The longer these final-season episodes of Sons of Anarchy get, the less it seems actually happens in between the opening and closing shots of each hour (which in this case, is literally a 60-minute running time). Where it seemed last week was stalling until it could get to “Greensleeves”, this week’s episode seemed like it was twiddling its thumbs until it could get to its next narrative markers: the bloody face of Bobby Elvis and the image of Juice’s blank face standing in prison. For either one, it takes a whole lot of nothing happening for us to get to those moments – and in between SoA wasting time playing street politics (badly, I might add) and Unser slowly, slowly starting to piece together what Gemma is hiding, there’s nothing but fists, cigarette smoke, and overt set-up for the final act. Top that whole package off with another awful Katey Sagal cover (I’m sorry: I love Katey Sagal, but the combination of overwrought singing and slow-motion montage is a terrible one).
If you step back and think about it, there really isn’t any narrative to this episode, simply a checklist of Things That Need to Happen before Sons of Anarchy can pile on the misery in the last few episodes (it arguably begins here, with the first injury of a Sons member by a non-Sons member in a long, long time). The most headshaking of these is Abel overhearing Gemma’s murder confession, which she gives to an infant in a room alone, a further reminder of just how “crazy” she’s gotten. Watching her paranoia over Jax asking her to go to the cabin is fun to watch – but it’s a fleeting pleasure, one displaced by the amount of convenient things happening around her at the same time, led by a heroin-addicted widow of a cross-dressing, sex-filming (and child-raping, apparently) priest being asked by a motorcycle gang member to help set up a drug lord for assassination.
And Jax really thinks this plan is going to work? Just like Gemma’s plan to stash Juice at Wendy’s (or Jax’s out-of-nowhere plan to stash Juice in jail, to kill Lin then hopefully die), these ludicrous turns of plot both sell out their characters, and reveal the shoddy construction of each plot of the season (big and small; when the gang stops at John Teller’s death spot to set Juice up to go to jail, I had to laugh at the show basically acknowledging it forgot its own identity and story). We know Nero isn’t going to have a happy retirement: he’s been talking about it for three seasons, only to get pulled further back into Jax’s underworld. We can also know that Jax’s plan to undermine Marks isn’t going to work: we’ve heard both Jax AND Marks talk about how formidable Augustine is… so he thinks this multi-faceted plan to take him out is going to end up any other way than with Bobby’s eye in a box (which made me roll both of my eyes, how silly that scene was)?
Perhaps what’s most frustrating is the stuff “Greensleeves” just skips altogether with Juice. Little as I care about a character whose been utterly useless the last three seasons (except as a tease for a possible upcoming death, even though he’s a character who can’t even kill himself successfully), Juice’s scenes agreeing to let Gemma go (absent from last week’s episode) and to give himself up for the Sons cause (absent from this week) are about the only moments of the show where Sons could let him be a human being, rather than an idiot with really good signifying tattoos. The funny part? Knowing what happened at the Teller home, Juice is kind of the key to this whole final season: and if he’d just open his mouth already, he’d already be free or enjoying the sweet peace of death, not willingly being fed to the dogs in Jax’s wrong-headed revenge play (has he even stopped to consider that Lin wasn’t lying when he said he wasn’t involved in Tara’s death? I guess Jax just knows how much he lies, and assumes Lin will do the same).
With all these laughable elements coalescing over sixty-one painfully slow minutes, it’s no surprise “Greensleeves” feels like a slog through molasses to nowhere, ending with its most recent attempt to “shock” the audience. It certainly doesn’t make for entertaining television: as Sons of Anarchy finally gets to its endgame (one I assume Sutter and company have been waiting for years to reach), the show’s never been more boring, artificial, or just downright unpleasant, another hour of silliness and motorcycle-riding montages set to another indulgent Sagal cover ballad.
[Photo via FX]
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Great review!