When, earlier this year, Sons of Anarchy aired its fifth episode of its fifth season, entitled “Orca Shrugged,” I mostly wrote about motorcycle gang leader Jax Teller’s decisions, and Walton Goggins’ performance as a transgender prostitute who was enlisted in a blackmail scheme. But the most important scene is actually one that happens at the end of the episode.

One of the subplot of this recently concluded episode of Sons was a series of violent home invasions, blamed on an African-American gang, but in reality, the work of white Nomad members of the Sons of Anarchy, who had been recruited as part of a scheme by one faction of the club to destabilize the other. And in “Orca Shrugged,” the home invaders broke into the home of Charming, Calif. Sheriff Eli Roosevelt. Roosevelt and his wife Rita’s challenges getting pregnant had been a storyline earlier in the show, and by this season, she was pregnant. When the home invaders arrived, she was the only person home. She wasn’t expecting the Nomads to break into her house, of course. And the Nomads, as it turned out, weren’t expecting her to have a handgun in her home, loaded and easily available to her for personal protection.

In a lot of American popular culture, in that situation, Rita would have fought back bravely. Even in a dark, chaotic bedroom, she would have had chances to get off shots, and her bullets would have found their targets. Rita would have been survived, and she would have become, in that moment, a Strong Female Character.

Instead, Rita was shot accidentally. She lost her child. And she died. This episode and the one that followed were a stark rebuke to the idea that having guns in, say, a movie theater in Aurora, or a classroom in Connecticut, would have been an effective defense against a determined killer wearing body armor using a weapon capable of shooting many people quickly. In chaos in the dark, another gun is a multiplier of the potential for violence, a tool that depends on calm, time, good light, and a clear line of sight to be reasonably accurate. I’m so grateful to Sons of Anarchy for making that painfully clear, and acting as a counter to the tropes that suggest any of us can pick up a gun, defend ourselves, and become heroes.

After I wrote yesterday about feeling overloaded on both violence and baroque plot mechanisms that ratchet up the intensity of shows, Linda Holmes at NPR wrote a wonderful piece about what we lose about focusing on violent death as the only possible stake for dramatic storytelling:

But what is concerning is that this revolution has been deep but narrow; it’s like we have an army of dazzlingly fluent poets who all write in one language. That doesn’t, of course, make all the poetry the same, any more than all English-language poetry is the same. These shows are varied in many ways: The Wire is not the same show as The Walking Dead just because people get shot and otherwise brutalized, and American Horror Story and Boardwalk Empire are hardly identical twins. But they share elements, one of which is that the stakes involve — not solely but largely — avoiding being violently killed. And for that reason, they ask the viewer to want to watch people being violently killed now and then, and sometimes now and then and then and then, because otherwise the threats are false…

The “television versus film” debate is absurd and always has been; there’s no way to attain a weighted average of all of television and all of film, nobody sees all of either one, and comparing best versus best ignores everything else. But at some point, if dramatic television wants to be considered as vibrant and exciting as film can be, it needs a better mix. It needs love stories and family stories, workplace stories and friendship stories, and they can’t all be soaked in blood. Inevitably, there is a portion of the audience that is — as Alyssa pointed out — eventually exhausted by that. Not offended; exhausted.

I also took some time yesterday to talk to Maureen Ryan of Huffington Post both about Sons of Anarchy and some of the issues I raised in my piece. Sons fans may be interested in the whole diavlog. But I wanted to pull this section of it, where we talk a bit about how to work our way out of hugely complex plots that are dependent on violent stakes. We talked a bit about British series, which have developed in the opposite direction that Linda described, exploring a broad range of forms and tones but without delving deeply into a limited set of tropes and themes. And I suggested that maybe we need a halfway point between traditional procedurals, which devote very little time to long character arcs and keep their plots largely confined to single episodes, and serialized dramas, which have both very long plot and character arcs. Mad Men, after all, is fundamentally a procedural, a show that has a discrete task per episode, often one that very clearly snaps onto the previous episode’s task like a Lego in the construction of the major goal of the season, and one that leaves significant space in every episode for character development. And it’s avoided the trap of both the traditional procedural, and of violent death stakes as the only ones:

This post discusses plot points from the fifth season of Sons of Anarchy through the December 4 finale.

