Well, the first leather-clad domino has fallen on Sons of Anarchy, victim to the ruthless “lessons” of Augustus Marks – and it couldn’t be any more anti-climatic, removing another large segment of the show’s heart (along with Tara’s death last season, this show doesn’t have much left) without giving us much meaningful weight to it. And it’s not because Bobby’s death felt inevitable; even when an audience knows a character is going to die (ala Breaking Bad), there’s still plenty of emotional weight to be garnered from their death, especially when the main cast of characters is a tight-knit family like those on Sons. No, Bobby’s death is weightless, victim of a convoluted plot and a bad guy who seems to get badder and badder as the plot demands it, not for any legitimate reasons beyond “mad black guy” – and in the wake of it, Sons of Anarchy struggles to make anything seem like it’s not heading towards a horrible ending, which begs the question of why we’re still watching at all.
Breaking Bad makes a great comparison series to Sons of Anarchy, especially given the construction of their final seasons, which theorize that their protagonists are horrible human beings, putting the weight of every short-sighted, violent decision they’ve made throughout the series, and bringing those chickens home to roost in devastating ways. Bobby’s death should really feel as significant as Hank’s did in “Ozymandias”: always a spiritual guide of sorts for the group, Bobby Elvis was the ONE Son who was always looking out for the best interests of the club (until the latter seasons, of course, when it just became easier to write a Bobby who would let Jax burn everything to ground without saying a word to the contrary). His death is a monumental one for the show – an importance “What a Piece of Work Is Man” recognizes, but is completely incapable of rendering meaningful to Jax Teller, other than another dead body to slump over and declare vengeance for.
Bobby’s death doesn’t even inspire Jax to act differently (hey, at least Walt realized what had happened after Hank was murdered): by the end of the episode, he’s back to making aggressive moves without consideration, calling for Marks’ arrest while his other plan to murder Lin falls apart the moment Juice gets put into solitary (Unser: the one person on this show still capable of intelligence… and he’s a cancer-addled pothead!). The only character to really give his death any meaningful gravitas is Gemma, who is finally starting to realize what a mistake she made lying to Jax about who murdered his wife: if anything, Katey Segal is able to give us that, a person whose tears don’t feel obligatory or coerced to make the moment more dour.
However, this is one of the fundamental problems of the season: given her 30 years of experience messing with club business, didn’t she know how fragile the balance of peace in Charming was? Even when Jax is keeping her in the dark about club business, she’s got to know that a single lie or action is all it takes to devolve their quaint, quiet town into gunfights and explosions. It’s not clear what we’re supposed to feel when she makes another dumb out-loud confession to Bobby’s dead body (which Abel hears again, conveniently): are we supposed to empathize with her, or just shake our heads at how stupid this female is? Given the line from Rat’s girlfriend about “I’m sorry that I’m crazy, because I’m bi-polar”, I’m guessing the latter – but nothing in this episode makes it very clear how it feels about its own material, beyond “oh man, a cool chase scene should go here” or “let’s break Bobby’s jaw twice and watch Juice shove a big black shank up his ass, because that’s cool and ‘shocking’, dude!”.
And it makes for confusing, ultimately empty television: the final season of Sons is designed to be all misery, all the time, whether it’s killing off main characters, watching others make dumb decisions, or just spending way, way too much time around people doing nothing but staring (or in Wendy’s case, staring at heroin and threatening to ruin the only character of the show who has improved over seven seasons), the latter a complaint tonight’s 61-minute episode stands as a shining testament to. At this point, all we can do is sit back and watch the Sons dissolve one by one: like the pastor’s son whose name I’ll never remember, the final season is a series of people trusting Jax so he can screw them over, in turn screwing things up worse for him (which at the end of the day, the show blames Jax and Gemma for equally) and enacting the wrath of Sutter, who has fully embraced the title of Grim Reaper in the world he’s created and cultivated (or devastated, depending on how you look at it) for the past seven seasons. At least there’s only four episodes left, which I imagine will have a combined running time of about six hours – can’t you tell how excited I am for it all?
Photo via FX
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