Showing posts with label Sons of Anarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sons of Anarchy. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "Na Triobloidi": From Abel to Zobelle
A review of the "Sons of Anarchy" season two finale coming up just as soon as I get some books on tape out of the library...
And a good thing, too. Because if "Sons of Anarchy" wasn't coming back, "Na Triobloidi"(*) would be one of the more aggravating series-ending cliffhangers of all time, with Gemma a fugitive (and framed for killing Edmond) and Abel kidnapped by Cameron Hayes as misguided vengeance for his own son. But because Kurt is confident that the show is coming back, and because he says he has a plan for how all the story bombs he dropped here are going to play out (as opposed to shows where they write the cliffhanger, go on vacation, and figure out how to solve it once they come back), I'm at peace with the insanity of the closing moments of season two.
(*) The title refers to The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
I found "Na Triobloidi" to be a much stronger episode than last week's "The Culling," but both seem of a piece. The emotional climax of the season - and the climax of the part of the show I care most about, which is the war for the heart of SAMCRO - happened in episodes 10 and 11, and these last two have mainly been about wrapping up unfinished business with Zobelle and LOAN and setting up the major story arcs of season three.
It's just that "Na Triobloidi" did a better job of taking care of the plot while still servicing the characters, where "The Culling" was pretty much wall-to-wall story. The 90-minute running time certainly helped on that score - a standard-length episode might not have had room for a moment like Clay's double-edged "You're a good son" compliment to Jax, followed by the club toasting to "Sons" - but whatever the reason, I felt like I was watching a story about these characters, as opposed to a story simply featuring these characters, if I can make that distinction.
Certainly, there's more visceral satisfaction to be had in SAMCRO's plans (mostly) working this time around, compared to the thwarted plotting of "The Culling." Jax gets to execute Weston in the tattoo shop's toilet and Piney and Happy take out Zobelle's Mayan escort by using one of Wayne Unser's shipping trucks as a Trojan horse.(**) Zobelle gets away in the end (and Kurt explains why nobody stays behind at the convenience store to deal with him), but at a very heavy cost: the daughter he used as a tool in his schemes dies over one of them, and his reputation with the white supremacists who made up his power base is lost to him.
(**) As on "The Sopranos," I think there comes a point with this show where we just have to throw up our hands and assume local law-enforcement isn't capable of doing much of anything about SAMCRO, whether they're shooting someone with a cop in the next room, or turning a highway into a shooting gallery. As the showdown on Main Street scenes made clear, this show is at its heart a Western, and sometimes you just need to hand Sutter his literary license and let his cowboys just shoot 'em up.
But while it's fun to see some ass get well and deservingly kicked, the parts of "Na Triobloidi" that I imagine will stay with me dealt more with the emotions of the people in and around the club: Tara terrified and incapable of speech(***) after Cameron stabs Half-Sack and prepares to take Abel, or Clay seeming utterly lost when Jax tells him about the abduction, Unser looking strangely pleased to be helping Gemma on her fugitive journey, and Jax despairing at the sight of Cameron getting away with his son(****).
(***) In a cast that's been superb all season, and even in this episode, Maggie Siff really rose above with that scene. Cameron killing Sack and taking Abel is so left-field and strange (and not just because the club still seems to be going to the mattresses, and therefore Tara shouldn't be anywhere near Jax's house) that the whole plot development maybe shouldn't work, but Siff sells the hell out of it. And whatever issues I had with the Margaret beat-down last week, I thought that moment - and the scene before that in the car where Tara listens to Gemma talk about God putting Polly in her path - did a nice job of showing Tara reaching the limits of her journey back into SAMCRO country. She may have come from this world originally, and she may have embraced it again after hooking up with Jax, but repeatedly in this episode she was reminded of the woman that she became when she left, rather than the woman she turned back into.
(****) Charlie Hunnam is also incredible in that moment, but what I want to add about that sequence is that I still can't figure out how Jax or one of the other club members doesn't catch up with Cameron (older, slower, and carrying an unhappy baby) before he can get his boat started and unmoored. Nor, for that matter, can I figure out how Zobelle, driving on at least one destroyed tire, outruns a bunch of SAMCRO bikes to the convenience store, and I'm still a little fuzzy about how profoundly Stahl has to screw up before someone higher-up at ATF says, "Hey, maybe you oughta take a rest for a few months while we put somebody else in charge." Which brings us to...
Well, Stahl has now created quite the pickle for everyone, huh? Gemma's on the run, in part for a murder she committed, but also for one she didn't, and Cameron stole Abel and killed Half-Sack as a result. And that's on top of the gun charges from the church raid, which Kurt confirms didn't disappear just because Zobelle left town, and the very uneasy detente between Opie and the men responsible for his wife's death.
And if I have a larger concern about what happens at the end of this episode, it's that the combined fugitive/kidnapping stories have the potential to put the club civil war even more on the backburner. How can Jax worry about the true mission of the club when he knows his son is out there somewhere, and when his mother is running from a pair of murder charges?
Like "The Shield," "Sons of Anarchy" is a show where our characters are dealing with a lot of simultaneous problems, all day, every day. Kurt insists that the inter-club tensions will still be there even as the club is trying to get Abel back and keep Gemma out of prison. Based on so much of this amazing second season, I have no reason not to trust him. But nine months (assuming FX sticks to the usual schedule) is a long time to wait to be sure suspicions are off-base.
And in the incredibly unlikely event the renewal deal falls apart? Well, then both Kurt and John Landgraf need to keep an eye out for any Unser shipping trucks that might pass them on the highway.
Some other thoughts on the finale:
• Not counting some a brief teaser prequel to "The Shield" season six, this was only Sutter's second directorial job (after the season one finale), but you wouldn't know it from the job he and director of photography Paul Maibaum did. "Na Triobloidi" was packed with memorable visuals: the glow of the Sons' headlamps overwhelming each bike to make them look like fireflies (or UFOs) and the shots of the showdown on Main Street, to name just two.
• Once more, with feeling: first the explanation for what happened to both Darby and Chuck in the Caracara fire was cut out of the end of "Fa Guan." Then Chuck turned up alive and mostly well in "The Culling," but with no explanation for where he'd been or what happened to Darby. Sutter told me (in an e-mail conversation before our interview) that, once again, they had to cut that scene for time, so the Darby issue won't be resolved until season three.
• We finally find the source of Zobelle's mysterious, intermittent accent, as we find out that he's originally from Hungary.
• Hale is, for the most part, defined by his belief in the rule of law, and here we see that he's not above using strict adherence to those rules - specifically, the matter of his jurisdiction - to punish a monster like Zobelle by leaving him alone at that store, then taunting him with the news of Polly's death.
• Lots of great music, as always, including the inevitable '60s cover (Paul Brady tackling The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter") and the appropriately apocalyptic "Freeze And Pixilate" by Monster Magnet as the club arms up to follow Zobelle and the Mayans.
• Henry Rollins has been acting regularly for 15 years now, and because of the way he looks, he tends to get typecast as angry tough guys. But over this season, he's shown that he's about more than just his look. Weston was impossible to like, for obvious reasons, but at times during the finale - staring at Zobelle in the jail, saying goodbye to his son (and telling him not to rat to the cops) - I at least understood him, you know? A very good performance in what could have very easily been a cartoonish thug role.
• I know they tried to establish it last week, but I never really bought that Polly had real feelings for Edmond. In previous episodes, it seemed like she was just using him the way she used every other man in the area who wasn't her beloved, creepy daddy. So hanging a lot of the finale plot on her need to say goodbye felt a little odd.
If you haven't by now, go read the interview, and then tell me... what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
"Any idea where we're headed?" -UnserYou may want to go read my interview with "Sons" creator Kurt Sutter about the finale before we get too far into the review. Not only does Kurt explain why Half-Sack died, why Zobelle lived and other plot points (including the origin of the book on tape Big Otto listens to before getting his revenge), but he says that while the third season renewal hasn't happened yet, it's essentially a matter of dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's, and will get finalized sooner or later.
"No." -Gemma
And a good thing, too. Because if "Sons of Anarchy" wasn't coming back, "Na Triobloidi"(*) would be one of the more aggravating series-ending cliffhangers of all time, with Gemma a fugitive (and framed for killing Edmond) and Abel kidnapped by Cameron Hayes as misguided vengeance for his own son. But because Kurt is confident that the show is coming back, and because he says he has a plan for how all the story bombs he dropped here are going to play out (as opposed to shows where they write the cliffhanger, go on vacation, and figure out how to solve it once they come back), I'm at peace with the insanity of the closing moments of season two.
(*) The title refers to The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
I found "Na Triobloidi" to be a much stronger episode than last week's "The Culling," but both seem of a piece. The emotional climax of the season - and the climax of the part of the show I care most about, which is the war for the heart of SAMCRO - happened in episodes 10 and 11, and these last two have mainly been about wrapping up unfinished business with Zobelle and LOAN and setting up the major story arcs of season three.
It's just that "Na Triobloidi" did a better job of taking care of the plot while still servicing the characters, where "The Culling" was pretty much wall-to-wall story. The 90-minute running time certainly helped on that score - a standard-length episode might not have had room for a moment like Clay's double-edged "You're a good son" compliment to Jax, followed by the club toasting to "Sons" - but whatever the reason, I felt like I was watching a story about these characters, as opposed to a story simply featuring these characters, if I can make that distinction.
Certainly, there's more visceral satisfaction to be had in SAMCRO's plans (mostly) working this time around, compared to the thwarted plotting of "The Culling." Jax gets to execute Weston in the tattoo shop's toilet and Piney and Happy take out Zobelle's Mayan escort by using one of Wayne Unser's shipping trucks as a Trojan horse.(**) Zobelle gets away in the end (and Kurt explains why nobody stays behind at the convenience store to deal with him), but at a very heavy cost: the daughter he used as a tool in his schemes dies over one of them, and his reputation with the white supremacists who made up his power base is lost to him.
(**) As on "The Sopranos," I think there comes a point with this show where we just have to throw up our hands and assume local law-enforcement isn't capable of doing much of anything about SAMCRO, whether they're shooting someone with a cop in the next room, or turning a highway into a shooting gallery. As the showdown on Main Street scenes made clear, this show is at its heart a Western, and sometimes you just need to hand Sutter his literary license and let his cowboys just shoot 'em up.
But while it's fun to see some ass get well and deservingly kicked, the parts of "Na Triobloidi" that I imagine will stay with me dealt more with the emotions of the people in and around the club: Tara terrified and incapable of speech(***) after Cameron stabs Half-Sack and prepares to take Abel, or Clay seeming utterly lost when Jax tells him about the abduction, Unser looking strangely pleased to be helping Gemma on her fugitive journey, and Jax despairing at the sight of Cameron getting away with his son(****).
(***) In a cast that's been superb all season, and even in this episode, Maggie Siff really rose above with that scene. Cameron killing Sack and taking Abel is so left-field and strange (and not just because the club still seems to be going to the mattresses, and therefore Tara shouldn't be anywhere near Jax's house) that the whole plot development maybe shouldn't work, but Siff sells the hell out of it. And whatever issues I had with the Margaret beat-down last week, I thought that moment - and the scene before that in the car where Tara listens to Gemma talk about God putting Polly in her path - did a nice job of showing Tara reaching the limits of her journey back into SAMCRO country. She may have come from this world originally, and she may have embraced it again after hooking up with Jax, but repeatedly in this episode she was reminded of the woman that she became when she left, rather than the woman she turned back into.
(****) Charlie Hunnam is also incredible in that moment, but what I want to add about that sequence is that I still can't figure out how Jax or one of the other club members doesn't catch up with Cameron (older, slower, and carrying an unhappy baby) before he can get his boat started and unmoored. Nor, for that matter, can I figure out how Zobelle, driving on at least one destroyed tire, outruns a bunch of SAMCRO bikes to the convenience store, and I'm still a little fuzzy about how profoundly Stahl has to screw up before someone higher-up at ATF says, "Hey, maybe you oughta take a rest for a few months while we put somebody else in charge." Which brings us to...
Well, Stahl has now created quite the pickle for everyone, huh? Gemma's on the run, in part for a murder she committed, but also for one she didn't, and Cameron stole Abel and killed Half-Sack as a result. And that's on top of the gun charges from the church raid, which Kurt confirms didn't disappear just because Zobelle left town, and the very uneasy detente between Opie and the men responsible for his wife's death.
And if I have a larger concern about what happens at the end of this episode, it's that the combined fugitive/kidnapping stories have the potential to put the club civil war even more on the backburner. How can Jax worry about the true mission of the club when he knows his son is out there somewhere, and when his mother is running from a pair of murder charges?
Like "The Shield," "Sons of Anarchy" is a show where our characters are dealing with a lot of simultaneous problems, all day, every day. Kurt insists that the inter-club tensions will still be there even as the club is trying to get Abel back and keep Gemma out of prison. Based on so much of this amazing second season, I have no reason not to trust him. But nine months (assuming FX sticks to the usual schedule) is a long time to wait to be sure suspicions are off-base.
And in the incredibly unlikely event the renewal deal falls apart? Well, then both Kurt and John Landgraf need to keep an eye out for any Unser shipping trucks that might pass them on the highway.
Some other thoughts on the finale:
• Not counting some a brief teaser prequel to "The Shield" season six, this was only Sutter's second directorial job (after the season one finale), but you wouldn't know it from the job he and director of photography Paul Maibaum did. "Na Triobloidi" was packed with memorable visuals: the glow of the Sons' headlamps overwhelming each bike to make them look like fireflies (or UFOs) and the shots of the showdown on Main Street, to name just two.
• Once more, with feeling: first the explanation for what happened to both Darby and Chuck in the Caracara fire was cut out of the end of "Fa Guan." Then Chuck turned up alive and mostly well in "The Culling," but with no explanation for where he'd been or what happened to Darby. Sutter told me (in an e-mail conversation before our interview) that, once again, they had to cut that scene for time, so the Darby issue won't be resolved until season three.
• We finally find the source of Zobelle's mysterious, intermittent accent, as we find out that he's originally from Hungary.
• Hale is, for the most part, defined by his belief in the rule of law, and here we see that he's not above using strict adherence to those rules - specifically, the matter of his jurisdiction - to punish a monster like Zobelle by leaving him alone at that store, then taunting him with the news of Polly's death.
• Lots of great music, as always, including the inevitable '60s cover (Paul Brady tackling The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter") and the appropriately apocalyptic "Freeze And Pixilate" by Monster Magnet as the club arms up to follow Zobelle and the Mayans.
• Henry Rollins has been acting regularly for 15 years now, and because of the way he looks, he tends to get typecast as angry tough guys. But over this season, he's shown that he's about more than just his look. Weston was impossible to like, for obvious reasons, but at times during the finale - staring at Zobelle in the jail, saying goodbye to his son (and telling him not to rat to the cops) - I at least understood him, you know? A very good performance in what could have very easily been a cartoonish thug role.
• I know they tried to establish it last week, but I never really bought that Polly had real feelings for Edmond. In previous episodes, it seemed like she was just using him the way she used every other man in the area who wasn't her beloved, creepy daddy. So hanging a lot of the finale plot on her need to say goodbye felt a little odd.
If you haven't by now, go read the interview, and then tell me... what did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
Sons of Anarchy: Kurt Sutter season two Q&A
So "Sons of Anarchy" season two has come to an end, and I have both a review of the finale and this transcript of the interview I did with "Sons" creator Kurt Sutter about all the things that happened in the finale (and the season before it), what the hold-up is with the third season renewal, and more. There are some mild spoilers for what Kurt plans to do in that third season, so read on at your own peril if you want to stay totally pristine, but know that this was stuff I felt comfortable including.
So I watched the finale, and the first thing I thought was, "This is a man who does not have concerns about coming back next season."
Wow. What does that mean?
It just means you leave a lot of things hanging out there.
In terms of?
Gemma's a fugitive, Abel has been abducted, Half-Sack is dead… I guess Half-Sack being dead isn't something hanging out there, but there is a whole lot to be resolved.
Right, right. Let me just start, because I know people are going to be pissed off about the Half-Sack thing. I will tell you that I've been having conversations with Johnny Lewis all season, and Johnny wasn't happy on the show. Creatively, he really wanted out of his contract. We had ongoing conversations, and we decided we'd find some noble way for him to go. It wasn't my intent to try to be sensational and kill off a main character. People are going to have their reaction, but I don't want an actor that's not happy. It's not good for the actor, and it's not good for the show. I love Johnny. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat.
But in terms of some of the other stuff - this was clearly written with confidence that you would have another season to deal with it.