From its pilot episode, Sons of Anarchy has made one of its hallmarks out of its musical montages to close out episodes and particularly seasons. The sequences can be thunderingly literal, though in terms of blunt force, they’re on the gentler end of the tactics Kurt Sutter’s retelling of Hamlet employs to underscore its arguments about power, masculinity, and loneliness. And so one of the things I enjoyed so much about the finale to this fifth season of Sons, a season that despite its flaws restored my faith in the show in some significant ways, can be summed up by the music that bracketed this episode, which for once came at the two main points the episode was trying to make sideways.

It began with Lulu’s “To Sir With Love,” and a focus on Gemma and Tara. This is a song with a rather literal origin, as the theme song to the 1967 movie adaptation of the memoir of the same name: when Lulu explains that “The time has come / For closing books and long / Last looks must end,” she was actually talking about a school year. Here, the men about whom Gemma and Tara think that “And as I leave, I know that / I am leaving my best friend / A friend who taught me right from wrong / And weak from strong that’s a lot to learn,” have taught them, but not exactly by example.

The strongest arc of this season of Sons has been Tara’s moral education, and it makes sense that her journey, which began with an image of her and Jax fading into an old photograph of Gemma and John, ends with Gemma resuming her place behind the man at the head of the table, telling Jax “It’s okay, baby.” This is the story of the failure of a grand experiment, of Tara trying on being a traditional old lady, blind to her husband’s flaws, having hair-pulling fights in the example of her mother-in-law, and deluding herself into believing that she could manipulate a man like Otto Delaney. That example’s been proved wrong at almost every level. Otto manipulated Tara into facilitating what will likely be his last murder. The fight between Carla and Tara fixed none of Tara’s long-term problems and contributed to Carla’s suicide. Like the nerves in her damaged hand, Tara’s old self, and the old moral sense that propelled her out of Charming so long ago are growing back, an inevitable life force.

Perhaps the most telling moment in the end of Tara’s experiment is that when Wendy tells her “You have no idea what happened to me last night, do you?…Jax came to see me after Tig dropped me off. Told me to back off from his family and threatened to tell my work that I came here looking for Abel high and out of control…Unfortunately a positive drug test might make it true. Because he banged a speedball into my shoulder,” Tara believes her, almost immediately. She doesn’t question Wendy’s version of events, or her motivations. She heeds Wendy’s warning to “Believe it. The MC, this town. It kills all the things you love…Trying is never going to get you out. Go to Oregon now, before something awful happens to you and your sons.” Rather than letting Jax talk her back into believing that Wendy’s a danger to their family, she tests him and when Jax tells Tara “She can’t prove shit. She’s just a junkie. She’s never gonna get custody,” he fails.

And when Tara confronts Jax, truly, about what their life has become, and forces him to make a decision, it turns out that, as he’s alluded to in the past, Jax isn’t much for the idea not just of living off his wife, but by bowing to her moral code. “I’m just getting things in order,” Tara tells Jax when he discovers the paperwork she’s filled out to provide for their children if something should happen to them. “She’s the best choice. You shouldn’t have attacked her, Jax.” “Is that what this is?” he demands of her. “You trying to teach me some kind of lesson?” She tries to lay out a vision of old ladyhood that could bridge the gap between them, maybe even provide a bridge to a new kind of life. “I used to think if I gave up on the club, or Charming, I’d somehow be betraying you and I didn’t want to do that,” Tara explained. “And then I realized my job as your old lady is to be strong when and where you can’t be. That’s what this is, baby. I took that job in Oregon. It starts in two weeks. The boys are coming with me. And if you love them, and if you love me, you’ll follow us up there. We both know if we stay here we’ll end up like the two people we hate the most. And our boys will be destined to relive all of our mistakes.” But it’s too late for them, as she’s taken off to jail, though whether by the machinations of Gemma or former U.S. Marshal Lee remains unclear. The season ends with Abel pulling one of Jax’s rings off his finger, looking at it as a mysterious object, and then placing it carefully on his own finger, too big for the weight now, but the boy has time to grow. It’s a quite moment, but one of the most forceful statements Sons has ever made for the power of fate over free will.
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Coming to the end of my day of writing on Monday, I realized something: I was exhausted by my last several days of watching television. It’s not just that Sunday has become so jam-packed with strong, interesting shows that my weekends feel more like a build-up to my craziest work day than a chance to relax, or the fact that I’m in the middle of a barrage of mid-season finales. It’s that that almost all television now, particularly in drama, seems to be operating in a sphere so intense that it’s impossible to relax—and sometimes impossible to watch, or even to follow what’s happening on-screen. Every show has a conspiracy. Shocking violence has become the norm, and seems to be escalating quickly. The stakes are constantly so high in every episode of television that plot is often swamping strong character dynamics. It made me wonder if our television needs to take a chill pill for a while, if only so we can start thinking more carefully about what kinds of storytelling tools are most effective.

