Episode Report Card Sobell: A | 51 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT That's One Way to Renovate an Office
By Sobell | Season 6 | Episode 5 | Aired on 10.08.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.I've read the odd book about this, the purported Third -- or Fourth -- Golden Age of Television (*footnote) and it is striking how persistently Sons of Anarchy is ignored or dismissed as The Shield's dumber, louder little brother. I'm not saying that this show doesn't have 110% of its daily gore allowance and there is a definite The A-Team element in how often the series regulars get shot at with machine guns and yet never get hit.
However, beneath the showy thuggery ticks an incredibly well-planned storyline hurtling toward a tragic conclusion, and the opening sequence makes that very clear. Remember how back in season one, these bikers were the kings of Charming? They were fully part of the city, even participating in fundraising fairs. Jax swaggered and smiled, a young Prince Hal who lightly wore his future and spent a lot of time wondering who he'd be as a father. Remember in season two, when the club went to ground before delivering the hurt to Zobelle's crew, how Clay delivered a rallying speech and called Gemma his queen? How it echoed "we few, we lucky few, we band of brothers" in a way?
Contrast that now with an opening showing the Sons skulking in cars outside the Irish bar while back at the clubhouse, Gemma paces like a restive mother cat and refuses to speak to the other crow-eaters and children stretched out on couches. The swagger is gone, and so is the joyful camaraderie. It's all anger, paranoia and the horrible awareness that there are consequences barreling down far too fast for anyone to avoid.
The opening is a poignant moment because it stands in stark contrast to what the club was and what it has become under Jax, who is no longer Prince Hal and incapable of becoming King Henry.
Let's get into the rest of the episode …
Toric's Death Does Not Help Tara. In fact, because Crazy Otto carried it out, there's a distinct possibility it will look like a club-ordered hit, Lowen tells Tara. On another legal front, DA Patterson decides to lean on Tara hard, because it's one way to crack the MC, and she directs Roosevelt to find another way to get into the MC and start pushing pressure points. This means Roosevelt's a bit motivated to tie Nero to the Byz-Lats and SAMCRO, especially after the DNA results from his truck come back. Alas,
Things Get Even Tenser on the Diosa Front: Nero practices risk management, pointing out to Jax that as a responsible businessman, he does not want the Diosa businesses threatened by the club's habit of feuding with fringe group lunatics. He also points out that he's not cool with the school shooting, since it was a gun that Jax supplied which his cousin's kid then used to kill four other children.
Roosevelt and Barofsky meet up when Roosevelt's staking out The Best Little Craftsman Whorehouse in Stockton. Barofsky tries to intimidate Roosevelt, but Roosevelt has an ace in his pocket, mainly that his Give a Damn has been busted since his wife died, and he honestly seems not to care what happens to him. Barofsky goes to Jax and Nero and chews them out, and while Nero tries to appease Barofsky, the minute Jax leaves, Barofsky expresses his skepticism over Nero's choice of business partners. (Hey, they can't all be Colette.) Later in the episode, Barofsky expresses his misgivings about their business partnership at the top of his lungs.
Unser and Tara Come to an Understanding: He will help her with her exit strategy if she gives him all the details on what she's up to. Meanwhile, Gemma tries to loop Wendy back into the club life by dropping off baby photos of Abel and telling Wendy, "I love you Wendy, a lot. You were a good fix for Jax." Will Wendy give in to the temptation to get custody of Abel? She almost does, but then she makes a visit to Tara in what is my favorite scene in this episode.
Wendy says she can't keep lying to everyone and she can't do this, and Tara cajoles her into sticking the course so that Abel and Thomas can be whisked away from Gemma and Jax as Tara's hauled off to jail. Wendy agrees, but begs to see Abel soon. Tara agrees to that.
Hands up, all of you who wish that these two women would just hit the road together and start a new life up in Oregon with a family practice that provides counseling and medical care for working-class families. They could even bring Juice along as their houseboy. Only me with that fantasy?
And What are the Boys of SAMCRO Up to This Week? Elaborate Negotiations with the Irish. And by "elaborate," I mean "shoot-y, car chase-y, murder-y." Jax finally gets the phone number to the Kings back on the Auld Sod. He talks to three old men and points out that Gaalan's been working off the books with Clay for a while (this does not go over well with the Kings) and Clay will be no good to the Kings once he's dead, so why not just enact a peaceful transfer of business to August Marks' organization? The men who make their business flooding the world with lethal weaponry object to someone making their money off something that makes people super-sleepy and fond of needles, but Jax calls them racists and points out that August can triple their business. The Kings are all, "We'll get back to you" and then the camera swings around to reveal … Gaalan! Who shrugs off the Kings' concerns about shrinking distribution sites by saying, "Teller's just like his old man. Weak, lost, his loyalties in the wrong place" and reassuring the Kings that he's already made arrangements to protect his totally legit, never-done-deals-on-the-side partner Clay. Gaalan goes on to say that SAMCRO's not dumping him, he's dumping SAMCRO and "Jax Teller gets what he wants. Out of guns. And ties severed."