It would suck if the show ended right now. I had this idea, and I didn't know when it would happen, but I did know I wanted to play out this notion of Abel being taken and what that would do to Charlie and the club. Ideally, and I think it came across, is the idea that it's so outside the parameters of the outlaw handbook that it was clearly like, "What the f--k?" That's something that doesn't happen within their world. You don't f--k with family. The fact that that rule was broken; the impact isn't, "Ohmigod, I'm going to kill this guy." It's, "What just happened?" That really is my hope for next season: to take them into a world that is outside their own, where they don't have control, where they are subject to other people's laws and beliefs and perameters. Where they aren't quite the big fish in the small pond.
How much confidence at this point do you have that the renewal is going to be finalized?
I've had conversations with (FX president John) Landgraf, and of course the show's going to be picked up. What happens in season three, dude, is my contract is a two-year contract, historically actors get a bump between season two and three. FX, really the burden of that lands on them. They are the co-producers of that show. They really had to get all their financial ducks in a row. Once you announce the actual pick up, it sets the ball rolling. My thought was that we would hopefully find out before the finale. Obviously, that clock is ticking. But I've been assured there will be a season three. My deal is pretty much done, but it's a matter of finalizing all the other deals. And then they'll make the announcement.
One of the things I used to talk with Shawn Ryan about on "The Shield" was that you guys would come up with some kind of trap the strike team would find itself in, and then spend three or four days figuring out how they'd get out of it before you began writing anything. Do you know how the kidnapping and everything else will resolve themselves now, or is that something you're going to solve during the hiatus?
I do. It's not by any plan of mine, but what happens is about halfway through the season, I have a good sense of where I'm going to go in the following season. By episode six or seven, I had a good sense of what the big story arcs will be for season three. I do know how it will be resolved, the big story arcs. I'll go in in the beginning of the season, and we'll start hanging the meat on those bones.
Well, I don't want to know too much about what's coming, and I'm sure you don't want to say much, but is it safe to assume we might see the club go to Belfast?
I think it's okay to tease this, because I think it'll be cool. I'm actually working with (the studio) now on how best to - clearly we're not a show that can up and move everybody to Belfast. Does that mean having a second unit work out there to match some shots? But the plan is to take the charter to Ireland.
Do you have Titus Welliver locked up yet (to keep playing Jimmy O)?
I don't have Titus locked up. For all those secondary characters, we're really at the mercy of people's schedules. Sometimes, that'll happen, and you'll be forced to write around characters. That happened in the first season. We had an actor that was playing the Irish contact, and we lost him to "Brotherhood," so we had to kill him off, and bring in another character. I love Titus. I think he had a really good time working on the show, and I think we can juggle it and make it work.
Okay, going back over some leftover business from this season: do the charges from the raid on the church go away because Zobelle fled the country? Or are they still in trouble because the cops caught them red-handed with guns?
It doesn't go away. Again, there's a lot of stuff, and I'm not saying this is a good thing or an excuse, but there are a lot of details that tend to fall away in scripts, and then in actual cuts. In fact, next season all that stuff will come back and have a big impact on them. They get away with stuff in Charming because they get away with stuff in Charming. But all this stuff, the federal charges for having assault weapons, all that stuff is there. We have the same sort of loose timeframe that we had on "The Shield." Sometimes, it's a day, and sometimes it's a week, but the truth is, there's not a whole lot of time that has passed.
And are we to take it that Georgie was the one who killed Luann before he skipped town for Thailand?
I think that'll also come back. Right now, there's a couple of pitches on the table that may change that. Right now, that's really where it stands. I don't know about you, but I thought Tom Arnold did a really good job, and I'd like to see him back if we can.
Yeah, he was good. It's just that there was some ambiguity about whether Georgie did it, or possibly Zobelle, or one of the club's other enemies.
I think right now the perception is that it is Georgie. For me, story-wise, that's fine. But it may actually change.
Did the club stand down from the fortress mentality of "The Culling" once Zobelle and Weston were arrested? I was wondering why Tara and Gemma were out and about like that, even with Half-Sack as bodyguard, and why Tara wound up back at Jax's house when Cameron found her.
I think so. For me, the blowout that happened at the end of (episode) 12 was really all about knowing that Weston wasn't going to hold true, he was going to bring his power base to the timberlands, and that (SAMCRO would) be able to, at the very least, injure them enough and take them out enough to cut off Zobelle's muscle. Which they were able to do. So, to me, Weston and Zobelle being in jail allows them to stand down from (the fortress). But they're still not going to let Gemma and Tara go out alone. Even though it's Gemma, who could probably snap Half-Sack in half, they won't let them go out without some kind of escort. There's definitely an awareness about that.
Initially, I had written that scene (where) there was ongoing discussion about the baby, and I just felt like, even leaving the clubhouse, there was something about Gemma not letting that baby out of her sight. That was an ongoing discussion, but I just felt, and then how it segued into the event with Polly. I just love the notion of the baby essentially being in the car while that conversation happens.
Knowing the kind of man Jax is, and the kind of dad he is, I can't imagine he's going to be able to think about anything else in this world so long as his son is missing. Does that mean that all the tension within the club goes away while they're searching for Abel?
I say this a lot, and it's sort of my mantra on the show: none of that stuff happens in a vacuum. I do believe that Jax and Clay are ultimately able to put aside their immediate differences, in the same way Opie's able to put aside his feelings, but the wounds are there. The scar tissue is not very tight. That's the kind of stuff that will not go away, and will always impact their relationship for the rest of the series. We're going to really see Opie struggle with that next year. How does he do that? How does he show up and cover Tig's back knowing what he knows? That stuff will always continue to play out. It's hard sometimes, to have that nuance play out in every scene.
Well, I remember when you set up this storyline last season with Donna getting killed, I thought to myself that when the episode came where Opie found out, there was no way that he, Clay and Tig would all leave that episode alive. Yet you came up with a solution that made sense.
I liked the notion - to me, it really spun on Piney - that Piney had the same fear that you did. Ultimately, he was going to take that on himself so it didn't have to fall on his son. Within that, it gave me an out for Opie. Then it's about Opie saying, "I want to put a bullet in your head, but I'm not going to do that, because you're going to give my old man a pass for trying to put one in yours." It just felt like a way out. But Piney still has no love for Clay, and Opie is willing to go to the mat now to protect Gemma and to protect the club. If I'm Tig, I'm not trusting this guy.
What did you have in mind with the scene in "The Culling" where Tara slaps around Margaret?
The conversations that I've been having with Maggie (Siff) all along - because it's so not who Maggie is, she's really a sweet, fragile soul - has been, it's not so much about Tara finding the ability to change and to accept (the violence), it's really about her continuing to suppress what she already has inside her. And for me, that's always been underneath Tara. We saw some of that with Kohn. I felt that she's had these strong influences all year with Jax, and what we saw happen to Gemma, and if we didn't see some of that break open, and some of that spill out from her former life, that would almost be a disservice to who she had been.
Knowing that, and doing that scene, I did know what would happen in the finale, which is that ultimately, the same violence she supported and ultimately participated in, comes back to bite her in the ass, and terrifies her. By the end of the finale, she's breaking down. I knew that I was going to go there, and I knew that I would see some of that bleed out, and I think that has a lot to do with the trauma that she feels afterwards. She knows that's a part of it. She patched the guy up who ultimately put a gun to her head.
Well, I like that even before Cameron shows up, there's that scene where Gemma's in the car giving this megalomaniacal speech about how God has put her on Earth to do this, and you can see Tara freaking out and thinking, "Wait, this is who I've been using as my guru?"
I think so. She starts to see it there. For me, I just love the notion, and not that I'm trying to make a huge statement about man and religion, but the idea that most people, when they go through this trauma and are suddenly feeling karmic guilt and questioning all they do, they're driven to a point of repentance. And Gemma, being exactly the megalomaniac she is, somehow manipulates it to her advantage, in that, "Oh, wait a minute. God gives me the license to do whatever the f--k I want to do." It's what the religious right does, and it's what the radical Muslims do. You interpret to substantiate your agenda. To me, the most upsetting thing in that scene is seeing how f--king calm Gemma is. That's what Maggie plays so beautifully: "Ohmigod, you are calm. You actually believe what's coming out of your mouth."
Why is Gemma willing to kill Polly when she couldn't pull the trigger on Weston? Is it just how much she's healed from the incident, or that she was afraid of AJ but isn't of Polly?
I think it's a little bit of both. Hearing Weston talk about his sons f--ked with Gemma at the time, but I also think Gemma has come much further in the crisis at this point. I think the scene with the priest was this pivotal moment for her. That's where the seed was planted: this is what God does, and it's all about being of service. I think she has that now in her favor. So it does give her the capacity, at the very least, to not be conflicted about pulling the trigger. If she had the awareness at the port-a-john, she would have put a bullet in the back of his head.
And instead Weston gets shot in a different toilet.
Heh. I hadn't thought of that.
So much of the bad things at the end of the episode are caused by Stahl. After all the screw-ups she's had investigating the Sons over the last two seasons, why is the ATF still leaving her in charge of the case, and giving her so much free rein?
I think she's been on point all season. She says early on that it's not about the Sons. I think she's backed off of that. She's really doing her job this season, which is to go after the guns. For the most part, the case is holding up, and she is gaining on it. Up until this point, she's sort of proven herself as being on point with what the case is in going after Jimmy O, and Jimmy O is a big fish. But I do think that the machinations that happen at the end here, really it's about her covering her tracks. Ultimately, the guys will try to take advantage of that next season. At the very least to try to help Gemma.
One of the cool things we were able to do on "The Shield" with the Kavanaugh character was, when you're that close to something and someone that you can't help but be influenced by it. Kavanaugh could not help but be influenced by the machinations of Vic, and ultimately, it impacted him and the decisions that he made. That's the same thing with Stahl. She's done some nefarious stuff within the boundaries of her job, in terms of how she threatens people, but she crosses the line here by essentially doing what we've seen the Sons do all along, which is to manipulate the truth and create a secret. That's the turning point for her.
And of course it's all perspective. On a different show, Stahl would be the hero. But on this show, we're horrified when she does something the Sons do, yet we like them when they do the same things.
I like to say that Vic Mackey was 60 (percent) good, 40 bad. The Sons are 40 good, 60 bad. I think it's important, and I was talking to my writers about this the other day: It's really important for me to never just paint people black and white. I do think Stahl has compassion for what happened to Gemma. I do think that when that happens, it does impact her. The same thing with Hale. We've seen that guy set up as the antagonist, who ultimately throws them a bone at the end by not sending the sheriffs. It'll be an interesting season next year. Unser will step down at the beginning of next season. It'll be interesting to see Hale navigate without the cooperation of the Sons. That's going to be fun to explore. Will he need to compromise the way Unser did to maintain civility in the town?
And having a guy like Hale, who's essentially good-hearted and means well, allows you to then write a character like Stahl or Kohn, so it's not just "Sons good, cops bad."
My brother-in-law was out for Thanksgiving. He's in the FBI, and he loves the fact we're painting ATF as scumbags. The federal divisions are so f--king competitive. He's like, "Yeah, they're all scumbags. They're all tripping over themselves."
What's the book on tape you're listening to (as Big Otto) right before you shiv the guy who blinded you?
It's actually from an old periodical called The Dublin Review from the 1800s. Quite honestly, what I did is I didn't want to have to pay for anything, so I just Googled "Sons of Anarchy" and went to books that are in the public domain, and I found this great old book that had all these great articles about the hypocrisy of governments. And the sons of anarchy that he talks about are a reference to the rebellious republic. It's actually a fascinating article that was written almost 200 years ago. If you read it, you'd feel like it could have been written today.
I was surprised the homemade bullets from the Native American tribe didn't figure in more to the end of this season. Were you just laying pipe with that for future seasons?
I actually ended up loving that storyline a lot, and it's a really interesting world. I think we will definitely come back there next season.
There's that scene near the end where Unser is driving Gemma out of town, and he looks so happy to be with her, because he loves her, and he gets to be her hero and do things without Clay or the other Sons around. It's just him and Gemma having an adventure, and it's the best thing that's happened to him in a long time.
I think they've always had a bond, and whether it's brotherly or whatever it is, I think he's got a connection to her. As f--ked up of a situation as she's in, I just felt there was a sense that Gemma would have, that the rest of the family is falling apart without her knowledge, but for her, "My circumstances are f--ked up, but emotionally, I'm f--king back.' There was just something interesting about her feeling whole, while everyone else was crumbling.
In the first season, you had to spend a lot of time establishing the world and building the major characters like Jax and Clay and Gemma, and it feels like we got to know more of the supporting characters this time around. Was that a concentrated effort on your part, or did it just happen?
I think it was a concerted effort, from the standpoint I have writers who have favorite characters. I knew, ultimately, what the big arcs were going to be, but we tried to bring out a couple of people. The interesting thing is we didn't do a big Bobby storyline, but through the circumstances, we were able to shine a light on what his role (in the club) was. The stuff that happened with Tig was just the residual angst of what happened last year. There was a lot of the Opie and Jax and Opie and Clay dynamic, so even though Opie and Jax didn't have a lot of scenes together, we really saw the impact on that relationship. Without there being a huge arc for any particular character, we were able to distinguish dynamics and purpose and focus within the club. Hopefully, we'll continue to do that.
Yeah, you were able to take a guy like Chibs off the bench in these last few episodes and build him up into somebody really important and tragic.
To me, that all felt organic, knowing what I wanted to do with the IRA, and playing out that relationship. Hopefully, we'll see some of that play out next year with Chibs. That storyline was a lot of fun for me to write, and Tommy (Flanagan) just stepped up to the plate and did a great job. And Unser, too. I just love writing for Dayton (Callie). I think you mentioned it in one of your other blogs, that we'll eventually find out he's related to Charlie Utter. I was a huge fan of him on ("Deadwood"), and he's such a soulful guy, and it's been fun to play that out. There was a moment that happened in that episode, that wasn't scripted, Clay comes out of the clubhouse and gives Unser a big hug, and Unser's response to it was he was almost taken aback. I love the way Dayton played that. He didn't know that was a good thing or a bad thing,. I just know that whatever I throw at the guy, he can handle.
Finally, because I know people will ask: why doesn't Clay leave Tig or Happy or somebody like that behind at the convenience store to take care of business with Zobelle while the rest of the club goes off to help Jax?
I thought about that, and there's a couple things. One was, I wanted to make a statement: I do believe that guys like Zobelle f--king get away. And also, I felt like him saying, "They took my grandson," that ultimately, Clay doesn't have the foresight to say, "Hey, you stay behind." Again, there was that notion that this was completely out of the rule book. And they're in as much shock as they are rage. At that point, nobody is going to desert the club. It's not about that thing now; it's about this thing. We can always come back and take care fo this. It's about helping take care of family, and that ultimately, family is more important than revenge.
Alan Sepinwall can be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post
So I watched the finale, and the first thing I thought was, "This is a man who does not have concerns about coming back next season."
Wow. What does that mean?
It just means you leave a lot of things hanging out there.
In terms of?
Gemma's a fugitive, Abel has been abducted, Half-Sack is dead… I guess Half-Sack being dead isn't something hanging out there, but there is a whole lot to be resolved.
Right, right. Let me just start, because I know people are going to be pissed off about the Half-Sack thing. I will tell you that I've been having conversations with Johnny Lewis all season, and Johnny wasn't happy on the show. Creatively, he really wanted out of his contract. We had ongoing conversations, and we decided we'd find some noble way for him to go. It wasn't my intent to try to be sensational and kill off a main character. People are going to have their reaction, but I don't want an actor that's not happy. It's not good for the actor, and it's not good for the show. I love Johnny. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat.
But in terms of some of the other stuff - this was clearly written with confidence that you would have another season to deal with it.
It would suck if the show ended right now. I had this idea, and I didn't know when it would happen, but I did know I wanted to play out this notion of Abel being taken and what that would do to Charlie and the club. Ideally, and I think it came across, is the idea that it's so outside the parameters of the outlaw handbook that it was clearly like, "What the f--k?" That's something that doesn't happen within their world. You don't f--k with family. The fact that that rule was broken; the impact isn't, "Ohmigod, I'm going to kill this guy." It's, "What just happened?" That really is my hope for next season: to take them into a world that is outside their own, where they don't have control, where they are subject to other people's laws and beliefs and perameters. Where they aren't quite the big fish in the small pond.
How much confidence at this point do you have that the renewal is going to be finalized?