The shows that got me thinking about this phenomenon were Scandal and Homeland, two shows that purport to operate in very different environments, network and cable, soap and anti-hero drama, but this week had a plot element in common. It’s not as if political assassination attempts are taboo on television: West Wing shot President Bartlet in its “In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen” episode, though the show made clear relatively quickly that the President himself would survive, and drew much of its drama from the grave threat to the life of one of his chief aides. But in that case, it felt like assassination was reserved for a moment of extreme gravity in the narrative arc of the show. In four days last week, we had two shows that had as their plot points attempts to kill a high official of the United States government. On last Thursday’s episode of Scandal, President Fitzgerald Grant was shot on the way to his birthday party, in what seems to have been a plot set in motion by his wife—it was the presidency as soap opera subject. And then on Sunday’s episode of Homeland, former prisoner of war Nicholas Brody, who has declined to murder a bunker full of government officials, got a chance to kill just one, the Vice President of the United States, the man responsible for the drone strike that killed Brody’s surrogate son and the biological son of the super-terrorist Abu Nazir. Last year, Brody’s decision not to commit an assassination was one of the most exciting episodes of television on any network.

It’s not only that more than one show is now fantasizing about killing high officials, a highly sensitive subject, that diminished the power of Homeland. It’s that the conspiracy around Brody has gotten significantly more complex. There are more people in play on the ground, journalist Roya Hamad, a munitions expert and his team, Abu Nazir himself, who seems to have strolled over the border. The scheme is grander, an attack on a welcome home ceremony for Marines, in front of Roya’s camera crew. The shock of Brody’s true nature would be even bigger now that he’s a Congressman. All of these elements amp up the magnitude of the plot against America. But they also introduce the possibility of inconsistency, implausibility, of error, and of emotional discontinuity, or losing track of characterization. And yet people continually seem to think these sorts of escalations are worth it, to believe that plausible character development and the emotional stakes that come along with being a human in a high-pressure situation aren’t actually enough to sustain our interest, and there has to be a giant conspiracy (as was the case with Lost Resort and remains the case with Revenge) or mystery or the promise of bloody destruction to keep us in our seats. It’s too bad, because some of my favorite shows—Sons of Anarchy with the cartels and the Irish, Homeland with Nazir, and Revenge with its shadowy initiative—have spent a lot more time on conspiracies that seem like they must eventually be dissolved or dismantled than on their main characters emotions, and have done so at moments when the actors on each shows are hitting high-water marks.

And it’s not just complicated serialized storytelling that can be getting in the way of experiencing genuine emotion on shows. One of the things that’s marked the search for increased intensity in our television watching is increasingly escalating violence, disgustingness as a signpost of how serious a situation. In 18 hours yesterday, I saw two of the grossest things I’ve ever watched on television, Glenn yanking an arm bone out of a zombie’s rotting flesh on the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead (I couldn’t make it through the rest of the episode) and a scene from an upcoming episode of television that was much more viscerally upsetting for taking place in a non-genre setting. This is not to say that grotesque violence can’t be powerful signposting: the latter incident is so powerful and so keeping in character that I’m still having a physical reaction to my revulsion hours later. And for those of you who know what’s coming in the Song of Fire and Ice universe, I’m bracing myself for some truly horrific things coming down the pike in Game of Thrones that will literally test my ability to keep my eyes on the screen as they occur. But I’m curious about the extent to which it’s actually necessary to holding mass interest.
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This post discusses plot points from the November 20 and 27 episodes of Sons of Anarchy.

