By Sobell
Good news, everyone! Gemma's little automotive incident from last week did not produce any lingering injuries for anyone. Let's hear it for seat belts, modern infant carseats, and being married to the show creator! Gemma is, of course, wracked with guilt over putting the boys in harm's way. It doesn't help that Clay totally covers for her with a far-fetched story about how a van full of hired thugs totally ran Gemma off the road, because now she's guilty about feeding Jax and Tara a lie they totally swallow. Nero comes in and urges her to stop the lie – and sort of nudges the process along -- and while that reduces one complication (no more fibbing to Jax and Tara!) it introduces MANY more, in that Tara declares Gemma persona non grata at the Teller-Knowles estate and Jax tells Gemma that if she ever wants to get in with his family again, she needs to give Clay what is known in the escort business as "the girlfriend experience" and pretend to fall in love with him all over again, then feed Jax all the info she gleans during pillow talk. I am positive that ordering his gang-raped mother into a coerced sexual relationship with a man who beat her like Chris Brown won't backfire on Jax at all!
Back to a van full of thugs: You will recall that last week, a van ran Jax and Chibs off the road and then conducted a spray-and-pray, yet the two club officers somehow dodged a hail of bullets and brought low one of their would-be killers. This week, Jax chops off the hands and dispatches one to Unser for ID'ing the guy; he sends the other to Pope for the same purpose, and to test whether Pope's a liar. (Spoiler alert: No. At least, not about pissant stuff like this.) Pope dispenses more gnomic wisdom about the gamesmanship of power, then Jax finds out that Frankie was the one who hired the two men to kill Jax and Chibs as part of his "I better kill them before they get me" plan.
Frankie is also the kind of guy who makes a back-up plan, namely: sneak into the brothel and hold Nero and Lyla hostage until he gets lots of cash and a clean break. This mutates into lots of cash plus Chibs as a hostage. Frankie goes to execute Chibs, and then Chibs says some not-very-nice things about Italians, so Frankie just pistol-whips Chibs and runs off. Chibs has a very restful remainder of the episode snoozing in the dirt; scalp wounds are more for show than they are serious. You know, sort of like a Kardashian.
Also along the no-more-lies lines: Juice comes clean to Clay about the boxes he checks on the census form and how they led to the events of the past season, and in turn, Clay tells Juice about how he used the nomads to stage the break-ins. Clay swears all this secret-swapping has made them besties and everyone in the club totally does it. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes Clay to conclude that killing Juice and crying, "RICO spy!" will help him consolidate power. In a parallel development, Roosevelt has a conversation with Jax wherein we learn that the skin under Rita's fingernails did not produce conclusive DNA evidence. However, Roosevelt has leverage he can use with Jax: If Jax delivers unto him the men who killed Rita, Roosevelt will tell him who within SAMCRO has been ratting on the RICO case.
Lisa Schmeiser thinks it's hilarious how the “Oakland” scenes show Palos Verdes in the background -- and knows that the preceding independent clause makes sense only if you know a little something about SoCal geography.