I've had conversations with (FX president John) Landgraf, and of course the show's going to be picked up. What happens in season three, dude, is my contract is a two-year contract, historically actors get a bump between season two and three. FX, really the burden of that lands on them. They are the co-producers of that show. They really had to get all their financial ducks in a row. Once you announce the actual pick up, it sets the ball rolling. My thought was that we would hopefully find out before the finale. Obviously, that clock is ticking. But I've been assured there will be a season three. My deal is pretty much done, but it's a matter of finalizing all the other deals. And then they'll make the announcement.
One of the things I used to talk with Shawn Ryan about on "The Shield" was that you guys would come up with some kind of trap the strike team would find itself in, and then spend three or four days figuring out how they'd get out of it before you began writing anything. Do you know how the kidnapping and everything else will resolve themselves now, or is that something you're going to solve during the hiatus?
I do. It's not by any plan of mine, but what happens is about halfway through the season, I have a good sense of where I'm going to go in the following season. By episode six or seven, I had a good sense of what the big story arcs will be for season three. I do know how it will be resolved, the big story arcs. I'll go in in the beginning of the season, and we'll start hanging the meat on those bones.
Well, I don't want to know too much about what's coming, and I'm sure you don't want to say much, but is it safe to assume we might see the club go to Belfast?
I think it's okay to tease this, because I think it'll be cool. I'm actually working with (the studio) now on how best to - clearly we're not a show that can up and move everybody to Belfast. Does that mean having a second unit work out there to match some shots? But the plan is to take the charter to Ireland.
Do you have Titus Welliver locked up yet (to keep playing Jimmy O)?
I don't have Titus locked up. For all those secondary characters, we're really at the mercy of people's schedules. Sometimes, that'll happen, and you'll be forced to write around characters. That happened in the first season. We had an actor that was playing the Irish contact, and we lost him to "Brotherhood," so we had to kill him off, and bring in another character. I love Titus. I think he had a really good time working on the show, and I think we can juggle it and make it work.
Okay, going back over some leftover business from this season: do the charges from the raid on the church go away because Zobelle fled the country? Or are they still in trouble because the cops caught them red-handed with guns?
It doesn't go away. Again, there's a lot of stuff, and I'm not saying this is a good thing or an excuse, but there are a lot of details that tend to fall away in scripts, and then in actual cuts. In fact, next season all that stuff will come back and have a big impact on them. They get away with stuff in Charming because they get away with stuff in Charming. But all this stuff, the federal charges for having assault weapons, all that stuff is there. We have the same sort of loose timeframe that we had on "The Shield." Sometimes, it's a day, and sometimes it's a week, but the truth is, there's not a whole lot of time that has passed.
And are we to take it that Georgie was the one who killed Luann before he skipped town for Thailand?
I think that'll also come back. Right now, there's a couple of pitches on the table that may change that. Right now, that's really where it stands. I don't know about you, but I thought Tom Arnold did a really good job, and I'd like to see him back if we can.
Yeah, he was good. It's just that there was some ambiguity about whether Georgie did it, or possibly Zobelle, or one of the club's other enemies.
I think right now the perception is that it is Georgie. For me, story-wise, that's fine. But it may actually change.
Did the club stand down from the fortress mentality of "The Culling" once Zobelle and Weston were arrested? I was wondering why Tara and Gemma were out and about like that, even with Half-Sack as bodyguard, and why Tara wound up back at Jax's house when Cameron found her.
I think so. For me, the blowout that happened at the end of (episode) 12 was really all about knowing that Weston wasn't going to hold true, he was going to bring his power base to the timberlands, and that (SAMCRO would) be able to, at the very least, injure them enough and take them out enough to cut off Zobelle's muscle. Which they were able to do. So, to me, Weston and Zobelle being in jail allows them to stand down from (the fortress). But they're still not going to let Gemma and Tara go out alone. Even though it's Gemma, who could probably snap Half-Sack in half, they won't let them go out without some kind of escort. There's definitely an awareness about that.
Initially, I had written that scene (where) there was ongoing discussion about the baby, and I just felt like, even leaving the clubhouse, there was something about Gemma not letting that baby out of her sight. That was an ongoing discussion, but I just felt, and then how it segued into the event with Polly. I just love the notion of the baby essentially being in the car while that conversation happens.
Knowing the kind of man Jax is, and the kind of dad he is, I can't imagine he's going to be able to think about anything else in this world so long as his son is missing. Does that mean that all the tension within the club goes away while they're searching for Abel?
I say this a lot, and it's sort of my mantra on the show: none of that stuff happens in a vacuum. I do believe that Jax and Clay are ultimately able to put aside their immediate differences, in the same way Opie's able to put aside his feelings, but the wounds are there. The scar tissue is not very tight. That's the kind of stuff that will not go away, and will always impact their relationship for the rest of the series. We're going to really see Opie struggle with that next year. How does he do that? How does he show up and cover Tig's back knowing what he knows? That stuff will always continue to play out. It's hard sometimes, to have that nuance play out in every scene.
Well, I remember when you set up this storyline last season with Donna getting killed, I thought to myself that when the episode came where Opie found out, there was no way that he, Clay and Tig would all leave that episode alive. Yet you came up with a solution that made sense.
I liked the notion - to me, it really spun on Piney - that Piney had the same fear that you did. Ultimately, he was going to take that on himself so it didn't have to fall on his son. Within that, it gave me an out for Opie. Then it's about Opie saying, "I want to put a bullet in your head, but I'm not going to do that, because you're going to give my old man a pass for trying to put one in yours." It just felt like a way out. But Piney still has no love for Clay, and Opie is willing to go to the mat now to protect Gemma and to protect the club. If I'm Tig, I'm not trusting this guy.
What did you have in mind with the scene in "The Culling" where Tara slaps around Margaret?
The conversations that I've been having with Maggie (Siff) all along - because it's so not who Maggie is, she's really a sweet, fragile soul - has been, it's not so much about Tara finding the ability to change and to accept (the violence), it's really about her continuing to suppress what she already has inside her. And for me, that's always been underneath Tara. We saw some of that with Kohn. I felt that she's had these strong influences all year with Jax, and what we saw happen to Gemma, and if we didn't see some of that break open, and some of that spill out from her former life, that would almost be a disservice to who she had been.
Knowing that, and doing that scene, I did know what would happen in the finale, which is that ultimately, the same violence she supported and ultimately participated in, comes back to bite her in the ass, and terrifies her. By the end of the finale, she's breaking down. I knew that I was going to go there, and I knew that I would see some of that bleed out, and I think that has a lot to do with the trauma that she feels afterwards. She knows that's a part of it. She patched the guy up who ultimately put a gun to her head.
Well, I like that even before Cameron shows up, there's that scene where Gemma's in the car giving this megalomaniacal speech about how God has put her on Earth to do this, and you can see Tara freaking out and thinking, "Wait, this is who I've been using as my guru?"
I think so. She starts to see it there. For me, I just love the notion, and not that I'm trying to make a huge statement about man and religion, but the idea that most people, when they go through this trauma and are suddenly feeling karmic guilt and questioning all they do, they're driven to a point of repentance. And Gemma, being exactly the megalomaniac she is, somehow manipulates it to her advantage, in that, "Oh, wait a minute. God gives me the license to do whatever the f--k I want to do." It's what the religious right does, and it's what the radical Muslims do. You interpret to substantiate your agenda. To me, the most upsetting thing in that scene is seeing how f--king calm Gemma is. That's what Maggie plays so beautifully: "Ohmigod, you are calm. You actually believe what's coming out of your mouth."
Why is Gemma willing to kill Polly when she couldn't pull the trigger on Weston? Is it just how much she's healed from the incident, or that she was afraid of AJ but isn't of Polly?
I think it's a little bit of both. Hearing Weston talk about his sons f--ked with Gemma at the time, but I also think Gemma has come much further in the crisis at this point. I think the scene with the priest was this pivotal moment for her. That's where the seed was planted: this is what God does, and it's all about being of service. I think she has that now in her favor. So it does give her the capacity, at the very least, to not be conflicted about pulling the trigger. If she had the awareness at the port-a-john, she would have put a bullet in the back of his head.
And instead Weston gets shot in a different toilet.
Heh. I hadn't thought of that.
So much of the bad things at the end of the episode are caused by Stahl. After all the screw-ups she's had investigating the Sons over the last two seasons, why is the ATF still leaving her in charge of the case, and giving her so much free rein?
I think she's been on point all season. She says early on that it's not about the Sons. I think she's backed off of that. She's really doing her job this season, which is to go after the guns. For the most part, the case is holding up, and she is gaining on it. Up until this point, she's sort of proven herself as being on point with what the case is in going after Jimmy O, and Jimmy O is a big fish. But I do think that the machinations that happen at the end here, really it's about her covering her tracks. Ultimately, the guys will try to take advantage of that next season. At the very least to try to help Gemma.
One of the cool things we were able to do on "The Shield" with the Kavanaugh character was, when you're that close to something and someone that you can't help but be influenced by it. Kavanaugh could not help but be influenced by the machinations of Vic, and ultimately, it impacted him and the decisions that he made. That's the same thing with Stahl. She's done some nefarious stuff within the boundaries of her job, in terms of how she threatens people, but she crosses the line here by essentially doing what we've seen the Sons do all along, which is to manipulate the truth and create a secret. That's the turning point for her.
And of course it's all perspective. On a different show, Stahl would be the hero. But on this show, we're horrified when she does something the Sons do, yet we like them when they do the same things.
I like to say that Vic Mackey was 60 (percent) good, 40 bad. The Sons are 40 good, 60 bad. I think it's important, and I was talking to my writers about this the other day: It's really important for me to never just paint people black and white. I do think Stahl has compassion for what happened to Gemma. I do think that when that happens, it does impact her. The same thing with Hale. We've seen that guy set up as the antagonist, who ultimately throws them a bone at the end by not sending the sheriffs. It'll be an interesting season next year. Unser will step down at the beginning of next season. It'll be interesting to see Hale navigate without the cooperation of the Sons. That's going to be fun to explore. Will he need to compromise the way Unser did to maintain civility in the town?
And having a guy like Hale, who's essentially good-hearted and means well, allows you to then write a character like Stahl or Kohn, so it's not just "Sons good, cops bad."
My brother-in-law was out for Thanksgiving. He's in the FBI, and he loves the fact we're painting ATF as scumbags. The federal divisions are so f--king competitive. He's like, "Yeah, they're all scumbags. They're all tripping over themselves."
What's the book on tape you're listening to (as Big Otto) right before you shiv the guy who blinded you?
It's actually from an old periodical called The Dublin Review from the 1800s. Quite honestly, what I did is I didn't want to have to pay for anything, so I just Googled "Sons of Anarchy" and went to books that are in the public domain, and I found this great old book that had all these great articles about the hypocrisy of governments. And the sons of anarchy that he talks about are a reference to the rebellious republic. It's actually a fascinating article that was written almost 200 years ago. If you read it, you'd feel like it could have been written today.
I was surprised the homemade bullets from the Native American tribe didn't figure in more to the end of this season. Were you just laying pipe with that for future seasons?
I actually ended up loving that storyline a lot, and it's a really interesting world. I think we will definitely come back there next season.
There's that scene near the end where Unser is driving Gemma out of town, and he looks so happy to be with her, because he loves her, and he gets to be her hero and do things without Clay or the other Sons around. It's just him and Gemma having an adventure, and it's the best thing that's happened to him in a long time.
I think they've always had a bond, and whether it's brotherly or whatever it is, I think he's got a connection to her. As f--ked up of a situation as she's in, I just felt there was a sense that Gemma would have, that the rest of the family is falling apart without her knowledge, but for her, "My circumstances are f--ked up, but emotionally, I'm f--king back.' There was just something interesting about her feeling whole, while everyone else was crumbling.
In the first season, you had to spend a lot of time establishing the world and building the major characters like Jax and Clay and Gemma, and it feels like we got to know more of the supporting characters this time around. Was that a concentrated effort on your part, or did it just happen?
I think it was a concerted effort, from the standpoint I have writers who have favorite characters. I knew, ultimately, what the big arcs were going to be, but we tried to bring out a couple of people. The interesting thing is we didn't do a big Bobby storyline, but through the circumstances, we were able to shine a light on what his role (in the club) was. The stuff that happened with Tig was just the residual angst of what happened last year. There was a lot of the Opie and Jax and Opie and Clay dynamic, so even though Opie and Jax didn't have a lot of scenes together, we really saw the impact on that relationship. Without there being a huge arc for any particular character, we were able to distinguish dynamics and purpose and focus within the club. Hopefully, we'll continue to do that.
Yeah, you were able to take a guy like Chibs off the bench in these last few episodes and build him up into somebody really important and tragic.
To me, that all felt organic, knowing what I wanted to do with the IRA, and playing out that relationship. Hopefully, we'll see some of that play out next year with Chibs. That storyline was a lot of fun for me to write, and Tommy (Flanagan) just stepped up to the plate and did a great job. And Unser, too. I just love writing for Dayton (Callie). I think you mentioned it in one of your other blogs, that we'll eventually find out he's related to Charlie Utter. I was a huge fan of him on ("Deadwood"), and he's such a soulful guy, and it's been fun to play that out. There was a moment that happened in that episode, that wasn't scripted, Clay comes out of the clubhouse and gives Unser a big hug, and Unser's response to it was he was almost taken aback. I love the way Dayton played that. He didn't know that was a good thing or a bad thing,. I just know that whatever I throw at the guy, he can handle.
Finally, because I know people will ask: why doesn't Clay leave Tig or Happy or somebody like that behind at the convenience store to take care of business with Zobelle while the rest of the club goes off to help Jax?
I thought about that, and there's a couple things. One was, I wanted to make a statement: I do believe that guys like Zobelle f--king get away. And also, I felt like him saying, "They took my grandson," that ultimately, Clay doesn't have the foresight to say, "Hey, you stay behind." Again, there was that notion that this was completely out of the rule book. And they're in as much shock as they are rage. At that point, nobody is going to desert the club. It's not about that thing now; it's about this thing. We can always come back and take care fo this. It's about helping take care of family, and that ultimately, family is more important than revenge.
Alan Sepinwall can be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "The Culling": I love it when a plan comes together
Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I play with the siren...
Instead, I found myself oddly disappointed by it.
I wrote last week that part of what made "Service" so powerful was that all these big moments and revelations were coming from the characters. There was a story there, but everything that happened - whether it was Tig confessing to Opie, or Opie confronting Stahl, or Clay letting Chibs and Piney slide on their crimes against the club - clearly started off with a question of, "How would this character, given his personality and recent events, react to this?"
There was a visceral quality to it all that I found lacking in "The Culling," which felt more like a chess game than a street fight. Kurt Sutter and Dave Erickson's script efficiently moved all the pieces into place, then blew up the board a few times with the arrests of Weston, Zobelle and Polly. Some of it was fun, particularly the club getting over on Stahl (and Ally Walker's performance as Stahl epically lost her cool), and perhaps at an earlier stage in the series' lifespan I would have loved watching all the tumblers click into place. But after the richness of the last two episodes, the sheer plot-intensiveness of "The Culling" felt a bit empty. Necessary, given all that had happened this season, but not nearly as deep as what had come immediately before.
I guess I find the internal struggles of the club more compelling than wars with external enemies like the Mayans and LOAN. "Service" focused entirely on the former, then healed the club to the point where SAMCRO as one could deal with the latter in "The Culling."
And for an episode that was so plot-y, I'm still not sure I understand exactly what SAMCRO's plan was. If, as Clay and Jax decided last week, they intended to "kill 'em all," then why bother with the brawl at the timberlands? Is that really what they were going to use their manpower advantage created by their alliance with the Niners and the Triad just to pick a fistfight with Weston and his best goons? A fight that, even with the various levels of badassery at hand in the combined Charming and Tacoma chapters of the club, they weren't guaranteed to win? Why not lure them out there, disarm them and then put a bullet into everyone's shaved head?
Now, some of this can be ascribed to the ongoing tension between Hale and Unser, and Unser's conflict between serving his friends and serving the law. Perhaps the plan involved a righteous beating and then a cold execution, whether SAMCRO won or lost the fight itself, followed by a trip into town to use Polly to lure Zobelle out of hiding. But while the move to screw over Stahl, get the guns and save Chibs from Jimmy O's retribution worked like clockwork, I'm having to contort myself to figure out how the LOAN half of the campaign was supposed to work.
The more interesting - and, at times, unsettling - part of the episode dealt with the role that the club plays in the lives of its members. The opening sequence, with everybody going to the mattresses - and the realization that SAMCRO takes everybody (kids, wives, old ladies, two-fingered friends) to the mattresses with them - and Clay giving a speech to the assembled crowd, showed the power that the club has. We need to see that power, and that sense of community, every now and then so we understand why it is people like Jax and Opie are trying to save the club instead of burning it to the ground.