“You reach an age where you realize that being a man isn’t about respect or strength. It’s about being aware of all the things you touch,” Jax writes to his son in his journal in last night’s episode of Sons of Anarchy. It’s a fantastic mission statement for masculinity. And I think the test for Sons of Anarchy going forward is whether the show thinks Jax is living up to it, or if it’s aware that Jax has reached a point where he’s entirely self-deluding, where even his declaration that “You can’t sit in this chair without being a savage,” is a way of evading the person that he’s truly become. I’m at a point with Sons of Anarchy where I literally could not care less about any of the plot mechanisms, the Irish, the cartels, the CIA, etc., but I think the show’s doing some of the best work it’s ever put on screen with its characters’ emotions, and with the impact of their choices.

First, and most important, I think Sons of Anarchy‘s made important steps this season to make Tara a consistent character, and that means forcing her to reckon with the totality of her life with Jax. “I know why you couldn’t walk away a few months ago. The club’s been your whole life, you couldn’t let it die. i think I fell in love with you even more because of that. You’re a beautiful, loyal man Jax,” she told him in last week’s episode. “You’ve done everything you wanted to do, baby. It’s your turn now. we can move on. And after yesterday, I can’t help but feel like this is some kind of last chance for us.” His deflection is heartbreaking, because what it really means is that he wants Tara to turn the job down, that he may say that he’d be willing to consider a life where his wife is the primary breadwinner away from Charming, but that when that option is genuinely present, he’s not up to the task. But Charming isn’t really enough for Tara, even if it takes Unser to help her realize it. “I love Jax and my boys. I love being his wife…I’m okay with the life,” she tells the old man when she meets him at chemo, stepping back from the triumphant embrace of her role as queen that marked her last season. “Seems like you left yourself off that list,” Unser reminds her. “I used to love being a surgeon,” Tara admits.

When she accepts the job, telling the head of the practice, “It’s a perfect fit. I just want to keep it under wraps. Let Jax sit with it for a minute,” she’s acting in her own interests. But she isn’t ready, either, to face up to the fact that what’s a perfect fit for her and what’s a perfect fit for Jax may be fundamentally incompatible. Jax may promise Tara that “I’m going to give you a beautiful life.” But the two of them, at least in our viewing, have never been able to have an honest conversation about what beautiful means to either of them, to agree on a shared vision of their life. They’re good at impulse, at sex in that hotel room, at the shotgun wedding. But marriage means planning, means understanding how your touch affects things years down the road.

It’s Wendy who speaks that truth to Tara and Jax once she finds out about Abel’s accident, and his kidnapping. “You knock her up, spit out another kid, and throw your entire family against the chaos. And you, how can you live like this? What is wrong with you?” she tells them. And when they object, she doubles down, telling them “Bullshit, you know I’m right.” How Jax punishes her for telling the truth, that as a recovering addict with a partner who is out of the life, Wendy is actually better-equipped to raise Abel than Jax and Tara are, is, to me, one of the most repulsive things that’s happened in this show. Tara may have revitalized prospects of a career, and Jax may be a man. But Wendy loves her son enough not to put him in danger, not to use him as a pawn in manipulating her family. And Jax absolutely cannot handle that truth.

Instead, he decides he’s justified in attacking Wendy as a threat to her family, tells her she’ll use her genuine and legitimate fears for her child to make her seem insane rather than accepting responsibility for his own failures, and attacks her through her sobriety. Wendy is not a perfect person, of course. Her drug use endangered Abel and made his life more difficult. But as an addict, her drug use has a different moral quality than Jax’s sober bad acts. And just as Gemma took advantage of Wendy’s addiction to try to push her into suicide in the pilot, Jax has become someone who will threaten Wendy’s hard-won sobriety to avoid a reconciliation for the threat he himself poses to Abel’s safety. It’s a repulsive thing to do. And I don’t know how Jax can recover from the places he’s gone to. If he’s Hamlet, Jax’s fate may be to suffer a kind of living death, casting a cancerous shade across the people he believes he loves. Whether she knows it or not, Gemma may have seen her son’s future in Nero’s ravaged face.

