Season 4, Episode 7
The season finally
kicks into gear, but there are still some problems
“You don’t have a normal life, baby.
You have this one.”
-Gemma
Watching the cold open and closing montage of tonight’s
very strong episode, I couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be some
subtle storytelling going on with the editing. In the cold open, lines of
character’s dialogue would bleed onto the next scene; in the closing montage,
each scene shared a line of dialogue, an object, or an action that was in the shot
before it. The somewhat-subtle message seemed clear: everything is connected to
everything else. I don’t think the show is making some grand statement about
life, but rather about the fourth season as a whole and how it would operate in
its storytelling.
In the beginning weeks of this season, many people were on
the lookout for how this season would work, how it would seek to overcome the
problems of season three and become more like the second season that had earned
the show so much critical praise. Now, part of Sutter’s reasoning for why he
broke down season three like he did was that he didn’t just want to repeat
season two’s winning formula ad nausea (or until he hits seven seasons) and create
a product of diminishing returns. It was perhaps the one thing about the third
season that was universally respected, so the fact that, in an attempt to
reorient the show, the fourth season began to behave an awful lot like the
first, seemed a bit hypocritical on Sutter’s part.
But now, halfway through this season, the show has
finally been able to reorient itself and start telling a story that’s actually
entertaining and feels like something new. I’ve said multiple times this season
that I’m willing to give the show some slack as it find its way to back to
greatness, but seven weeks is a long time, especially for a show that usually doesn’t
play the long game, or at least lets us know about the long game sooner. The
theme of the season seems to be that the club is facing problems both inside
and out (which yes, is shades of season two), but this time the lines between
what’s inside and what’s outside aren’t so clear, and as all the problems start
to bleed together, it becomes harder and harder for SAMCRO to stick together.
It’s a theme that we’ve seen already addressed this season, but up until now it’s
only been foreshadowed. So perhaps it’s fitting that the season’s strongest
episode is the one that finally delivers concretely on that idea.
I’m just not sure if the delivery should have come in the
form of Juice’s death. Look, Juice’s suicide in the face of the club and police
pressure was a strong moment for the show, perhaps the first strong moment that
the season has been able to deliver, and it seems to signify that now is when
the shit’s really going to start flying. And while it seems like a proper end
to Juice’s story – it lets him be both a coward and a loyal hero, which is an inherently
interesting dialectic – it’s doesn’t really feel like the moments were earned.
Part of this is course that his death feels like a way for the show to write
out an actor who’s not happy with his job (much like they did with Half Sack in
season two), but a much larger part is that Juice hasn’t really had the proper journey
to get to this point. He didn’t have much to do in the first three seasons of
the show, and his arc here, while interesting for the issue of racism that it
brought up, can be distilled down to a fairly standard “member turns rat” arc, and
a lot of the more interesting ideas sort of fell to the wayside.
I guess the real narrative upside to his death now is
that it we got an actual window into the law enforcement side of this season-long
story. I’ve long complained that the show didn’t really give us enough insight
into Potter, and though that finally happened a few weeks back, it wasn’t until
tonight, when we see him and Roosevelt finally square off against one another
in regards to how they’re going to use Juice, that I finally felt as if I was getting
to know these two men and how they work. Much like the story of the club, it
feels like this is happening later than it should, and now that Juice is dead I
fear that it might be a while before we get to see some more solid action from
them.
But perhaps the biggest problem I’ve had with the season is
that it’s just become so damn hard to write about given the way it’s gone about
developing the arc. As I wrote about a few weeks back, it seems as if the show
is piecemealing out the story so that each week there’s a small accomplishment,
either for the character or the show, that brings the audience closer the
overall story. This can be an effective system of storytelling, but the problem
here is that the piecemealing often times feels more like a “case of the week”
structure than an actual serialized story, and it leaves the meat of those
episodes feeling very inconsequential, meaning that they lack the certain punch
we’ve come to expect from SOA.
Tonight was perhaps a little different, and yet another reason
that this was such a strong episode. While episodes past have felt more like table-setting
than anything else, the time spent here felt like a purposeful exploration of
where everybody stands before we hopefully head off for more action-oriented
pastures (more on that in a minute). While the club becoming paranoid at the
idea of a death threat against Tara’s life may not have amounted to much, it
does give us a look at just how fragile things are, and how stretched the group
has become, that a threat like this causes such large reverberations. (It’s
also a quiet reminder of how much damage Unset can still inflict, even as old
and sickly as he is.) And though Lyla’s departure doesn’t affect anyone but
Opie, it’s an ominous bit of foreshadowing to the dangers the club life can
have of a family.
Which I guess raises the question of whether or not we
are at that point where the story had to kick into full gear. Juice’s suicide,
coupled with Bobby’s motion for an Officer Challenge certainly seem like the
sort of things that would indicate that the show will now be moving forward.
But other closing moments have also led me to believe that the “shit finally
got real”, and it wasn’t until tonight until that actually seemed to happen. Sons of Anarchy used to be one of the
best damn shows on television, and it didn’t get to be that way by stringing
the audience along; it did it by telling real stories where things happened and
people got hurt. It needs to return to the way once again.
Quotes and Other
Thoughts:
Following up on last week's talk about the show’s failure to properly depict female characters, I was going to look at how the show portrayed
masculinity. (Surprise: It’s much stronger in this department.) This would have
been a good episode to do it with, given how we see a bunch of men rise up to
protect a woman, but I felt like taking it the story shift was a more pressing
topic. Another time, then.
So it’s only been two weeks since Clay and Jax made the
deal with Galindo, and yet it has taken six week’s worth of episodes to get
there. So that’s how they’re planning
on keeping Jax in the club for one more year. While it makes sense in terms of
the story, I think it’s going to be hard to buy one year passing over four
seasons. That’s a bit of a stretch.
I don’t really like when Katey Sagal signs the song that
comes over the closing montage. It’s not that I don’t find her voice lovely (I
do), but it tends to break the fourth wall and highlight the manufactured
nature of a television episode, especially at moments when we’re supposed to be
caught up in the emotions of the moment. (Also, I’ll have to go back and check
this, but it seems to me that every time that a Sagal song closes out an
episode, that song title become the episode’s title as well.)
So the first scene of the episode is Juice praying to God,
and then last is him hanging himself. Is this apparent contradiction on
purpose, or do the writers not know that Christians consider suicide a mortal
sin?
Also, what the hell is a “Man of Mayhem”, and how is that
an honor for Juice? (Seriously, I don’t remember if that’s been brought up
before, and thus I can’t be sure why Clay’s giving it to him now.)
Another sign the piecemealing is problematic: I honestly wasn’t
sure what the attack on Alvarez’s coke processing station had to do with
anything beyond some vague talk about rival cartels. If I don’t know why it
matters, you can’t really ask me to care about it.
“Yeah, tortillas. That’s embracing the stereotype, huh?”
“I’m assuming none of us picked up Spanish in Stockton…great.”
“Good night, ma’am.” “Don’t call me ma’am.”
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