But if the show usually dances around the question of whether it considers the club a good or a bad thing - or whether it's willing to judge the club at all - the scene with Tara smacking around Margaret felt uncomfortably in favor of Clay and Gemma's vision of SAMCRO. The whole scene, and particularly the "No, this is assault" moment, seemed structured to get the audience pumping their fists - Let's watch Tara show that snooty administrator lady who's boss! - and yet I was mostly horrified by it. For all that "Sopranos" fans wanted Dr. Melfi to sic Tony on her rapist, David Chase was always clear that Melfi was the closest thing the show had to a representative from real society, and in a society of rules, that stuff's just not done.
Now, Tara occupies a different dramatic space on this show than Melfi did on "Sopranos." She grew up around the club, is dating a member, taking care of his baby and befriending the club's matriarch. Perhaps I was meant to be horrified by her actions in that scene, and one of the storylines of season three (if not the finale) will be Tara recognizing that perhaps she's adopted more of the club's morality than she wanted to. But if this is just the next step into her ascension to Gemma's throne, and something meant to be applauded, then I'm going to have a problem with it.
But we'll have a better sense of that - and of how (or if) Jax and Clay can still get their righteous vengeance if all their targets are behind bars - in next week's finale. Even though I didn't love "The Culling," I still have very high hopes for what's to come.
Some other thoughts on "The Culling":
• The show has more or less dropped the tension over the club members getting their bail revoked, Oswald losing his land, etc. Even with his recognition that LOAN is worse for the town than SAMCRO, wouldn't Hale at some point in this episode have just thrown Jax, Clay and others back into jail for violating the terms of their release?
• Last season, Jay Karnes did a multiple episode guest stint as Agent Kohn, and we have our second "Shield" regular turning up as an "SoA" guest star, as Kenny Johnson pops up as the Tacoma charter's version of Tig. Predictably, the two hate each other, though I thought it a nice touch that Tig is too messed-up by recent developments to even care about whatever their feud is about.
• As mentioned previously, the explanation for what happened to Chuck and Darby in the Caracara fire had to be cut for time from "Fa Guan." We got half an answer here, sort of, in that Chuck turns up alive and mostly well at the clubhouse, and continues to be a useful friend to the club. But where exactly has Chuck been in between the fire and now? And what happened to Darby? If he died, wouldn't Hale have also charged Weston with murder? If not, where the hell is he?
• I have to commend whoever was responsible for the work on Chuck's mutilated hands. Not sure if that was a prosthetic or something digital, but it worked. I had just assumed they would keep him in the gloves all the time, as that's an easy way to hide the actor's non-amputated fingers and thumbs.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
"I love all of ya." -ClayThe previous two episodes of "Sons of Anarchy," "Balm" and "Service," took the show to a new creative level. Based on those two shows, and the general momentum of a cable drama season - where the dramatic peak is often in the penultimate episode - I had high hopes for "The Culling."
Instead, I found myself oddly disappointed by it.
I wrote last week that part of what made "Service" so powerful was that all these big moments and revelations were coming from the characters. There was a story there, but everything that happened - whether it was Tig confessing to Opie, or Opie confronting Stahl, or Clay letting Chibs and Piney slide on their crimes against the club - clearly started off with a question of, "How would this character, given his personality and recent events, react to this?"
There was a visceral quality to it all that I found lacking in "The Culling," which felt more like a chess game than a street fight. Kurt Sutter and Dave Erickson's script efficiently moved all the pieces into place, then blew up the board a few times with the arrests of Weston, Zobelle and Polly. Some of it was fun, particularly the club getting over on Stahl (and Ally Walker's performance as Stahl epically lost her cool), and perhaps at an earlier stage in the series' lifespan I would have loved watching all the tumblers click into place. But after the richness of the last two episodes, the sheer plot-intensiveness of "The Culling" felt a bit empty. Necessary, given all that had happened this season, but not nearly as deep as what had come immediately before.
I guess I find the internal struggles of the club more compelling than wars with external enemies like the Mayans and LOAN. "Service" focused entirely on the former, then healed the club to the point where SAMCRO as one could deal with the latter in "The Culling."
And for an episode that was so plot-y, I'm still not sure I understand exactly what SAMCRO's plan was. If, as Clay and Jax decided last week, they intended to "kill 'em all," then why bother with the brawl at the timberlands? Is that really what they were going to use their manpower advantage created by their alliance with the Niners and the Triad just to pick a fistfight with Weston and his best goons? A fight that, even with the various levels of badassery at hand in the combined Charming and Tacoma chapters of the club, they weren't guaranteed to win? Why not lure them out there, disarm them and then put a bullet into everyone's shaved head?
Now, some of this can be ascribed to the ongoing tension between Hale and Unser, and Unser's conflict between serving his friends and serving the law. Perhaps the plan involved a righteous beating and then a cold execution, whether SAMCRO won or lost the fight itself, followed by a trip into town to use Polly to lure Zobelle out of hiding. But while the move to screw over Stahl, get the guns and save Chibs from Jimmy O's retribution worked like clockwork, I'm having to contort myself to figure out how the LOAN half of the campaign was supposed to work.
The more interesting - and, at times, unsettling - part of the episode dealt with the role that the club plays in the lives of its members. The opening sequence, with everybody going to the mattresses - and the realization that SAMCRO takes everybody (kids, wives, old ladies, two-fingered friends) to the mattresses with them - and Clay giving a speech to the assembled crowd, showed the power that the club has. We need to see that power, and that sense of community, every now and then so we understand why it is people like Jax and Opie are trying to save the club instead of burning it to the ground.
But if the show usually dances around the question of whether it considers the club a good or a bad thing - or whether it's willing to judge the club at all - the scene with Tara smacking around Margaret felt uncomfortably in favor of Clay and Gemma's vision of SAMCRO. The whole scene, and particularly the "No, this is assault" moment, seemed structured to get the audience pumping their fists - Let's watch Tara show that snooty administrator lady who's boss! - and yet I was mostly horrified by it. For all that "Sopranos" fans wanted Dr. Melfi to sic Tony on her rapist, David Chase was always clear that Melfi was the closest thing the show had to a representative from real society, and in a society of rules, that stuff's just not done.
Now, Tara occupies a different dramatic space on this show than Melfi did on "Sopranos." She grew up around the club, is dating a member, taking care of his baby and befriending the club's matriarch. Perhaps I was meant to be horrified by her actions in that scene, and one of the storylines of season three (if not the finale) will be Tara recognizing that perhaps she's adopted more of the club's morality than she wanted to. But if this is just the next step into her ascension to Gemma's throne, and something meant to be applauded, then I'm going to have a problem with it.
But we'll have a better sense of that - and of how (or if) Jax and Clay can still get their righteous vengeance if all their targets are behind bars - in next week's finale. Even though I didn't love "The Culling," I still have very high hopes for what's to come.
Some other thoughts on "The Culling":
• The show has more or less dropped the tension over the club members getting their bail revoked, Oswald losing his land, etc. Even with his recognition that LOAN is worse for the town than SAMCRO, wouldn't Hale at some point in this episode have just thrown Jax, Clay and others back into jail for violating the terms of their release?
• Last season, Jay Karnes did a multiple episode guest stint as Agent Kohn, and we have our second "Shield" regular turning up as an "SoA" guest star, as Kenny Johnson pops up as the Tacoma charter's version of Tig. Predictably, the two hate each other, though I thought it a nice touch that Tig is too messed-up by recent developments to even care about whatever their feud is about.
• As mentioned previously, the explanation for what happened to Chuck and Darby in the Caracara fire had to be cut for time from "Fa Guan." We got half an answer here, sort of, in that Chuck turns up alive and mostly well at the clubhouse, and continues to be a useful friend to the club. But where exactly has Chuck been in between the fire and now? And what happened to Darby? If he died, wouldn't Hale have also charged Weston with murder? If not, where the hell is he?
• I have to commend whoever was responsible for the work on Chuck's mutilated hands. Not sure if that was a prosthetic or something digital, but it worked. I had just assumed they would keep him in the gloves all the time, as that's an easy way to hide the actor's non-amputated fingers and thumbs.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "Service": Meet your unmaker
Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I say things in smaller doses...
It's not surprising, then, that Kurt Sutter would spend a lot of time on "Sons of Anarchy" on the SAMCRO members painting themselves into corners, then searching for an escape route. But what's been so remarkable about the episodes this season, particularly last week's and tonight's, is that the escapes (and in some cases, the additional jeopardy) are coming internally, out of character rather than plot.
Gemma heals the Jax/Clay rift by finding the courage to speak up about her rape. Opie finds out Tig killed Donna only because Tig was finally so consumed with guilt that he had to tell. And the inevitable Opie/Clay/Tig confrontation, which we all assumed would end with at least one fatality ever since Donna died, instead leads (for now) to a detente, as Opie comes to realize that he needs the club - and needs to find some inner peace - more than he needs vengeance on Clay, or Tig, or even Stahl. And that decision, in turn, helps save the lives of both Chibs and Piney, under circumstances where Clay might once have shot first and asked questions later.
Before watching "Service," I never would have imagined a circumstance under which Opie, Clay and Tig would all be living and riding together over whatever long term this series has. But because the solution came from the characters first, I completely buy that this could happen - that Jax and Opie, now teamed up again, may find a way to save the club without drenching it in even more blood, and have for now decided that's the best tribute they can give to Donna's memory.
(Or, conversely, Opie may just bide his time for a season and a half, then drop a car on Tig after he, like his old man, gets impatient with the pace of Jax's plan.)
It's pretty ballsy what Sutter (co-writing the script with Jack LoGiudice, based on a story by Brady Dahl and Cori Uchida) does here. "Balm" ends with Jax and Clay making peace, and "Service" opens with the two of them seeming to unite all of SAMCRO to avenge the attack. And just as we're all feeling somewhat complacent and ready to watch the club whup white supremacist ass, Tig has to continue his doom spiral by making out with Gemma, and chooses to punish himself further by spilling the beans to Opie (and then in front of Bobby). The episode still ends with SAMCRO united to go after Zobelle - and to get Chibs out from between the rock (Stahl) and the hard place (Jimmy O) - but it's a much shakier union now, one that no one feels very good about.
One of the episode's quietest scenes is also its most important. As Gemma sits with the priest, he tells her about the value of helping others to help assuage guilt over your own transgressions. Over and over, characters choose to live up to the episode's title at the expense of their own desires. Even before she met the priest, Gemma knew that she had to let go of her pride and fear to tell her men the truth. Tara downplays her career trainwreck because she knows Jax needs her to be strong now. Opie swallows his desire for vengeance to help the club, in the short-term trading his right to be aggrieved for the lives of Chibs and Piney. Clay lets Chibs and Piney walk because he owes that - and so, so much more - to Opie.
But if everybody makes the somewhat noble, community-minded decision in the end, they struggle on the way to those decisions, and the actors - directed by "Mad Men" veteran Phil Abraham - play the hell out of those journeys. I could spend paragraph after paragraph on the way Kim Coates shows how much this has been eating Tig up inside, or how Maggie Siff plays Tara's freak out about the life she envisions with Jax, or how Tommy Flanagan plays Chibs' despair with Gemma, or how Katey Sagal plays Gemma's fear for Chibs (Gemma knows Clay and what he's capable of), or how Ryan Hurst plays Opie's stoic anger, or how Ally Walker handles Stahl's shift from feigning control to realizing she's about to die, or... but in the interest of time and equality, I will just say this: everyone in the cast (everyone) was at the top of their games this week.
And for the second week in a row, this show about these tough men and their violent worlds ends on a scene of heartbreaking tenderness. Tig - who really, really wants to be something other than Clay's blunt instrument, and who has obviously nursed a thing for Gemma forever - points out to Clay that the best thing he can do for Gemma, even more than killing Zobelle and Weston, is to show her that he still desires her. And Clay - who has been shaken to his core by the developments of the last two episodes, and who seems to finally realize he needs to step back and think about things, rather than simply acting on his gut - hears him, and goes to his wife and sweeps all of her fears away as easily as he sweeps all the papers off her desk.
And it's great.
As Dan Dority once told Al Swearengen, we're fixing for a bloody outcome, but what "Sons of Anarchy" has shown us lately is that the show can be just as powerful when restraint is being shown: when it's just a woman telling a painful story, or a grieving man showing mercy, or a husband making sweet, necessary love to his wife.
Only two episodes left in this season. Based on the two we've just seen, they have a lot to live up to.
Some other thoughts:
• I want to see how the Jimmy O and Zobelle stories intertwine over these last two. Jax seeing Zobelle with the Mayans paints such an obvious picture of how SAMCRO is going to take down his operation that I have to assume there will be some more twists along the way.
• It's been implied that Unser feels more than just big brother affection for Gemma, and Tig's aborted makeout session with her only crystallized the idea that all the men of a certain age in SAMCRO's sphere of influence would have some kind of crush on her. Like, of course they would. Hell, even Half-Sack once called her a MILF (much to Clay's displeasure).
• Speaking of Unser, I wonder how big a deal it is that he's unofficially made Hale the acting chief. What exactly is Wayne planning that requires him to surrender the responsibilities of the top job?
• More idle speculation: what are the odds that the clip Opie handed Stahl had any of the homemade bullets in it? I'm guessing not - and I'm also guessing that June Stahl will never, ever tell anyone she knows (let alone any fellow ATF agents) about what happened in that parking lot.
• Interesting to see Tara and Lyla hanging out without incident, or even any real tension. I guess things have now gotten so bad for Jax and Opie that they, like the men, have to put that junk aside.
• Though it sounds exactly like The Rolling Stones doing a country song, the closing tune is actually "Can't Make It Through The Night" by Deadstring Brothers.
As we head into the home stretch, let me remind you about the commenting rules - specifically, the No Spoilers passage, which includes the part about not discussing anything in the previews. Period. Any comment in violation of that will be deleted.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
"The outlaw had mercy." -OpieOne of the trademarks of "The Shield" was watching Vic and the strike team dig themselves a deep hole and somehow find a way to climb out. Most of the time, though - the final few seasons obviously excepted - the escapes were external and plot-based. Vic would find a patsy, or figure out a way to blackmail someone with influence, and the problem would go away (sometimes permanently, sometimes not).
It's not surprising, then, that Kurt Sutter would spend a lot of time on "Sons of Anarchy" on the SAMCRO members painting themselves into corners, then searching for an escape route. But what's been so remarkable about the episodes this season, particularly last week's and tonight's, is that the escapes (and in some cases, the additional jeopardy) are coming internally, out of character rather than plot.
Gemma heals the Jax/Clay rift by finding the courage to speak up about her rape. Opie finds out Tig killed Donna only because Tig was finally so consumed with guilt that he had to tell. And the inevitable Opie/Clay/Tig confrontation, which we all assumed would end with at least one fatality ever since Donna died, instead leads (for now) to a detente, as Opie comes to realize that he needs the club - and needs to find some inner peace - more than he needs vengeance on Clay, or Tig, or even Stahl. And that decision, in turn, helps save the lives of both Chibs and Piney, under circumstances where Clay might once have shot first and asked questions later.
Before watching "Service," I never would have imagined a circumstance under which Opie, Clay and Tig would all be living and riding together over whatever long term this series has. But because the solution came from the characters first, I completely buy that this could happen - that Jax and Opie, now teamed up again, may find a way to save the club without drenching it in even more blood, and have for now decided that's the best tribute they can give to Donna's memory.
(Or, conversely, Opie may just bide his time for a season and a half, then drop a car on Tig after he, like his old man, gets impatient with the pace of Jax's plan.)
It's pretty ballsy what Sutter (co-writing the script with Jack LoGiudice, based on a story by Brady Dahl and Cori Uchida) does here. "Balm" ends with Jax and Clay making peace, and "Service" opens with the two of them seeming to unite all of SAMCRO to avenge the attack. And just as we're all feeling somewhat complacent and ready to watch the club whup white supremacist ass, Tig has to continue his doom spiral by making out with Gemma, and chooses to punish himself further by spilling the beans to Opie (and then in front of Bobby). The episode still ends with SAMCRO united to go after Zobelle - and to get Chibs out from between the rock (Stahl) and the hard place (Jimmy O) - but it's a much shakier union now, one that no one feels very good about.