Clay’s expulsion may offer some instruction. “I’m aware that we don’t just pick it up where we left off. But maybe this is a chance for us to do it different, Gem. No lies, no secrets,” he tells her. Their reconciliation may be false on Gemma’s end, and Clay may not have fully reckoned with his past willingness to commit violence against people he loved in the name of controlling them. But there seems to be some genuine shame and regret in his reactions to her return, to his expulsion from the club. “I’ll sleep at mine tonight. The ink’ll ruin your sheets,” Clay tells her as he heads off to have his tattoos covered up. He’s accepted his punishment from the club, and he’s aware of what he’s touching, even to the level of Gemma’s linens.

This post discusses plot points from the November 13 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

There’s so much going on in this season of Sons of Anarchy that I’m glad to see the show start moving towards resolving some of its exhausting number of plotlines in an episode that was primarily concerned with the management of three separate families: Jax and Tara’s household, SAMCRO itself, and the reconstituted family Gemma is building for Clay under Jax’s orders.

In that first storyline, I was glad to see this episode center on Tara’s moral dilemmas. There’s been something of a pattern in major anti-hero shows of protagonists’ wives getting involved with their husband’s businesses, only to recoil from the reality of the work. Skyler White did precisely that on Breaking Bad, only to be drawn back in to laundering Walter’s money again. Carmela Soprano looked at what Tony did and solved her dilemma by choosing to look away. In this case, Tara’s convinced herself that she’s fully in control of her dealings with Otto Delaney as she works in Stockton to try to get him to give up his RICO testimony. “I would take you out to lunch, but I have a hot date with some inmates,” she tells a hospital administrator who’s offered her an amazing job opportunity and an escape from Charming. When Otto tells her of their encounter, “Something happened to me yesterday, with you. I haven’t cried that way since I was a kid,” she assumes the pose of a motherly authority figure, telling him soothingly, “That’s good.”

She can’t see that he’s doing a masterful job playing her. “I’ll make my part of RICO go away. I’d like one more thing. Before I went inside, I gave LuAnn this crucifix my mother gave me,” he tells her in a request that’s made mild by his references to his dead wife and his faith. “It was this ornate gold and silver piece. LuAnn promised she’d give it back to me when I got out. I know they’re not going to let me have it in here, but I’d like to wear it for a few minutes, maybe say a prayer.” When Tara complies, sure she’s on the brink of victory (though Gemma seems less sure), he asks her to put the crucifix “Next to my heart. Thank you. Can I get a minute alone? It’s been a very long time since I’ve prayed.” Of course, it’s all a scam. “Sons live, Redwood bleeds,” Otto tells Tara as he murders the nurse Tara had been duping to spend time alone with him, making the killing as bloody as possible, forcing Tara to confront his ruined eye, as he forces her to understand what he is doing to Tara and why.

At home, Tara’s reconciliation to her complicity is terrible. “They’re going to find out I gave him that murder weapon,” she tells Jax, suddenly and painfully aware that she only liked the game she was playing when she was in control of it and assured of winning. “Who I am. Why I was there. He made me an accessory to murder.” Jax tries to reassure her, saying “Babe. I’m not going to let that happen. Okay? We’re going to get through this like we do everything else.” But Tara is right to tell him “That’s what scares me the most.” She chose Jax in a moment when the violence that is his life seemed thrilling, when he killed to save her, and the two of them sexualized that violence, having sex next to Tara’s dead stalker. But now Tara is guilty, if only through her naivete, and she’s facing her first real consequences for her complicity. Just as she’s lost herself the opportunity to escape from Charming, she realizes how badly she wants to leave.
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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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This post discusses plot points from the October 30 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

“What you going to do, prez?” Nero asks Jax towards the end of last night’s episode of Sons of Anarchy. “You going to beat the shit out of your mom? Ain’t that been done enough by your family?” It’s telling that, even though Nero hasn’t known Gemma and her family very long, he can already see the toxic dynamics embedded in it even more clearly than the Teller-Morrows can. One of the best things in this flawed season of Sons has been the presence of Nero and Damon Pope, men who are more competent at violence and corruption than SAMCRO is, but who also have much more clearly articulated values outside of their criminal activities. As the Teller-Morrows have become increasingly contemptible and incompetent, Nero and Pope serve to illustrate the gap between who Jax Teller is and who he might have been.

