clear he feel that responsibility powerfully. “I refuse to be the Earl who dropped the torch and let the flame go out,” he insists. “The estate must be a major employer and support the house, or there’s no point to it. To any of it.” That’s not to say that he’s solely concerned for the welfare of the poorer people in his orbit. But without the ability to generate jobs, Downton isn’t just economically unviable—it will come to be seen as morally indefensible to the people who have previously accepted its paternal influence on the region.

Or as Violet puts it at dinner with the family, her bluntness in service of a useful honesty, “It’s our job to provide employment. An aristocrat without servants is as much use of the county as a glass hammer,” a beautiful, profoundly stupid object. I’d argue that Downton Abbey is a relatively conservative show, one that likes to set up radicals and reformers like Branson, and to a lesser extent, Lady Edith, as naive and ineffectual. Even Branson finds himself pulled into another way of seeing things as he’s absorbed into the family, telling Matthew the night before his wedding “It’s strange I’m arguing about inherited money and saving estates. The old me would like to put a bomb under the lot of you.” But this episode mounted as effective a version of the job creators’ argument for the maintenance of their privilege as it’s possible to make, largely because we actually like someone like Lady Mary vastly more than we like Charles and David Koch, and thus are more receptive to her insistence that “I shall be Countess of Grantham one day, and in my book, the Countess of Grantham lives at Downton Abbey.”
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This post discusses plot points from the November 6 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

Sons of Anarchy is a show that’s always at its best when it puts aside complex arms deals, and the Galindo Cartel, and the CIA and focuses on a simple question: what does SAMCRO mean for the downwardly mobile white men and women who are affiliated with the club? Last night, while it had its share of exploding vans and poker club shootouts, and a setup for a devastating assassination, was primarily concerned with that question, and with the question of the aspirations that its main characters have seen slip out of reach.

Nero and Gemma discussed those questions most directly in a series of conversations that heightened their relationship even as Gemma finally reckoned with the fact that she would have to end it on Jax’s orders. “Ex-junkie, ex-con, those six-figure offers were kinda slim,” Nero explained to her of his decision to become a pimp rather than to go completely legitimate. “It’s hard to be a land baron on minimum wage,” Gemma agreed with him. And Nero gently probed the failure of her own dreams. “What about you, mama?” he asked. “Being an old lady’s your life’s ambition?” “My only ambition was to keep moving,” she told him, ruefully. “I was all in from that first ride. Knocked up two months later.”

Gemma’s not a stupid or incapable woman–quite the reverse. But unlike her daughter-in-law, Tara, she’s never had someone direct her considerable talents in a productive decision, or one that could have given her financial independence and legitimate leverage in her marriages. It’s heartbreaking to hear her tell her son, one who has the trappings of power that were his to claim as a man, and as a prince of the club, “I can count the times I’ve been really happy on one hand. You and your brother. Abel and Thomas…I like Nero, Jax. I haven’t felt light in a very long time.” Her price to return to the man who beat her down, and who she’d rather see dead, is pitifully small: a key to Jax and Tara’s house, and permission to see her grandsons. Whether you despise Gemma or admire her tenacity, there’s something crushing about the tiny scale of her dream, and the thought that she may not be able to handle even that. Clay’s predatory grin of triumph when she came home to inject his hands after the ride was a reminder of how high the cost can be for even the littlest ambitions.

Tara, by contrast, spends much of this episode in triumph. “You’re a persistent little gash,” Otto tells her when she returns to prison intent on getting him to recant the testimony that makes the RICO case against the Sons possible. “Yes, I am,” she replies. But one of the fascinating elements of Tara–though I’m not sure whether it’s a deliberate choice or an inability to read the character that’s produced this–is the extent to which being an old lady is a kind of role play for her, or a genuine identity that she’s chosen. When we first met Tara, her connection to Jax was reestablished by the fact that she was being stalked by a man who would eventually try to sexually assault her. Now, taking on the role of his old lady lends her a kind of cold power as she lets Otto masturbate to the sense of her perfume and the touch of her hand, telling her “Unhook my hand…Please. I’m not going to hurt you…Come to me. Hold my hand…I just want to feel a woman’s hand on me one more time. Please.” For someone who sought protection in the club against a rape, there’s something uneasy about watching Tara allow herself to be used as a sexual object for the sake of that club, to see her go home and tell Jax: “It’s just incredibly sad. He’s just emotionally broken. The perfume crushed him. He was sobbing. I think I got through to him.”
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