tv

Sons of Anarchy (2008 – 2014)

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One thing that kills once-great TV shows is an influx of over-the-top sentimentality. Many shows get too caught up with the characters and forget all about telling a story. Here, we have the exact opposite: a show that went from pragmatically soulful to utterly soulless.

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When Sons of Anarchy (SOA) came on the air, it made a huge splash alongside other hits of the mid to late 2000’s, like Breaking Bad (2008), Dexter (2006), and The Walking Dead (2010).  Though it never quite matched the success of these shows, it came close, and was one of several great shows that came out of this sort of artistic outpouring on cable TV.  With a second generation of shows like this already in full swing (House of Cards (2013), Game of Thrones (2011) and the like), we can start looking back at this first generation with a more critical eye, especially since many of them have drawn to a close.

The good news is that shows like these are often times successful enough to run on their own terms.  Producers and writers are granted a great deal of creative freedom and high ratings keep them in charge.  Best of all, they’re able to end these shows when they want, instead of drawing it out for years for extra money.  Right now, shows like this are in the hands of the “artists,” which is a very good thing.  And as much as we may all hate to see our favorites go off the air, it’s best to remember them as they were intended rather than perfunctorily following them for years and witnessing their inevitable decline.

Ending a show gracefully is not easy.  Go too big and you risk overwhelming the audience with too many major developments taking place at once.  Fail to pack enough of a punch and viewers won’t have any sense of closure or resolution.  In my opinion, SOA went way too big, and did it way too fast.  And it wasn’t even just the finale that went overboard, it was the entire 7th season.

When SOA started out, it gave us a believable picture of outlaw motorcycle gangs, or at the very least what people think of when they think of outlaw MCs.  It struck a reasonable balance between criminal activities, the moral dilemmas of at least some of the men, family responsibilities, the fascist overtones of such organizations and their status of an entity unto themselves, and the law enforcement agencies and personnel responsible for eradicating this criminal element.  All of these elements were juggled at almost all times.  Of course we were treated to a lot of sensational events and a statistically improbable number of coincidences, but these are liberties that we must all endure for the sake of an interesting story.

Like most viewers, I was especially vested in Jax’s internal conflict between his role as a father/husband and an outlaw.  As his conscious gnawed away it him, it was increasingly interesting to watch this internal struggle spill over into reality.  And we had a ton of events to play against his turmoil, from warring with other gangs, to problems with the law, to increasingly complex family matters.  When a TV show/movie/book/whatever can successfully portray an anti-hero, they open up a fascinating world.  As a viewer, most of us found the violence alluring and even fun to watch, but we generally accept that it’s wrong, and our cultural sense of justice keeps us from fully siding with the MC.  We may not have wanted to see the MC dead, but most of us didn’t think that it was right for them to continue filling the streets with guns or murdering people without impunity.  What kept us pulling for them was Jax’s plan to turn them straight, as well as the law’s own unethical ways of dealing with the MC and the MC’s sometimes devotion to squashing out greater evils.

The show built on this theme for the first 4 or 5 years by showing Clay take the MC further and further from what Jax hoped it could be.  Here was Jax, already uncomfortable with the club’s activities, accumulating one reason after another why this shouldn’t be his preferred way of life: his dad’s old manuscripts, his friends, a kid, a wife, another kid, and so on.  And yet here was Clay, becoming evermore the dictator, doing everything he could to portray the MC as a ruthless organization, above and beyond reproach from anyone or anything.

We spent a season or two watching this all come to a head, which was really the climax of the series, though I do feel like it was drawn out a little too long.  It got hard to keep track of who knew what with Clay and Jax vying for power and which side the other members fell on, but when it finally started picking up speed, it was a great time to be watching the show.

Granted the show had a few missteps along the way, including the kidnapping of Abel and the MC’s stint in Ireland, and the all-too-slow transformation of Clay into the unmistakable antagonist, especially during the protracted cartel dealings in Season 4 and the out of control web of lies that held Season 5 together.  Personally I got a little overloaded trying to connect the dots between all the dealings with the cartel, the Irish, the other gangs, who was buying what from whom, plus all the double crosses and betrayals surrounding Pope.  These weren’t exactly bad seasons, I just think that both of them lingered on certain points too long and could’ve probably told the same story in 3 or 4 less episodes.

The first 3 seasons are easily the strongest.  We don’t quite know how bad Clay is or how far he’s willing to go, we’ve got the ruthless Agent Stahl on the club’s trail, and Jax’s role in the gang oscillates between burgeoning leader and potential outcast.