Pope, in this episode, represents the value of patience and the danger of impulsiveness. “Five years from now, this will be affordable housing. Multi-family units. Retail. Park. MARC Station,” Pope tells Jax meditatively when they meet at the rail yard. “Where do they put your bronze statue?” Jax asks him sarcastically. “Somewhere they can’t chop the hands off,” Pope tells him. Their immediate conversation is Jax’s belief that Pope targeted him for assassination, but of course Jax is both wrong about that, and missing Pope’s larger point. SAMCRO’s protected Charming from outside harm for years, but it’s rarely done much to build the town up. Jax sees Jacob Hale’s Charming Heights project as a tool rather than as a potential legacy. And even when he looks to tools, he misidentifies them. “What was I supposed to think?” Jax asks of the hit. “That someone wants you dead and hired a black guy to do it,” Pope tells him patiently. “Unemployment’s crushing the hood. Brothers need work.” If Jax wants to not just survive, but thrive, he needs to develop the ability to see around corners when right now, he can barely see what’s in front of him.

If Pope represents the possibility of becoming a criminal mastermind, Nero’s begging Jax to consider an exit strategy. “You got a beautiful wife, you got two healthy kids, you need to accelerate the end game,” he tells the younger man. “Get away from this shit that’s trying to kill you.” But Gemma and Jax may be too deeply enmeshed in their family culture to start living a new way, and making a living by new means. As Clay put it to Juice, after learning the secret of his parentage, “Everybody at that table’s done something that puts them outside the Reaper. Self-disclosure kills the group.” That’s not just a rule for the club. Gemma and Clay have long hid the secrets of John’s death from Jax, and as they’ve been revealed bit by bit, those half-truths have given the family gangrene. They’re like a patient that can’t bear to give a limb up as lost, and risk dying as a result.
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This post discusses plot details from the October 23 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

I remain deeply ambivalent about this season’s treatment of Gemma, which appears to be coming to a head in this episode. I understand what the show is trying to do with her: tell a story about a woman unmoored from the sources of her identity and increasingly self-destructive as a result. It’s telling that it’s Nero, someone from outside that family, who diagnoses her problem for Jax. “She’s still your mother, jefe, and you got to respect that,” he warns the younger man, having promised to stay away from Gemma but still seeing her clearly. “She’s stuck in between a husband she hates and a son she thinks hates her. Women like her don’t do so good without family.”

But I wish that Sons of Anarchy had found a way to tell that story that didn’t involve treating Gemma like she’s a shameful whore, down to her choice of poison. “Since when do you drink banana vodka?” Jax asks his mother after she becomes the target of Joel McHale’s conman, adding “Jesus Christ. Who are you?” when he finds out she can’t identify the man who robbed her by name. He even apologizes for her to Nero, telling him “I’m sorry you got pulled into this. She’s a goddamn train wreck.” Jax, of course, is not exactly one to preach to his mother about chastity—he slept around on the road even when he was in a relationship with Tara, and Gemma has far more right to go out and have fun without obligations than he did on that unfortunate occasion.

I understand that much of Sons of Anarchy is about how a deeply retrograde, patriarchal subculture that’s survived into the modern era affects both the men who are sworn to the culture and the women who end up participating in it by proxy. And Katey Sagal has always acted the hell out of every line of material written for her. But I’m not sure there’s enough, or sufficiently delineated, distance between how the show views Gemma and how Jax views her right now for Sons of Anarchy to make this very tricky storyline work. The show is pulling it off intermittently. The moment of her weeping in the motel bathroom at night, wrapped in a blanket, was one of the best moments in this arc of letting Gemma sit with her own decisions, as opposed to filtering them through the eyes of her son, or her lover, or her ex-husband. And there was something extremely touching about watching Gemma reminisce to Tara about Luann Delaney, the best friend she lost to murder motivated by SAMCRO’s business dealings in the second season of the show (both the best Sons of Anarchy has ever done, and not coincidentally, the one with the best long-arc Gemma story). “He liked to watch her movies,” Gemma told Tara. “But I’m guessing they’re not to going to let you bring a stack of old videotapes in there. Perfume. Otto loved that goddamn perfume. Smelled like cum and patchouli, was godawful. But he wouldn’t let her wear anything else. It came in a blue bottle, it was Blue Roses, Blue Violet, something like that.” Even in death, Luann, like all the SAMCRO women, is defined by her relationship to a man.