One of the episode's quietest scenes is also its most important. As Gemma sits with the priest, he tells her about the value of helping others to help assuage guilt over your own transgressions. Over and over, characters choose to live up to the episode's title at the expense of their own desires. Even before she met the priest, Gemma knew that she had to let go of her pride and fear to tell her men the truth. Tara downplays her career trainwreck because she knows Jax needs her to be strong now. Opie swallows his desire for vengeance to help the club, in the short-term trading his right to be aggrieved for the lives of Chibs and Piney. Clay lets Chibs and Piney walk because he owes that - and so, so much more - to Opie.
But if everybody makes the somewhat noble, community-minded decision in the end, they struggle on the way to those decisions, and the actors - directed by "Mad Men" veteran Phil Abraham - play the hell out of those journeys. I could spend paragraph after paragraph on the way Kim Coates shows how much this has been eating Tig up inside, or how Maggie Siff plays Tara's freak out about the life she envisions with Jax, or how Tommy Flanagan plays Chibs' despair with Gemma, or how Katey Sagal plays Gemma's fear for Chibs (Gemma knows Clay and what he's capable of), or how Ryan Hurst plays Opie's stoic anger, or how Ally Walker handles Stahl's shift from feigning control to realizing she's about to die, or... but in the interest of time and equality, I will just say this: everyone in the cast (everyone) was at the top of their games this week.
And for the second week in a row, this show about these tough men and their violent worlds ends on a scene of heartbreaking tenderness. Tig - who really, really wants to be something other than Clay's blunt instrument, and who has obviously nursed a thing for Gemma forever - points out to Clay that the best thing he can do for Gemma, even more than killing Zobelle and Weston, is to show her that he still desires her. And Clay - who has been shaken to his core by the developments of the last two episodes, and who seems to finally realize he needs to step back and think about things, rather than simply acting on his gut - hears him, and goes to his wife and sweeps all of her fears away as easily as he sweeps all the papers off her desk.
And it's great.
As Dan Dority once told Al Swearengen, we're fixing for a bloody outcome, but what "Sons of Anarchy" has shown us lately is that the show can be just as powerful when restraint is being shown: when it's just a woman telling a painful story, or a grieving man showing mercy, or a husband making sweet, necessary love to his wife.
Only two episodes left in this season. Based on the two we've just seen, they have a lot to live up to.
Some other thoughts:
• I want to see how the Jimmy O and Zobelle stories intertwine over these last two. Jax seeing Zobelle with the Mayans paints such an obvious picture of how SAMCRO is going to take down his operation that I have to assume there will be some more twists along the way.
• It's been implied that Unser feels more than just big brother affection for Gemma, and Tig's aborted makeout session with her only crystallized the idea that all the men of a certain age in SAMCRO's sphere of influence would have some kind of crush on her. Like, of course they would. Hell, even Half-Sack once called her a MILF (much to Clay's displeasure).
• Speaking of Unser, I wonder how big a deal it is that he's unofficially made Hale the acting chief. What exactly is Wayne planning that requires him to surrender the responsibilities of the top job?
• More idle speculation: what are the odds that the clip Opie handed Stahl had any of the homemade bullets in it? I'm guessing not - and I'm also guessing that June Stahl will never, ever tell anyone she knows (let alone any fellow ATF agents) about what happened in that parking lot.
• Interesting to see Tara and Lyla hanging out without incident, or even any real tension. I guess things have now gotten so bad for Jax and Opie that they, like the men, have to put that junk aside.
• Though it sounds exactly like The Rolling Stones doing a country song, the closing tune is actually "Can't Make It Through The Night" by Deadstring Brothers.
As we head into the home stretch, let me remind you about the commenting rules - specifically, the No Spoilers passage, which includes the part about not discussing anything in the previews. Period. Any comment in violation of that will be deleted.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "Balm": The situation 'shroom
Spoilers for tonight's extra-long "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I introduce some serious people to some serious fungi...
And what's incredible about "Balm" is that it manages to be as gripping as it is even though the season's chief villain (Ethan Zobelle) doesn't appear; even though the B-story hangs on a character (Chibs) who's been absent for a while, and a glorified extra for much of the series; and even though the big emotional moment of Gemma's confession plays out subdued, rather than as heated as we all expected it to be.
Or, really, the last part is so brilliant because it's not what we expect. Look, I love this show and all the violence and sheer bad-assery that comes with it. So I'm not ashamed to admit that when Gemma told Clay and Jax about her rape, things got very, very dusty in the Sepinwall living room. The genius of that scene - as written by Dave Erickson and Stevie Long, directed by Paris Barclay (from "In Treatment," but also someone Kurt Sutter worked with several times on "The Shield") and played by Katey Sagal, Ron Perlman, Charlie Hunnam and Maggie Siff - is that it's not about everyone getting upset and flipping over tables and swearing revenge. (Though Jax does pound his fist once before realizing that's not what his mother needs at the moment.) This is Gemma quietly, simply, telling the two men in her life about the worst day of her life - not because she wants them to go out and kill Zobelle and Weston and the others (though she wouldn't mind that), but because letting go of her pride and telling them about the rape is the best, and only, way she knows how to keep both her family and the club (which to Gemma are one and the same) from falling apart.
And it works. After Jax has spent the entire episode preparing to say goodbye to the charter, to his friends, to the life he's built for himself, he rests his hand on Clay's shoulder, and Clay takes it. And Jax takes his SAMCRO tags back on his way out the door. All the rest of it - Donna and Opie and Caracara and power plays - is forgotten, or at least put to the side. This is all that matters: this family, this wife, this mother, this need to protect her, and avenge her in time. Zobelle thought that news of Gemma's rape would have destabilized the club, and maybe if the news had come out when it happened, it would have. But by waiting this long - by making Jax and Clay realize how long she's been holding this in, for them - and telling them this way, at this crisis point, it's had the opposite effect. If anything's going to save SAMCRO from its current civil war, it's going to be this need to rally around Gemma and kick some righteous ass on the men who hurt her.
And Jax feels anger for his mother, and compassion for his stepfather. And Tara feels proud of Gemma for finally opening up and exposing her vulnerability. And Clay feels lost and hurt that his wife has suffered so greatly, and so alone.
(Excuse me. I had to pause the writing of this review to watch that scene again. Incredible. Gets me every time.)
All through this season, Sutter and company have done a good job of giving depth to club members outside the core of Clay, Jax, Tig and Opie, and the expanded running time of "Balm" allowed even more of that than usual. As Jax went on what he thought was his SAMCRO farewell tour, we got to spend time with Piney being bitter (and, based on that shot of him in the final montage, potentially dangerous to himself or others), with Juice in the hospital (not comic relief for once), and especially with Chibs.
It's really remarkable what they pull off with Chibs here. This is a guy who was one of the more minor figures of season one, who was largely on the sidelines of season two before he blew up real good and was shipped off to the hospital, and who still speaks with an accent thick enough that I sometimes need a chainsaw to cut through it... and he's suddenly this incredibly compelling central figure to whatever's going to happen through the rest of this season.
The amount of Chibs backstory they dumped on us in this one via Agent Stahl - that Jimmy O had Chibs kicked out of the IRA, gave him his scars and kept his wife and daughter as trophies - should have felt clumsy and shoe-horned, but it didn't. Credit Tommy Flanagan in his first real showcase of the series, but especially credit Titus Welliver for being so riveting and creepy (and for doing a brogue that was at least respectable) in the role. When he threatened to have his way with Chibs' daughter - "even if she does call me 'Da'" - chills ran down my spine, and made me understand why Chibs would make such a desperate, potentially suicidal move like offering to rat for Stahl.
And it was the presence of the monstrous Jimmy, and the respectable but no less monstrous Stahl, that made this episode so intense despite Zobelle and his goons being discussed but not seen. SAMCRO at this point has so many enemies or potential enemies - the League, the Mayans, True IRA, Stahl, Hale, the Nords, and, of course, each other - that we can afford to do without a few of them in any given week and things will still feel apocalyptic.
If the show didn't still have Hale as an example of a lawman who's decently and (mostly) not corrupt, I'd worry that Sutter and company were trying to stack the sympathy deck too much in SAMCRO's favor and away from the cops with the depiction of Stahl. It seemed after Donna's death, and after the way she behaved in the season premiere, that she had come to regret the tactics she used against the club, but again and again in "Balm," she resorts to the same old reckless tricks: threatening to have Abel put in foster care, to leave Chibs' family unprotected from Jimmy, to imply Edmond is a rat in the exact same way she treated Opie. If Ally Walker wasn't so good in the part - and particularly at showing how Stahl enjoys performing for her targets like this is all one big play for her - I would absolutely despise her, instead of largely despising her while admiring the actress playing her.
This is a deep, deep hole that SAMCRO is in. But with one selfless, ego-less gesture Gemma may have finally placed momentum on the club's side. And with this terrific episode - and that extraordinary tearjerking scene at the end of it - "Sons of Anarchy" has all the momentum it needs going into the season's final three episodes.
Some other thoughts on "Balm":
• I obviously got to watch this episode on a screener, without commercials, for 55 minutes straight. How did the show play out over a 90-minute timeslot? Did the commercial breaks seem longer and/or more frequent than usual?
• The episode's title refers to the healing effects of Gemma's confession, but is it in any way supposed to tie in with the prison episode, which was called "Gilead," and which together evoke the famous Lanford Wilson play?
• It's still not clear whether Chuck and/or Darby perished in the Caracara fire, in part because some material about it had to be cut for time from last week's episode, according to Kurt Sutter. The matter will be explained in an upcoming episode.
• The song playing during Gemma's confession was "Mary," by Patty Griffin.
• The chronology of this episode was odd. We seem to be only a day or two at most past Jax's decision to go nomad at the end of last week's episode, yet Chibs (who still needed a lot of in-patient rehab) is ready to be released from the hospital? I know these are the kind of contrivances that ensemble dramas with multiple, intertwined character arcs sometimes have to go through, but I still raised an eyebrow when Chibs got out. But the fact that he had just gotten out, and shouldn't have been exerting himself the way he's been, only added to all the tension in his part of the story.
• I was remiss in my review of "Gilead" to note how incredibly arrogant and stupid it was for Jax to more or less tell Stahl that he murdered Kohn. And now it looks like that could bite him if Stahl's other avenues of attack fail.
• Despite all their mounting enemies, SAMCRO does take on one new ally (or, at least, business partner), in the Native American tribe with their own homemade bullets - and their own stock of psychedelic 'shrooms. The latter leads to one of the few light moments of a very dark episode, as Half-Sack and Tig both get blissfully, deliriously high on the stuff, Half-Sack babbling in a mud pit ("It's cwarm! Cwarm! Cwarm!") and Tig looking terrifying as he enjoys a rare moment of peace and contentment. (And, during the final montage, the trip turned bad as Tig began crying and apologizing, presumably for killing Donna.)
• Another benefit of the long run time is that we get a scene that doesn't really move the plot along but tells us a lot about the characters and the world, like Gemma trying to talk Jax away from what he'd read in John's book. We find out that John wrote it shortly after the death of their other son, and Gemma implies that John's death might have been suicide, not an accident. The previews for this episode made it seem like Gemma was suggesting he had been murdered - I guess by Clay. While I still wouldn't be surprised by that revelation down the road - it would complete the Hamlet metaphor, after all - that was one more development than this episode needed.
• Tara began the season trying to open up to Jax, understand his world, and make her peace with being an MC member's old lady. And what has it gotten her? She's suspended from her job at the hospital, and her man doesn't even bother to consult her before making a huge change like going nomad. No good deed...
• Nice to see Opie making an effort to reach out to Jax again, even if it doesn't work, and then to see him finally opening up and letting himself have sex with Lyla (albeit on the floor, not on the bed he shared with Donna). There are going to be problems with this relationship, I'm sure, given Lyla's job and drug habit, but she's helped bring him out of his suicidal spiral.
• I also liked how the table vote scene allowed each club member (the ones who weren't hospitalized or tripping on mushrooms, anyway) to have his own reaction to Jax's attempt to go nomad: Clay resigned but not displeased, Bobby quiet and frustrated, Piney outraged, Opie sad and Chibs disbelieving.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
"Blood family, hometown, all that s--t moves back a row. Once you're patched, members are your family. This charter is your home." -Juice"Balm," the best episode so far of this exceptional second season of "Sons of Anarchy," comes along at a perfect time. "Mad Men" has just gone on hiatus. "Breaking Bad" won't be back until sometime in 2010. If you don't have DirecTV, "Friday Night Lights" won't be on TV until next summer. So "Sons of Anarchy" is, at the moment, the best drama on television, and an episode like "Balm" makes it clear the title shouldn't just be by default. Pound-for-pound, this series is as engrossing, as funny and as moving as all those others.
And what's incredible about "Balm" is that it manages to be as gripping as it is even though the season's chief villain (Ethan Zobelle) doesn't appear; even though the B-story hangs on a character (Chibs) who's been absent for a while, and a glorified extra for much of the series; and even though the big emotional moment of Gemma's confession plays out subdued, rather than as heated as we all expected it to be.
Or, really, the last part is so brilliant because it's not what we expect. Look, I love this show and all the violence and sheer bad-assery that comes with it. So I'm not ashamed to admit that when Gemma told Clay and Jax about her rape, things got very, very dusty in the Sepinwall living room. The genius of that scene - as written by Dave Erickson and Stevie Long, directed by Paris Barclay (from "In Treatment," but also someone Kurt Sutter worked with several times on "The Shield") and played by Katey Sagal, Ron Perlman, Charlie Hunnam and Maggie Siff - is that it's not about everyone getting upset and flipping over tables and swearing revenge. (Though Jax does pound his fist once before realizing that's not what his mother needs at the moment.) This is Gemma quietly, simply, telling the two men in her life about the worst day of her life - not because she wants them to go out and kill Zobelle and Weston and the others (though she wouldn't mind that), but because letting go of her pride and telling them about the rape is the best, and only, way she knows how to keep both her family and the club (which to Gemma are one and the same) from falling apart.
And it works. After Jax has spent the entire episode preparing to say goodbye to the charter, to his friends, to the life he's built for himself, he rests his hand on Clay's shoulder, and Clay takes it. And Jax takes his SAMCRO tags back on his way out the door. All the rest of it - Donna and Opie and Caracara and power plays - is forgotten, or at least put to the side. This is all that matters: this family, this wife, this mother, this need to protect her, and avenge her in time. Zobelle thought that news of Gemma's rape would have destabilized the club, and maybe if the news had come out when it happened, it would have. But by waiting this long - by making Jax and Clay realize how long she's been holding this in, for them - and telling them this way, at this crisis point, it's had the opposite effect. If anything's going to save SAMCRO from its current civil war, it's going to be this need to rally around Gemma and kick some righteous ass on the men who hurt her.
And Jax feels anger for his mother, and compassion for his stepfather. And Tara feels proud of Gemma for finally opening up and exposing her vulnerability. And Clay feels lost and hurt that his wife has suffered so greatly, and so alone.
(Excuse me. I had to pause the writing of this review to watch that scene again. Incredible. Gets me every time.)
All through this season, Sutter and company have done a good job of giving depth to club members outside the core of Clay, Jax, Tig and Opie, and the expanded running time of "Balm" allowed even more of that than usual. As Jax went on what he thought was his SAMCRO farewell tour, we got to spend time with Piney being bitter (and, based on that shot of him in the final montage, potentially dangerous to himself or others), with Juice in the hospital (not comic relief for once), and especially with Chibs.
It's really remarkable what they pull off with Chibs here. This is a guy who was one of the more minor figures of season one, who was largely on the sidelines of season two before he blew up real good and was shipped off to the hospital, and who still speaks with an accent thick enough that I sometimes need a chainsaw to cut through it... and he's suddenly this incredibly compelling central figure to whatever's going to happen through the rest of this season.
The amount of Chibs backstory they dumped on us in this one via Agent Stahl - that Jimmy O had Chibs kicked out of the IRA, gave him his scars and kept his wife and daughter as trophies - should have felt clumsy and shoe-horned, but it didn't. Credit Tommy Flanagan in his first real showcase of the series, but especially credit Titus Welliver for being so riveting and creepy (and for doing a brogue that was at least respectable) in the role. When he threatened to have his way with Chibs' daughter - "even if she does call me 'Da'" - chills ran down my spine, and made me understand why Chibs would make such a desperate, potentially suicidal move like offering to rat for Stahl.
And it was the presence of the monstrous Jimmy, and the respectable but no less monstrous Stahl, that made this episode so intense despite Zobelle and his goons being discussed but not seen. SAMCRO at this point has so many enemies or potential enemies - the League, the Mayans, True IRA, Stahl, Hale, the Nords, and, of course, each other - that we can afford to do without a few of them in any given week and things will still feel apocalyptic.