Clay reaches out to Gemma and via the un-tapped sanctity of the conjugal cell, he tells her that the Irish won't do business with anyone "whose skin they can't see through," and they're going to break him out in two weeks. "What then?" Gemma asks. "I go to ground, I put together a crew," Clay replies. "I go to Northern Ireland and I run the whole thing from Belfast." Gemma, who is digesting the news that her son wants out of the business her two husbands worked so hard to build up, asks what that means for SAMCRO. Short answer: Nothing good. "Ask Jax what he wants me to do," Clay says. (Anyone get the sense that he's wooing Gemma through her real love, the club?)
And then things get appalling as two perverted screws come in and smack Clay around a little while demanding that either he rape Gemma in front of them or one of them rapes her while he watches. This is … what, the third sexual assault with an audience Gemma's had on the show? Jeeeeeeeeesus. It's horrifying.
After Gemma lives through that, she and Nero head to the clubhouse. Remember, that spot where everyone in the club and their associates happen to be bunking down, on account of being at war with the Irish? After the Kings call Jax to extra-super-confirm that the entire club will be in the clubhouse awaiting their phone call at 8 p.m., Jax and Chibs assemble everyone. Then, Jax notices that there's a mystery keg of beer (that Chucky has not been able to tap) and a shamrock pen on the counter and he realizes that the reason the Irish are being so reasonable about letting the club walk away is because they're going to remove everyone's legs (and other body parts) via a monster explosion.
So the good news is, everyone in the clubhouse gets out just in time. The bad news is that Teller Morrow Motors is probably going to be attracting a lot of attention from law enforcement. And whatever customers they have left will probably be getting their car back in worse condition than when it was dropped off.
* If you go with the idea that we're in the fourth Golden Age, then the breakdown goes thusly: the first Golden Age ran in the 1950s (Playhouse 90); the second Golden Age took place in the very early 1980s with the advent of Hill St. Blues and other dramas that adopted the serial storytelling model which comic books were so good at and pushed character development beyond archetypes; the third Golden Age took place in the mid-1990s as network television's writing became more sophisticated, casually imbued the shows with social seriousness and continued adding nuance to characterization. And the Fourth Golden Age began roughly around the turn of the century and it's been pegged to cable shows which have turned into inward-looking meditations on human character or fiction-as-long-form-journalism.
Some writers like to pretend that the real renaissance in TV didn't happen until the 1980s, when there enough of a history in the medium for people to begin defying the form and conventions that had sprung up around it. Others like to contend that the 1950s weren't a golden age at all, but the 1970s were because that's when television reconfigured the basic definition of popular culture. I am still waiting for the writer who makes the case that the real impact of the 1980s didn't comes from Hill St. Blues or thirtysomething but rather from MTV.
The point is, there's a lot of people who are analyzing the history of television. If you're interested in reading any of it, the books I can personally recommend are: The Showrunners : A Season Inside The Billion-Dollar, Death-Defying, Madcap World Of Television's Real Stars by David Wild; Television's Second Golden Age by Robert J. Thompson; I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks; Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad by Brett Martin; The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers, and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever by Alan Sepinwall.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Like war -- irregular dashes of excitement that punctuate lengthy stretches of boredom -- so do we have the outlaw life. The SAMCRO crew is busy staking out the Irish crew’s usual haunt and sitting silently next to a grown man in a car is really nobody’s idea of a good time. Back at the clubhouse, things are equally quiet and tense: Gemma is fussing over assorted crow eaters and their children, then goes to check on Tara, who’s resting (but not sleeping) with a child on either side of her.
Clay’s in gen-pop, by the by. I’d say something about placing your bets on the remaining length of his life, but come on.
On ticks the people-are-not-having-a-pleasant-night montage, and eventually, the bikers decide to go home. I am probably reading too much into it with Tig and Juice being in the same car, but given that Jax is casually gambling with the life of one and keeping the other on a double-super-secret probation, I think my over-analysis is justified.
When morning finally breaks, we see Gemma heading up a pancake hootenanny in the clubhouse, delivering a buck-up-little-camper speech to Chuckie (who had, you will recall, been delivered unto the club via Otto’s auspices back in season one), and generally thriving in her element.
Sidebar: Gemma is one of the great Freudian monsters on television, but I think she also represents one of the most heartbreaking characters to come along too. She is basically the walking embodiment of thwarted potential. Gemma’s own mother abandoned her when Gemma most needed her (we covered this in season three), and Gemma lives every day with the ceaseless grief of losing a small child. Those powerful maternal needs – to be mothered and to mother without fear of loss – come out in a variety of warped ways. And I think she’s also a product of her time and her socioeconomic status, and that’s why a fiercely intelligent and ambitious woman like Gemma has spent her life using men as a proxy for her own accomplishment or power. Had Gemma been born into another family, she might have gone to Berkeley in the 1970s, fallen in with the Chez Panisse crowd, and then devoted the next 30 years to browbeating America’s entire food industry into organic, free-range standards by 2007. Instead, she serves pancakes to crow eaters and ignores the identity crisis that bubbles up every time she sees Tara with two little boys.