But I thought the show whiffed again when Gemma and Jax finally spoke. “After my Thomas died, I did the worst thing a mother could do,” she told him. “I made you make up for the love that he couldn’t give me anymore. I’m sorry, Jackson. I’m sorry that I’ve always been too much.” Gemma’s committed her crimes and kindnesses, but I really, profoundly wish the show would allow her a deeper reckoning with both her guilt for the sins she’s incurred in the service of SAMCRO, and for the huge damage the club has done her. Gemma got raped and kept quiet about it for the club, she lost Luann, she saw her grandsons kidnapped, she took a beatdown by her husband. But instead, this episode reduced what Gemma’s working through to the nature of her relationship with Jax. “Yeah, when he died, I felt so bad,” Jax tells her. “It wasn’t because he was dead. It was because I would have you all to myself. I knew how wrong that was. I love you, Mom. And we’re going to get through all of this, I promise.” If Jax wants to help his deeply traumatized—and guilty—mother get through what’s ailing her, they’re going to have to learn to talk to each other more honestly than that. As Gemma tells Unser about his profession of love, “Too many people feeling shit. What you said was the truth. More people did that, there’d be less bodies lying on floors.” Terrifyingly—if frustratingly, given the way the show uses Abel to gin up drama—this episode ended with the suggestion that the bodies on the floor could be Gemma’s grandsons.
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This post discusses plot details of the October 16 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

There were a lot of things that happened in this episode of Sons of Anarchy, from Jax getting surprisingly easy revenge for Opie’s murder, beating the prison guard to death with a snow globe, to Tara trying to get Otto to recant his testimony, to Roosevelt’s wife’s death, to Carla’s suicide. But really, this hour of television ended up focusing on two themes for me: the extent to which the Sons are building a very bad fate for themselves they’ve evaded through luck, and the degree to which the show itself is avoiding giving Gemma responsible for her behavior.

Part of what’s fascinating about watching Pope groom Jax is the way he moves to separate him from the rest of SAMCRO. “My crew wants out of the drug game,” Jax tells him when Pope offers him a deal that would pay an extra $100,000 per run to haul in extra cocaine. “What do you want?” Pope asks him. And he gives Jax a personal incentive, promising him that “I’ll kick back 2 percent of my profits on the 30 keys to you, gentleman’s agreement. Just between us.” Given Jax’s perpetual waffling about whether to get out of the club before he took his seat at the head of the table, this is a particularly potent inducement, an offer of money that he could exempt from the normal split with the rest of the club and sock away as a nest egg that might enable him to leave with Tara and their sons without the shame of living off his wife. Later, Pope reminds him of how vulnerable Jax is. “Independent security contractors,” he advises him. “First one to kill my killer gets $5 million. Fear protects me. Greed ensures it…You don’t need money, Jaxon. Just the ability to see the inevitable.”

And so much of Sons of Anarchy is about the things that men make inevitable. No fate is so terrible as the ones the Sons are building for themselves, piece by bloody piece. “Must have been retaliation,” Clay says when he learns that Sheriff Roosevelt’s wife has died of the wounds she sustained in the invasion of her home, using the cycle of violence that the MCs have accepted as normal as a cover for his own actions. But of course, it’s been the Nomads, master-minded by Clay, who have been staging the attacks all along. “Idiots! You weren’t supposed to kill her!” The idea that he could create an acceptable level of violence in Charming that would undermine Jax and create tension with the Niners without creating extraordinary blowback that could imperil the whole club was a foolish dream. He’s made a liar of Jax, who tells Roosevelt “That was some outlaw shit, man,” after Roosevelt runs Bobby off the road to force the club to talk to him, but swears they are not involved in any way in the attacks. And Roosevelt is even righter than he knows when he promises Jax: “You reap what you sow. I’m going to crush your club.”
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