If the show didn't still have Hale as an example of a lawman who's decently and (mostly) not corrupt, I'd worry that Sutter and company were trying to stack the sympathy deck too much in SAMCRO's favor and away from the cops with the depiction of Stahl. It seemed after Donna's death, and after the way she behaved in the season premiere, that she had come to regret the tactics she used against the club, but again and again in "Balm," she resorts to the same old reckless tricks: threatening to have Abel put in foster care, to leave Chibs' family unprotected from Jimmy, to imply Edmond is a rat in the exact same way she treated Opie. If Ally Walker wasn't so good in the part - and particularly at showing how Stahl enjoys performing for her targets like this is all one big play for her - I would absolutely despise her, instead of largely despising her while admiring the actress playing her.
This is a deep, deep hole that SAMCRO is in. But with one selfless, ego-less gesture Gemma may have finally placed momentum on the club's side. And with this terrific episode - and that extraordinary tearjerking scene at the end of it - "Sons of Anarchy" has all the momentum it needs going into the season's final three episodes.
Some other thoughts on "Balm":
• I obviously got to watch this episode on a screener, without commercials, for 55 minutes straight. How did the show play out over a 90-minute timeslot? Did the commercial breaks seem longer and/or more frequent than usual?
• The episode's title refers to the healing effects of Gemma's confession, but is it in any way supposed to tie in with the prison episode, which was called "Gilead," and which together evoke the famous Lanford Wilson play?
• It's still not clear whether Chuck and/or Darby perished in the Caracara fire, in part because some material about it had to be cut for time from last week's episode, according to Kurt Sutter. The matter will be explained in an upcoming episode.
• The song playing during Gemma's confession was "Mary," by Patty Griffin.
• The chronology of this episode was odd. We seem to be only a day or two at most past Jax's decision to go nomad at the end of last week's episode, yet Chibs (who still needed a lot of in-patient rehab) is ready to be released from the hospital? I know these are the kind of contrivances that ensemble dramas with multiple, intertwined character arcs sometimes have to go through, but I still raised an eyebrow when Chibs got out. But the fact that he had just gotten out, and shouldn't have been exerting himself the way he's been, only added to all the tension in his part of the story.
• I was remiss in my review of "Gilead" to note how incredibly arrogant and stupid it was for Jax to more or less tell Stahl that he murdered Kohn. And now it looks like that could bite him if Stahl's other avenues of attack fail.
• Despite all their mounting enemies, SAMCRO does take on one new ally (or, at least, business partner), in the Native American tribe with their own homemade bullets - and their own stock of psychedelic 'shrooms. The latter leads to one of the few light moments of a very dark episode, as Half-Sack and Tig both get blissfully, deliriously high on the stuff, Half-Sack babbling in a mud pit ("It's cwarm! Cwarm! Cwarm!") and Tig looking terrifying as he enjoys a rare moment of peace and contentment. (And, during the final montage, the trip turned bad as Tig began crying and apologizing, presumably for killing Donna.)
• Another benefit of the long run time is that we get a scene that doesn't really move the plot along but tells us a lot about the characters and the world, like Gemma trying to talk Jax away from what he'd read in John's book. We find out that John wrote it shortly after the death of their other son, and Gemma implies that John's death might have been suicide, not an accident. The previews for this episode made it seem like Gemma was suggesting he had been murdered - I guess by Clay. While I still wouldn't be surprised by that revelation down the road - it would complete the Hamlet metaphor, after all - that was one more development than this episode needed.
• Tara began the season trying to open up to Jax, understand his world, and make her peace with being an MC member's old lady. And what has it gotten her? She's suspended from her job at the hospital, and her man doesn't even bother to consult her before making a huge change like going nomad. No good deed...
• Nice to see Opie making an effort to reach out to Jax again, even if it doesn't work, and then to see him finally opening up and letting himself have sex with Lyla (albeit on the floor, not on the bed he shared with Donna). There are going to be problems with this relationship, I'm sure, given Lyla's job and drug habit, but she's helped bring him out of his suicidal spiral.
• I also liked how the table vote scene allowed each club member (the ones who weren't hospitalized or tripping on mushrooms, anyway) to have his own reaction to Jax's attempt to go nomad: Clay resigned but not displeased, Bobby quiet and frustrated, Piney outraged, Opie sad and Chibs disbelieving.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
Monday, November 09, 2009
'Sons of Anarchy' finds another gear - Sepinwall on TV
In today's column, I continue to sing the praises of "Sons of Anarchy," which has a sensational episode coming up tomorrow night:
And, obviously, I'll be doing a more thorough review after the episode finishes tomorrow night (which will be around 11:30; it's a super-sized ep). Click here to read the full post
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how setting an end date can be a shot in the arm to a drama series. “Lost,” “The Shield” and “Battlestar Galactica” all took major upswings in quality after their creators were allowed to start planning toward a specific finish. When you don’t have to worry about being on the air past a certain date, you can take greater risks, not worry about maintaining the status quo — or, in some cases, about keeping characters alive — and the stakes feel higher, the drama richer.You can read the full review here. If you're not watching and like good drama, folks, you need to start.
FX’s “Sons of Anarchy” has somehow reached that higher gear without having the finish line anywhere in sight. It’s in only its second season, one of the most successful scripted shows on cable (it made headlines a few weeks ago for finishing ahead of Jay Leno in the 18-to-49 demographic), and FX no doubt wants to keep it on the air for a long, long time. (The cable channel, which tends to be conservative about renewals, has yet to formally order a third season.)
But “Sons” creator Kurt Sutter (a Jersey guy and former “Shield” writer) doesn’t seem to be worrying about the long-term right now.
And, obviously, I'll be doing a more thorough review after the episode finishes tomorrow night (which will be around 11:30; it's a super-sized ep). Click here to read the full post
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "Fa Guan": Evil will always triumph because good is dumb
Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I deputize the nomads...
(*) Next week's episode is 56 minutes long without commercials, and will run 90 minutes with from 10-11:30 Eastern. So be prepared for longer-than-normal commercial breaks.
I have one complaint about "Fa Guan" (which, per Kurt Sutter, is Chinese for "The Judge") that I want to get out of the way first, which is that it seems like the writers are making things a bit too easy on Ethan Zobelle. I get that he's a criminal mastermind, that the club doesn't have all the information we have (like the attack on Gemma) and also that he has the good fortune to be going after SAMCRO at the perfect moment when the club is distracted by the Jax/Clay beef. But it felt like there were too many moments in "Fa Guan" where Jax or Clay ignored the possibility that Zobelle - who has caused them so much trouble already and seems to be attacking them on a different front each week - might be behind any of their porn problems. And then for Darby, who just found out he got screwed over by Zobelle, to go to Caracara accompanied only by Ethan's goons... well, I know (as Frank Pembleton put it) crime makes you stupid, but that stupid?
And yet, if I could put my frequent cries of, "Why aren't you thinking it's Zobelle?" aside, "Fa Guan" continued the season's riveting downward spiral for SAMCRO. The series began with the club's gun factory burning to the ground with people inside, and now the porn factory has suffered the same fate, possibly taking Chuck and/or Darby with it. And Jax, consumed with his hatred of Clay, and frustrated that things in the club are getting worse, not better, takes the radical step of deciding to go nomad(**).
(**) Next week's episode will explain a little more about how being a nomad works, but keep in mind that Happy was a member of the Tacoma charter who went nomad so he could be closer to his sick mom in Bakersfield. He hangs a lot with our charter, but he's not a voting member.
Though Jax is wrong to blame Clay for the destruction of Caracara, you can see his anger and self-loathing grow throughout the episode, starting with that devastating visit to Otto in jail. Kurt Sutter did a really nice job playing Otto's bitterness towards the club - the very quiet way he said, "You should go, Jax" spoke volumes about how angry he is, and yet how hard that is on him, since the club is all he has left - and I loved the way they left the glimpse of the wheelchair until the final shot of the scene, like an added punch to the gut.
Things only get worse as Clay tries to use Luann's murder as an excuse to shut down Caracara and flex his own muscles as club leader, and while Jax calls his bluff - for the second time in a week daring an enemy to shoot him - neither the fight in jail nor Gemma's potluck dinner nor Bobby's pleas for healing has done the least bit of good in repairing this rift. Though Jax isn't nearly to blame for Luann's death as Clay is for Donna's, hearing Clay accuse him of getting someone's wife killed was perhaps one indignity too many.
And then there's Clay's ongoing campaign to bind Opie to him by appealing to the big man's violent side, which ties into Tig's increasing post-Donna aversion to the dirty work. That comes to a head in that harrowing sequence at the judge's house, with Opie making things too personal as he screams, "Look what you've done to your family!" while Tig - knowing all too well what he did to Opie's family - practically goes fetal.
This is not the club that Jax knows and loves. This is not who Jax's best friend wants to be. And yet this is what everything and everyone around him is becoming. Is it any wonder he just wants to hop on his bike and head for parts unknown?
Some other thoughts on "Fa Guan":
• Keeping things all in the family, this episode was co-written by Liz Sagal, one of Katey Sagal's younger sisters. Liz and identical twin Jean spent a few years co-starring on the '80s sitcom "Double Trouble." (Here's the two of them in a short promo.)
• Outside of Don Draper (or insert name of your favorite "Mad Men" character here), does any character on television smoke as much as Jax Teller? That nicotine habit leads to that great moment right after Opie flips out on the judge, as Jax and Opie stand outside on the porch, just smoking and thinking about how they got to this point.
• Unser's story acquires more pathos, as we find out that his wife bailed on him during his cancer treatments, but he manages to use that news to help out Gemma by inviting her to join him at a revival service. And note the return - looking somewhat the worse for wear - of the homeless girl whom both Gemma and Jax met last season. I'm not exactly sure whether she's supposed to be real, or a ghost, or an angel, or a symbol, or just Sutter exercising a bit of literary license, but I can handle a little magical realism (if that's what she's about) in these very brief, occasional doses. Even bikers (and their old ladies) need a little help now and then, right? And Katey was her usual stellar self at showing Gemma's reluctantly to let the music and the mood of the service wash over her. (Side note: I'm perfectly happy with my inherited religion, but if I were ever of a mind to comparison shop, presence of a gospel choir would be high up on the priorities list.)
• Maybe I'm just trying harder, or maybe my confession a few weeks ago that I couldn't understand Chibbs helped lift some kind of mental block, because he made perfect sense to me in this one. Interesting to see Tara getting in deeper with the club, by helping out Chibbs (telling him how to lie so he could stay on the critical list) on her own turf at the hospital.
• Hale's also getting in deeper with the club than he might have ever planned, choosing to let Clay take out Darby's meth lab rather than doing it himself. Hale still means well, and I believe him when he says he intends to go right back to attacking the club as soon as the greater evil of Zobelle is out of the way, but why do I have the feeling that this is how Clay and Unser's relationship began several decades ago?
• One other plot nitpick: early in the episode, Clay's on the phone with SAMCRO's lawyer, Rosen (played in previous episodes by Tom Everett Scott, but unseen here), who apparently says he can get the charges from the church assault dropped because the video was inconclusive and the church members don't want to testify. But isn't there still the rather large matter of the Sons being caught red-handed by the cops while carrying a bunch of illegal weapons? And wouldn't respectable Ethan testify rather than let his new enemies walk?
• God, Ryan Hurst is just sensational, whether in an explosive scene like Opie flipping out on the judge, or a much smaller one like Opie's reaction to being kissed by Lyla. He's so sad, and so reluctant to get involved with another woman this soon after Donna's murder, yet you can tell how much he needs this.
• Things could be (a bit) worse for Otto, I suppose: he could find out that Bobby was having sex with Luann (which Bobby admits to Jax was "a little scary").
• Half-Sack's boxing skills, not mentioned since midway through season one, come in handy when he punches out one of Darby's goons during the raid on the meth lab.
• As the reluctant judge, Hey, It's That Guy! Michael O'Neill adds a new item to the list of acceptable occupations for which he may be cast. Others include cop, FBI agent, CIA agent, special forces soldier and, possibly, stern private school headmaster or stuffy dean.
• Is Neeta a 24-hour nanny? Or does Abel just nap a ton? Jax and Betty Draper either have outstanding child care or very well-rested babies, I think.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
"Jesus, Gemma, when does this settle? When does it stop?" -TaraI had the pleasure of watching "Fa Guan" and the show's next two episodes over this weekend, and it should tell you how mind-blowing the next two(*) are that I would call this tremendous outing easily my third-favorite of the bunch.
"I don't know, baby." -Gemma
(*) Next week's episode is 56 minutes long without commercials, and will run 90 minutes with from 10-11:30 Eastern. So be prepared for longer-than-normal commercial breaks.
I have one complaint about "Fa Guan" (which, per Kurt Sutter, is Chinese for "The Judge") that I want to get out of the way first, which is that it seems like the writers are making things a bit too easy on Ethan Zobelle. I get that he's a criminal mastermind, that the club doesn't have all the information we have (like the attack on Gemma) and also that he has the good fortune to be going after SAMCRO at the perfect moment when the club is distracted by the Jax/Clay beef. But it felt like there were too many moments in "Fa Guan" where Jax or Clay ignored the possibility that Zobelle - who has caused them so much trouble already and seems to be attacking them on a different front each week - might be behind any of their porn problems. And then for Darby, who just found out he got screwed over by Zobelle, to go to Caracara accompanied only by Ethan's goons... well, I know (as Frank Pembleton put it) crime makes you stupid, but that stupid?
And yet, if I could put my frequent cries of, "Why aren't you thinking it's Zobelle?" aside, "Fa Guan" continued the season's riveting downward spiral for SAMCRO. The series began with the club's gun factory burning to the ground with people inside, and now the porn factory has suffered the same fate, possibly taking Chuck and/or Darby with it. And Jax, consumed with his hatred of Clay, and frustrated that things in the club are getting worse, not better, takes the radical step of deciding to go nomad(**).
(**) Next week's episode will explain a little more about how being a nomad works, but keep in mind that Happy was a member of the Tacoma charter who went nomad so he could be closer to his sick mom in Bakersfield. He hangs a lot with our charter, but he's not a voting member.
Though Jax is wrong to blame Clay for the destruction of Caracara, you can see his anger and self-loathing grow throughout the episode, starting with that devastating visit to Otto in jail. Kurt Sutter did a really nice job playing Otto's bitterness towards the club - the very quiet way he said, "You should go, Jax" spoke volumes about how angry he is, and yet how hard that is on him, since the club is all he has left - and I loved the way they left the glimpse of the wheelchair until the final shot of the scene, like an added punch to the gut.
Things only get worse as Clay tries to use Luann's murder as an excuse to shut down Caracara and flex his own muscles as club leader, and while Jax calls his bluff - for the second time in a week daring an enemy to shoot him - neither the fight in jail nor Gemma's potluck dinner nor Bobby's pleas for healing has done the least bit of good in repairing this rift. Though Jax isn't nearly to blame for Luann's death as Clay is for Donna's, hearing Clay accuse him of getting someone's wife killed was perhaps one indignity too many.
And then there's Clay's ongoing campaign to bind Opie to him by appealing to the big man's violent side, which ties into Tig's increasing post-Donna aversion to the dirty work. That comes to a head in that harrowing sequence at the judge's house, with Opie making things too personal as he screams, "Look what you've done to your family!" while Tig - knowing all too well what he did to Opie's family - practically goes fetal.
This is not the club that Jax knows and loves. This is not who Jax's best friend wants to be. And yet this is what everything and everyone around him is becoming. Is it any wonder he just wants to hop on his bike and head for parts unknown?
Some other thoughts on "Fa Guan":
• Keeping things all in the family, this episode was co-written by Liz Sagal, one of Katey Sagal's younger sisters. Liz and identical twin Jean spent a few years co-starring on the '80s sitcom "Double Trouble." (Here's the two of them in a short promo.)
• Outside of Don Draper (or insert name of your favorite "Mad Men" character here), does any character on television smoke as much as Jax Teller? That nicotine habit leads to that great moment right after Opie flips out on the judge, as Jax and Opie stand outside on the porch, just smoking and thinking about how they got to this point.
• Unser's story acquires more pathos, as we find out that his wife bailed on him during his cancer treatments, but he manages to use that news to help out Gemma by inviting her to join him at a revival service. And note the return - looking somewhat the worse for wear - of the homeless girl whom both Gemma and Jax met last season. I'm not exactly sure whether she's supposed to be real, or a ghost, or an angel, or a symbol, or just Sutter exercising a bit of literary license, but I can handle a little magical realism (if that's what she's about) in these very brief, occasional doses. Even bikers (and their old ladies) need a little help now and then, right? And Katey was her usual stellar self at showing Gemma's reluctantly to let the music and the mood of the service wash over her. (Side note: I'm perfectly happy with my inherited religion, but if I were ever of a mind to comparison shop, presence of a gospel choir would be high up on the priorities list.)
• Maybe I'm just trying harder, or maybe my confession a few weeks ago that I couldn't understand Chibbs helped lift some kind of mental block, because he made perfect sense to me in this one. Interesting to see Tara getting in deeper with the club, by helping out Chibbs (telling him how to lie so he could stay on the critical list) on her own turf at the hospital.
• Hale's also getting in deeper with the club than he might have ever planned, choosing to let Clay take out Darby's meth lab rather than doing it himself. Hale still means well, and I believe him when he says he intends to go right back to attacking the club as soon as the greater evil of Zobelle is out of the way, but why do I have the feeling that this is how Clay and Unser's relationship began several decades ago?
• One other plot nitpick: early in the episode, Clay's on the phone with SAMCRO's lawyer, Rosen (played in previous episodes by Tom Everett Scott, but unseen here), who apparently says he can get the charges from the church assault dropped because the video was inconclusive and the church members don't want to testify. But isn't there still the rather large matter of the Sons being caught red-handed by the cops while carrying a bunch of illegal weapons? And wouldn't respectable Ethan testify rather than let his new enemies walk?
• God, Ryan Hurst is just sensational, whether in an explosive scene like Opie flipping out on the judge, or a much smaller one like Opie's reaction to being kissed by Lyla. He's so sad, and so reluctant to get involved with another woman this soon after Donna's murder, yet you can tell how much he needs this.
• Things could be (a bit) worse for Otto, I suppose: he could find out that Bobby was having sex with Luann (which Bobby admits to Jax was "a little scary").
• Half-Sack's boxing skills, not mentioned since midway through season one, come in handy when he punches out one of Darby's goons during the raid on the meth lab.
• As the reluctant judge, Hey, It's That Guy! Michael O'Neill adds a new item to the list of acceptable occupations for which he may be cast. Others include cop, FBI agent, CIA agent, special forces soldier and, possibly, stern private school headmaster or stuffy dean.
• Is Neeta a 24-hour nanny? Or does Abel just nap a ton? Jax and Betty Draper either have outstanding child care or very well-rested babies, I think.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "Potlatch": Bad luck Chuck
Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I get an orange Fanta...
Jax is the guy we're supposed to be rooting for, but more and more, the only sane one in the bunch seems to be Tara, who hears all his talk about reform and yet sees a man going to jail, getting beat up, beating other people up, and digging a hole deeper and deeper. At this point, Jax's dream of reforming the club feels like a fool's errand, where the wisest move would be to walk away - if only he could bear to give up his cut. He begins the episode talking to Tara about how that vest is all he ever dreamed about, and when Alvarez threatens to take it at gunpoint after Jax and Opie walk into the wrong bar, Jax tells him, "Pull the trigger, man. It's the only way this leather's coming off my back."(*) This is not a man who walks away from things, even hopelessly, horribly screwed-up things like SAMCRO.
(*) Sidebar to talk about how incredible Charlie Hunnam has been this year. As I said in a comment last week, whatever issues I had with him at the start of the series are long, long gone now. (Even the accent is much less spotty than it used to be.) He carries himself with such power, can stand toe-to-toe with anyone else in the ensemble, and is just generally bad-ass. The venom (with a tinge of self-hatred, given what happened to Luanne) in his voice when Jax told Clay, "I'm not the one murdering women!" was something to hear, wasn't it? Much as I'd like to see Jax turn SAMCRO into a peaceful organization, I wouldn't want to lose Hunnam's portrayal of the character's violent side.
And while Jax is busy screwing things up this week, we see Clay demonstrate why he's been such an effective club leader for so long. The mindgame he runs on Tig is brilliant. He doesn't even acknowledge Tig's point that there needs to be peace with Jax; he just goes straight at Tig's sense of loyalty and competence, and gets his black bag man back in line, PDQ.
But clever as Clay is, and well-meaning as Jax is, they still don't seem to be a match for Ethan Zobelle, who seems capable of taking over gun distribution in this area on all ends. His daughter's sleeping with the son of SAMCRO's IRA connect, and picking up details about how that operation runs, while Ethan's buying the loyalty of the Mayans - whom SAMCRO scorned in favor of the Niners - with a whole lot of free guns. It's clear by this point that he has no interest in white supremacy and every interest in fiscal supremacy, and so long as he can keep guys like AJ in line, how can SAMCRO hope to beat this guy, especially since they're too busy with in-fighting to come together on a proper strategy?
Some other thoughts on "Potlatch":
• Chuck the compulsive masturbator makes his return, and seems in surprisingly good spirits for someone who - after the Chinese cruelly but cleverly chopped off most of his fingers - is no longer able to perform his favorite act. Between him and blind, widowed Otto, it's been a rough patch for both SAMCRO members and assorted hanger-ons. If I was somebody like Neeta, I'd be very afraid of suffering a permanent injury, and soon.
• Between Chuck's return and Half-Sack displaying his nuticle for all to see, this was a pretty funny episode, considering how many bad things also happened in it. (Tig: "Is it gay that I want to see it?" Bobby: "Gay-curious.")
• I don't know how it played out with sponsored interruptions, but this was one of the shorter episodes I can remember, clocking in at just under 39 minutes without commercials.
• Would you rather have seen the confrontation between Tara's boss and Gemma, or did you appreciate the cut away because you could tell how that was going to go down as soon as they wound up on the elevator together?
• I'm glad I can understand Chibs' wife a bit more than Chibs himself. And I like how Gemma framed her opinions about the lady: "There are only three women I'm afraid of: my mother, my third grade math teacher, and that Irish bitch." Think she'll wind up being a factor in whatever goes on between SAMCRO and the IRA?
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
"Change won't happen quick, or without blood, but it'll happen. It has to." -JaxThis season of "Sons of Anarchy" has been about a schism at the top of SAMCRO, with Jax and Clay supposedly representing conflicting leadership styles. But we've seen in recent weeks that both are just as capable of being cagey as they are impulsive and arrogant. And we see in "Potlatch" (another episode with a title that had me running to Wikipedia for an explanation) that both men are just as capable of getting a club member's wife killed through their own impulsiveness.
Jax is the guy we're supposed to be rooting for, but more and more, the only sane one in the bunch seems to be Tara, who hears all his talk about reform and yet sees a man going to jail, getting beat up, beating other people up, and digging a hole deeper and deeper. At this point, Jax's dream of reforming the club feels like a fool's errand, where the wisest move would be to walk away - if only he could bear to give up his cut. He begins the episode talking to Tara about how that vest is all he ever dreamed about, and when Alvarez threatens to take it at gunpoint after Jax and Opie walk into the wrong bar, Jax tells him, "Pull the trigger, man. It's the only way this leather's coming off my back."(*) This is not a man who walks away from things, even hopelessly, horribly screwed-up things like SAMCRO.
(*) Sidebar to talk about how incredible Charlie Hunnam has been this year. As I said in a comment last week, whatever issues I had with him at the start of the series are long, long gone now. (Even the accent is much less spotty than it used to be.) He carries himself with such power, can stand toe-to-toe with anyone else in the ensemble, and is just generally bad-ass. The venom (with a tinge of self-hatred, given what happened to Luanne) in his voice when Jax told Clay, "I'm not the one murdering women!" was something to hear, wasn't it? Much as I'd like to see Jax turn SAMCRO into a peaceful organization, I wouldn't want to lose Hunnam's portrayal of the character's violent side.
And while Jax is busy screwing things up this week, we see Clay demonstrate why he's been such an effective club leader for so long. The mindgame he runs on Tig is brilliant. He doesn't even acknowledge Tig's point that there needs to be peace with Jax; he just goes straight at Tig's sense of loyalty and competence, and gets his black bag man back in line, PDQ.
But clever as Clay is, and well-meaning as Jax is, they still don't seem to be a match for Ethan Zobelle, who seems capable of taking over gun distribution in this area on all ends. His daughter's sleeping with the son of SAMCRO's IRA connect, and picking up details about how that operation runs, while Ethan's buying the loyalty of the Mayans - whom SAMCRO scorned in favor of the Niners - with a whole lot of free guns. It's clear by this point that he has no interest in white supremacy and every interest in fiscal supremacy, and so long as he can keep guys like AJ in line, how can SAMCRO hope to beat this guy, especially since they're too busy with in-fighting to come together on a proper strategy?
Some other thoughts on "Potlatch":
• Chuck the compulsive masturbator makes his return, and seems in surprisingly good spirits for someone who - after the Chinese cruelly but cleverly chopped off most of his fingers - is no longer able to perform his favorite act. Between him and blind, widowed Otto, it's been a rough patch for both SAMCRO members and assorted hanger-ons. If I was somebody like Neeta, I'd be very afraid of suffering a permanent injury, and soon.
• Between Chuck's return and Half-Sack displaying his nuticle for all to see, this was a pretty funny episode, considering how many bad things also happened in it. (Tig: "Is it gay that I want to see it?" Bobby: "Gay-curious.")
• I don't know how it played out with sponsored interruptions, but this was one of the shorter episodes I can remember, clocking in at just under 39 minutes without commercials.
• Would you rather have seen the confrontation between Tara's boss and Gemma, or did you appreciate the cut away because you could tell how that was going to go down as soon as they wound up on the elevator together?
• I'm glad I can understand Chibs' wife a bit more than Chibs himself. And I like how Gemma framed her opinions about the lady: "There are only three women I'm afraid of: my mother, my third grade math teacher, and that Irish bitch." Think she'll wind up being a factor in whatever goes on between SAMCRO and the IRA?
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "Gilead": Jail bait
Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I let you know that I don't want to be set up...
"I ain't never seen us beat up this bad." -BobbyThat Bobby can say this only midway through the episode, before Agent Stahl turns up again, and before Clay and Jax have a protracted, ugly brawl the likes of which I haven't seen since Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David threw down in "They Live!"... Well, that tells you what kind of awful shape SAMCRO is in by the end of the hour, and what an intense, terrific hour of this increasingly great show "Gilead" was.
This week is going to be lighter on writing time than I would like, so I can't go into everything I liked about "Gilead," but I'll try to make do with the short version.
Kurt Sutter said on Twitter that the episode was an homage to "Oz," his favorite TV show of all time. But while it had that prison setting, and a few convenient shiv attacks and beat-downs out of sight of the guards, it felt very much like a prison-set episode of a Kurt Sutter show, where the protagonists are scrambling to solve an ever-increasing set of problems, most of them of their own making. So we had the SAMCRO guys in jail trying to watch each other's backs and arrange for protection from the Niners, Opie and Sheriff Trammell (who's more overtly in SAMCRO's pocket than the Charming cops are, including Unser) trying and failing to set up the trans snitch, and Gemma trying to guilt Oswald into springing for the bail money.
And, as per usual on both "Sons of Anarchy" and "The Shield," things mostly worked out, in that the club guys get bailed out before one of them gets killed. But in the larger picture, matters are more screwed-up than ever: Juice is stabbed (which, as Bobby notes, is only going to add to the mountain of debt that Chibs' hospital stay will bring), Trammell is shot, Stahl is back in the picture, Oswald and Gemma are going to be hard on Clay to keep the club from forfeiting the bail money, and Bobby's plea for "a healing" between Clay and Jax instead leads to that savage brawl that solves exactly nothing.
In the end, Clay and his guys go back into the clubhouse (where they plot out all their illegal business), Jax goes into the Teller/Morrow tow office (the one legitimate aspect of SAMCRO), and Gemma and Tara are left standing in the middle. This club needs a healing, but instead it seems more deeply wounded than ever.
Hell of an episode. Hell of a season.
What did everybody else think?
Click here to read the full post
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "Falx Cerebri": Patience is a virtue
Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I spill some "diet cola" on you...
The episode's title is taken from a part of the brain that separates the two hemispheres, and represents the rough divide between the reckless emotion of Clay and the perhaps over-calculation of Jax. Clay has no problem running blind off the cliff, and while Jax would prefer to hang back, his insistence on hanging back and thinking is starting to backfire. He and Piney didn't want to tell Opie the truth about his wife to protect him, and all it's accomplished is to turn Opie into one of Clay's staunchest allies, and to deepen the schism in the group. And while Jax was right to vote against swift vengeance for Otto's eye last week, and right to try to curb the club's bloodlust for Chibs being blown up here, he's piled one too many cautious decisions on top of each other, and now no one in the club wants to hear from him any more. And so the core of the club(*) winds up in jail, and Zobelle is free to do to Charming what he wants.
(*) Minus Piney, who's off on an oddly-timed bender that seems designed to keep the character off-stage at an inconvenient moment in the story arc, and minus Opie, who was busy chasing Ethan and is so tough that flipping off his bike and onto a parked car barely knocked the wind out of him.
Zobelle so far has outsmarted Samcro at every turn, and his daughter Polly looks to be cut from the same evil, efficient cloth. Hale thinks he's intimidating her, but she's just using the honest but not particularly clever cop to bait the hook for her father's enemies. This will be trouble.
And Hale only gets to Polly by confronting Gemma with what Unser told him, which led to one of two hilarious Unser moments of the episode (the other being Unser's cup of radioactive urine), as he was taken completely off-guard when Gemma showed up to chew him out about it.
And fed up with the men in her life, however well-meaning some may be, Gemma winds up doing even more bonding with Tara. With their sunglasses and visible scars, the two look like they could be mother and daughter as they go for target practice outside Luanne's studio. (It's a good thing Gemma co-owns a body shop so she and Tara can get away with going all Thelma & Louise on Ima's car.)
Really, despite the usual Jax/Clay/Opie tension, and the cliffhanger at the end, this was one of the funnier episodes the show has done yet. Sutter and company have done such a good job establishing the characters that we can laugh at things like Gemma's hat box, or Happy shrugging and saying "Okay" when Bobby suggests cutting off Ethan's head in broad daylight, and yet the jokes don't take away from the tension. Not every drama can do that, but some of the great ones can, and at the moment, "Sons of Anarchy" is in "great" territory.
Finally, I'm going to be off work next week and unable to do a review of next week's episode, but I'll try to get some kind of open discussion post scheduled to publish shortly after it ends so you guys can talk about it.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
"That's it? You're gonna run blind off the cliff?" -HaleAs he and his "Shield" colleagues did with the strike team, Kurt Sutter clearly takes great joy in painting Samcro into tight corners, and they don't come much tighter than the one at the end of "Falx Cerebri." Unless Sutter plans to turn this show into a Northern California companion to "Oz," Clay and the boys will get out of jail sooner or later, but getting free, and then staying free, when they were caught red-handed by the cops (and filmed by strategically-placed video cameras), will require an exit strategy worthy of the best of Vic Mackey.
The episode's title is taken from a part of the brain that separates the two hemispheres, and represents the rough divide between the reckless emotion of Clay and the perhaps over-calculation of Jax. Clay has no problem running blind off the cliff, and while Jax would prefer to hang back, his insistence on hanging back and thinking is starting to backfire. He and Piney didn't want to tell Opie the truth about his wife to protect him, and all it's accomplished is to turn Opie into one of Clay's staunchest allies, and to deepen the schism in the group. And while Jax was right to vote against swift vengeance for Otto's eye last week, and right to try to curb the club's bloodlust for Chibs being blown up here, he's piled one too many cautious decisions on top of each other, and now no one in the club wants to hear from him any more. And so the core of the club(*) winds up in jail, and Zobelle is free to do to Charming what he wants.
(*) Minus Piney, who's off on an oddly-timed bender that seems designed to keep the character off-stage at an inconvenient moment in the story arc, and minus Opie, who was busy chasing Ethan and is so tough that flipping off his bike and onto a parked car barely knocked the wind out of him.
Zobelle so far has outsmarted Samcro at every turn, and his daughter Polly looks to be cut from the same evil, efficient cloth. Hale thinks he's intimidating her, but she's just using the honest but not particularly clever cop to bait the hook for her father's enemies. This will be trouble.
And Hale only gets to Polly by confronting Gemma with what Unser told him, which led to one of two hilarious Unser moments of the episode (the other being Unser's cup of radioactive urine), as he was taken completely off-guard when Gemma showed up to chew him out about it.
And fed up with the men in her life, however well-meaning some may be, Gemma winds up doing even more bonding with Tara. With their sunglasses and visible scars, the two look like they could be mother and daughter as they go for target practice outside Luanne's studio. (It's a good thing Gemma co-owns a body shop so she and Tara can get away with going all Thelma & Louise on Ima's car.)
Really, despite the usual Jax/Clay/Opie tension, and the cliffhanger at the end, this was one of the funnier episodes the show has done yet. Sutter and company have done such a good job establishing the characters that we can laugh at things like Gemma's hat box, or Happy shrugging and saying "Okay" when Bobby suggests cutting off Ethan's head in broad daylight, and yet the jokes don't take away from the tension. Not every drama can do that, but some of the great ones can, and at the moment, "Sons of Anarchy" is in "great" territory.
Finally, I'm going to be off work next week and unable to do a review of next week's episode, but I'll try to get some kind of open discussion post scheduled to publish shortly after it ends so you guys can talk about it.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "Smite": If an eye offend thee, pluck it out!
Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I have a hormonal spike...
An outstanding episode like "Smite" is a reminder of what an impossible task Jax has set for himself, and the club. How do you take a group steeped in blood, violence and crime and take it back to the hippie ideals espoused by the late John Teller? How do you go peacenik when everyone is still trying to shove a knife in your back - or (in the case of Big Otto) a broken mop handle in your one good eye? And how do you scold your stepfather for being bloodthirsty and impulsive when your temper is the strongest and quickest in the club?
And how do you rein in the instant-gratification side of the club when one of the guys who voted to wait for smarter vengeance gets blown up real good by a minivan-bomb?
It's a staple of any storyline about a conflicted criminal, be it the "Godfather" movies or "The Shield," that getting clean is never as easy as the protagonist would like it to be. There are too many sins and too many people looking to avenge them. Sure, if Samcro wasn't selling guns to black and Latin gangs, they might not have run afoul of the League, but some outside group would have very happily moved into Charming to take over the gun and protection business. Darby would still hate Clay, Tig would still have outstanding warrants (and a need to cause trouble), Agent Stahl would still be after the club because Otto smashed her face into a table, etc., etc., etc. And to protect themselves against those various threats, the club members have to commit even more crimes, and create more enemies. It's a vicious cycle for this vicious group, one that Jax may not be equipped to solve and one that status quo-supporting Clay has no interest in solving.
So who, if anyone, can save the club? Could it be Bobby Elvis? He's grown in importance this season, never moreso than when he plays the swing vote in the table vote. Bobby's in a unique position in this club civil war, in that he doesn't know for sure what went down with Donna, but has a hell of an inkling thanks to what Stahl told him at the end of the first season. He's a trusted older hand, not impulsive like Tig or driven by ego like Clay, and he seems to enjoy the club more for the fringe benefits (girls, booze, freedom) than out of a desire to run guns and kick ass. Maybe he's smart enough to figure a way out of this mess - if, that is, he can calm everybody down after Chibs got hit - but hopefully not killed(*) - by the bomb.
(*) And it's here that I want to remind you about the No Spoilers section of the commenting rules for this website, and to make it very clear that I don't want any discussion of what's in the previews for next week's episode, which could very well give away whether Chibs is dead or alive. (I'm writing this review before watching additional episodes, so I have no idea.)
And while the club's alpha males jockey for position, and Clay and Ethan take indirect shots at each other, we see Tara starting to assert herself in her new friendship with Gemma. Getting a busted nose for being helpful will motivate a girl to try some tough love, and while it doesn't work here (Gemma bails on the therapy session at the last minute), you can see Tara bit-by-bit breaking through Gemma's armor. But from Tara's perspective - where her nose is messed-up, where her boss is wrongly (but understandably) suspecting her boyfriend of domestic abuse, where the club is still hip-deep in blood, and where Gemma is being stubborn as hell, it's hard not to see the change coming way too slow. Because the show is about the members of the club, even if it doesn't always take their side of certain moral issues, it would be easy for a character like Tara to be written and played as the killjoy - Why would Jax want to be with this pill? - but what the writers and Maggie Siff have done this year has been very shrewd. Tara's the "normal" point of view on the club, and because she clearly loves Jax, she wants to love the club, but it's hard not to overlook all the baggage that comes with it.
A few other thoughts on "Smite":
• After failing/refusing to pull the trigger on AJ last week, it's interesting to see Gemma so aggressive in her pursuit of the woman who set the whole abduction in motion - and who turns out to be Ethan's doting, equally ruthless daughter. So are we to take it that Gemma couldn't shoot AJ because she's still afraid of him (even in a position of total safety/power) due to her PTSD, while she feels confident in going after a younger, smaller woman who enabled, but didn't participate in, the rape?
• Shortly before Chibs got blown up, I jotted down the following note: "I have no idea what this guy says 90 percent of the time."
• How much time is supposed to have passed from Donna's murder? "The Shield" tended to take place in an incredibly compressed timespan, but I don't know if "SoA" is doing the same. I ask because Opie seems at least somewhat interested in Lyla the porn actress, and I'm not sure how far removed he is from his wife's death. And one of Kurt Sutter's more stomach-churning (yet completely non-graphic) inventions is Opie's continued loyalty to Clay. If he only knew...
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
"I'm going to get us out of all those things that you're afraid of. You stay with me, I promise: you'll find your place." -JaxYes, Jax, and Michael was going to make the Corleone family legitimate within five years, right?
An outstanding episode like "Smite" is a reminder of what an impossible task Jax has set for himself, and the club. How do you take a group steeped in blood, violence and crime and take it back to the hippie ideals espoused by the late John Teller? How do you go peacenik when everyone is still trying to shove a knife in your back - or (in the case of Big Otto) a broken mop handle in your one good eye? And how do you scold your stepfather for being bloodthirsty and impulsive when your temper is the strongest and quickest in the club?
And how do you rein in the instant-gratification side of the club when one of the guys who voted to wait for smarter vengeance gets blown up real good by a minivan-bomb?
It's a staple of any storyline about a conflicted criminal, be it the "Godfather" movies or "The Shield," that getting clean is never as easy as the protagonist would like it to be. There are too many sins and too many people looking to avenge them. Sure, if Samcro wasn't selling guns to black and Latin gangs, they might not have run afoul of the League, but some outside group would have very happily moved into Charming to take over the gun and protection business. Darby would still hate Clay, Tig would still have outstanding warrants (and a need to cause trouble), Agent Stahl would still be after the club because Otto smashed her face into a table, etc., etc., etc. And to protect themselves against those various threats, the club members have to commit even more crimes, and create more enemies. It's a vicious cycle for this vicious group, one that Jax may not be equipped to solve and one that status quo-supporting Clay has no interest in solving.
So who, if anyone, can save the club? Could it be Bobby Elvis? He's grown in importance this season, never moreso than when he plays the swing vote in the table vote. Bobby's in a unique position in this club civil war, in that he doesn't know for sure what went down with Donna, but has a hell of an inkling thanks to what Stahl told him at the end of the first season. He's a trusted older hand, not impulsive like Tig or driven by ego like Clay, and he seems to enjoy the club more for the fringe benefits (girls, booze, freedom) than out of a desire to run guns and kick ass. Maybe he's smart enough to figure a way out of this mess - if, that is, he can calm everybody down after Chibs got hit - but hopefully not killed(*) - by the bomb.
(*) And it's here that I want to remind you about the No Spoilers section of the commenting rules for this website, and to make it very clear that I don't want any discussion of what's in the previews for next week's episode, which could very well give away whether Chibs is dead or alive. (I'm writing this review before watching additional episodes, so I have no idea.)
And while the club's alpha males jockey for position, and Clay and Ethan take indirect shots at each other, we see Tara starting to assert herself in her new friendship with Gemma. Getting a busted nose for being helpful will motivate a girl to try some tough love, and while it doesn't work here (Gemma bails on the therapy session at the last minute), you can see Tara bit-by-bit breaking through Gemma's armor. But from Tara's perspective - where her nose is messed-up, where her boss is wrongly (but understandably) suspecting her boyfriend of domestic abuse, where the club is still hip-deep in blood, and where Gemma is being stubborn as hell, it's hard not to see the change coming way too slow. Because the show is about the members of the club, even if it doesn't always take their side of certain moral issues, it would be easy for a character like Tara to be written and played as the killjoy - Why would Jax want to be with this pill? - but what the writers and Maggie Siff have done this year has been very shrewd. Tara's the "normal" point of view on the club, and because she clearly loves Jax, she wants to love the club, but it's hard not to overlook all the baggage that comes with it.
A few other thoughts on "Smite":
• After failing/refusing to pull the trigger on AJ last week, it's interesting to see Gemma so aggressive in her pursuit of the woman who set the whole abduction in motion - and who turns out to be Ethan's doting, equally ruthless daughter. So are we to take it that Gemma couldn't shoot AJ because she's still afraid of him (even in a position of total safety/power) due to her PTSD, while she feels confident in going after a younger, smaller woman who enabled, but didn't participate in, the rape?
• Shortly before Chibs got blown up, I jotted down the following note: "I have no idea what this guy says 90 percent of the time."
• How much time is supposed to have passed from Donna's murder? "The Shield" tended to take place in an incredibly compressed timespan, but I don't know if "SoA" is doing the same. I ask because Opie seems at least somewhat interested in Lyla the porn actress, and I'm not sure how far removed he is from his wife's death. And one of Kurt Sutter's more stomach-churning (yet completely non-graphic) inventions is Opie's continued loyalty to Clay. If he only knew...
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Sons of Anarchy, "Eureka": Head out on the highway
Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I file the serial numbers off my extra gun...
Last week, the Jax/Clay feud had to co-exist with the tension between Clay and Gemma. But with the club out on the road, and with Tig's capture by the bounty hunters complicating the gun deal, things come to a very violent head between these two. But more interesting than the fight itself, or the grousing beforehand, is seeing who's taking which side. Piney's clearly with Jax because he knows about Donna, while Opie sides with Clay precisely because he doesn't know about that, and because he's thrown himself so deeply into the club that he's going to blindly follow its leader. It made sense at the time for Jax and Piney not to tell him, but this is very bad now. The only way to get Opie on their side is to tell him the truth, at which point he may feel almost as betrayed by his father and his best friend as by his president. It's bad enough that Clay and Tig did this, but for Jax and Piney to not tell him - to let him keep liking and trusting the men who murdered Donna, and to let them stay alive when all Opie cares about is killing anyone involved - well, I just keep thinking about how good Opie is with explosives and worrying that this season is going to end with a lot of them going off.
On the flip side, I think we all assumed that one of this season's story arcs was going to be about Gemma stalking and killing (or badly hurting) AJ and the other men who attacked her. Instead, she spots his telltale tattoo in episode four, follows him, with gun in hand, and... can't pull the trigger.
Why not? Is it because she can hear AJ's conversation with his son and that humanizes him too much? Is it because he damaged her so badly that she's still afraid of him, even in a situation where she has all the power and he faces all the danger? Or has the experience - and the help and compassion she's received since from people like Unser and Tara and Neeta - altered her in a different way? Monstrous as the rape was, is it possible it's forced her to view the world in a different way? That she's not as cold and hard and vengeful as she used to be? Or is she just hanging around in the chapel because she won't have to talk to strangers in there?
Whatever the reason, Katey Sagal continues to knock it out of the park on this storyline, and I like how she played Gemma's hand tremors so they looked very much like Clay's arthritic mitts when he's in the middle of an attack.
Some other thoughts on "Eureka":
• Clay's difficulty in getting the bike up was a nice art-imitates-life moment, as Ron Perlman has struggled more than the other actors in mastering the art of riding. He's better now than he was at the start of the series ("I don’t talk to him; he doesn’t talk to me," he jokes), but when I asked him about the learning process back at press tour, he said:
• In addition to his showdown with Ethan, quoted above, I loved Unser's continued exasperation with having to be Gemma's friend and protector, particularly the way he says, "What am I supposed to do with that?" after Gemma admits to pointing a gun at the woman in the other car. And Unser later reminds us of how long he's known Gemma, and how well he knows her, while again painting a parallel between Gemma and Tara. Is one of the stories of the series going to be Gemma softening just as Tara gets harder to handle her life as Jax's "old lady"? And how soon before that hospital administrator starts being more overt in her objections to all of Tara's visitors from both sides of the law?
• The bald, intense club member who rode with Jax, Piney, Chibbs and Half-Sack on the rescue mission is Happy, played by technical advisor David Labrava. He appeared in several episodes last year, but it had been a while since he played a prominent role. But if you're going on an armed raid, he's clearly a guy you want on your side.
What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post
"Charming's a special town. Not many folks take to it. I like to think the town chooses its occupants. Right ones stay; wrong ones disappear." -UnserThis killer second season of "Sons of Anarchy" just keeps getting better, doesn't it? Kurt Sutter and company (here Kurt co-writes with Brett Conrad, with Guy Ferland directing) are expanding the scope of what they can do - with this episode offering us the image of the full Samcro roster (augmented with a lot of help from Central Casting) out on their blood run, plus the action of Jax and Piney's assault on the bounty hunters' motel room - but they're also going much deeper into who these characters are and the many ways that their association with the club, and with Charming, is messing them up.
Last week, the Jax/Clay feud had to co-exist with the tension between Clay and Gemma. But with the club out on the road, and with Tig's capture by the bounty hunters complicating the gun deal, things come to a very violent head between these two. But more interesting than the fight itself, or the grousing beforehand, is seeing who's taking which side. Piney's clearly with Jax because he knows about Donna, while Opie sides with Clay precisely because he doesn't know about that, and because he's thrown himself so deeply into the club that he's going to blindly follow its leader. It made sense at the time for Jax and Piney not to tell him, but this is very bad now. The only way to get Opie on their side is to tell him the truth, at which point he may feel almost as betrayed by his father and his best friend as by his president. It's bad enough that Clay and Tig did this, but for Jax and Piney to not tell him - to let him keep liking and trusting the men who murdered Donna, and to let them stay alive when all Opie cares about is killing anyone involved - well, I just keep thinking about how good Opie is with explosives and worrying that this season is going to end with a lot of them going off.
On the flip side, I think we all assumed that one of this season's story arcs was going to be about Gemma stalking and killing (or badly hurting) AJ and the other men who attacked her. Instead, she spots his telltale tattoo in episode four, follows him, with gun in hand, and... can't pull the trigger.
Why not? Is it because she can hear AJ's conversation with his son and that humanizes him too much? Is it because he damaged her so badly that she's still afraid of him, even in a situation where she has all the power and he faces all the danger? Or has the experience - and the help and compassion she's received since from people like Unser and Tara and Neeta - altered her in a different way? Monstrous as the rape was, is it possible it's forced her to view the world in a different way? That she's not as cold and hard and vengeful as she used to be? Or is she just hanging around in the chapel because she won't have to talk to strangers in there?
Whatever the reason, Katey Sagal continues to knock it out of the park on this storyline, and I like how she played Gemma's hand tremors so they looked very much like Clay's arthritic mitts when he's in the middle of an attack.
Some other thoughts on "Eureka":
• Clay's difficulty in getting the bike up was a nice art-imitates-life moment, as Ron Perlman has struggled more than the other actors in mastering the art of riding. He's better now than he was at the start of the series ("I don’t talk to him; he doesn’t talk to me," he jokes), but when I asked him about the learning process back at press tour, he said:
Well, the interesting thing about Clay is that we’re dealing with a character whose riding days are probably coming closer to an end than a beginning. He’s got these problems with his hands. He’s got this oncoming profound arthritis which will disable him from being able to ride, which is one of the story points that we kind of revisit every once in a while. So that helps me in my disposition about my relationship with the bike. But the show is really so heavy on the presidency and all of the things that that entails that the riding of the bike, thankfully, is just, sort of an accessory to a very complex network of who the guy is.• It's so rare to see Maggie Siff smile in character, as either Tara or as Rachel Mencken, that it was kind of startling when she flashed her teeth after seeing little Abel in his Samcro knit cap? And how soon before FX or the studio tries to merchandise those things?
• In addition to his showdown with Ethan, quoted above, I loved Unser's continued exasperation with having to be Gemma's friend and protector, particularly the way he says, "What am I supposed to do with that?" after Gemma admits to pointing a gun at the woman in the other car. And Unser later reminds us of how long he's known Gemma, and how well he knows her, while again painting a parallel between Gemma and Tara. Is one of the stories of the series going to be Gemma softening just as Tara gets harder to handle her life as Jax's "old lady"? And how soon before that hospital administrator starts being more overt in her objections to all of Tara's visitors from both sides of the law?
• The bald, intense club member who rode with Jax, Piney, Chibbs and Half-Sack on the rescue mission is Happy, played by technical advisor David Labrava. He appeared in several episodes last year, but it had been a while since he played a prominent role. But if you're going on an armed raid, he's clearly a guy you want on your side.
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