Pretty much every long running plotline comes to head in Season 6, including the inevitable face off between Jax and Clay.  All in all in played out in a satisfying manner, and I think we were at a point where the show could almost end.  Maybe Jax took out Clay and then left it all behind to finally be the husband and father that he never was.  Maybe he leaves behinds his ambitions to turn the club around and just gets his own damn life together instead of worrying about a bunch of thugs.  That was the Jax I wanted to see.  I wanted to see him finally come to that revelation.  I wanted him to understand that this wasn’t any kind of life for his family, and that the MC wasn’t worth his whole life, the life of his loved one, and the life of his children.

But no.  Instead of winding down, shit revved up.  The preponderance of lies eventually comes to a boiling point when Gemma straight up kills Tara.  It was a powerful moment, but ultimately I view it as a shock tactic.  I know that Gemma never had much respect for Tara, and by the time Tara was in a comparable position, Gemma not only disliked her, but was envious of her.  Gemma was a crafty manipulator; I think that if she had really wanted Tara gone she could’ve gone about it in a better or different way.  I just don’t see this rage-filled blowout as probable, though I suppose there are a fair bit of murders committed that start of as assaults where something goes wrong, someone grabs something sharp, etc.

Anyway, that’s where Season 6 left off, and pretty much any and all hopes of Jax’s redemption left with it.

Season 7 is nothing but a bloodbath.  The majority of it is built on lies constructed around Tara’s death, which I think is a big mistake, because it leaves the audience shaking their head at Jax who has been used and manipulated.  He’s no longer his own man.  He’s no longer the good guy.  He’s just a machine with a bloodlust that he uses every resource available to satiate.  It’s a little annoying having to spend 9 or 10 episodes watching Jax do absolutely absurd shit with seemingly little to no regard for those around him.  I also really, really hate what he did to Juice.  Sure, Juice lied and betrayed the club and all that, but he didn’t deserve what happened to him.  Even after all of Clay’s transgressions against the clubs, he was pretty much left alone and allowed to live.  Although he was eventually killed, what Jax planned for Juice was a fate worse than death.  I thoroughly detested Jax for throwing him to the wolves when others had done so much more wrong by him.

And then all loose ends were tied up during those last couple of episodes.  Jax embarked on a spree of kill fucking everything and the show almost became farce.  SOA never shied away from a brutal beating or a gunshot to the head, but at this point it seemed like a competition between episodes to see which had the highest body count.  The whole thin was out of control, and many of those realistic elements I talked about were thrown out the window.  Jax is suddenly able to outsmart, out-man, and out-gun every credible threat from both sides of the law.  Tara’s death or not, someone would’ve eventually stepped in to address all the bridges that Jax had burned, or else outright stopped him.  I know the irony here is that in trying to stop what he hated Jax then became what he hated, but I think this point was made long ago and was now just being beaten over the audience’s head.

Clay was a son of a bitch to be sure, and Jax was at one point likable, but in many ways Jax superseded Clay’s awfulness during Season 7.  He was full of rage.  He didn’t think at all.  Clay may have been making the wrong decisions, but at least he was making decisions and not acting on pure vitriol.  Jax turned into a full blown psychopath.  At the end of it all, he wasn’t even concerned with trying to fix all the shit he’d broken by going about wantonly killing people; instead, he just killed even more people so that there’d be no aggrieved parties left to care.

During the penultimate episode, we finally watch Jax put a bullet through his own mother’s head, something we’d be wondering about since the second Gemma offed Tara.  I don’t regret her death at his hands one bit, I only wish he’d fully realized what an evil, broken piece of shit his mother had been all along.  He also killed Unser for little more than being in the way, yet another ridiculous development.  Unser’s death was probably in the cards all along, though part of me wanted him to be the old dog that walked away from the whole thing.  But even if a living Unser was out of the question, I don’t understand why it had to be written in so hastily.  It felt like an afterthought and there wasn’t a bit of meaning behind hit.  There was so much more that Jax could’ve done to subdue him, and I don’t think that Jax would’ve realistically killed him.  Unser was no angel, but he did more good than most of them will ever know.

At this point, where the hell does the show go?  Does Jax skip jauntily off into the sunset with Wendy and the kids?  No, because that just wouldn’t fly after all the terrible shit we’ve watched him do.  Is he executed by his own gang or another?  No, because it doesn’t seem like he deserves something so brutal either.  So we hit the only bullet point left, suicide.  Like his father.  For damn near the same reason as his father.  I guess there was no better way to end it.  Jax realized what a piece of shit he was and that he absolutely had to get his kids away from this life.  The problem was that it was too damn late.  His older child would probably be scared for life (not helped by the creepy, lifeless kid actor who played Abel) and his wife was already dead.  So was his mother.  It’s great that the kids had a chance a normal life, but Jax did so much more damage than he ever needed to do.

I didn’t/don’t hate SOA or even dislike it; I think it has a well-earned reputation as one of television.s strongest shows as of late.  But I am a little disappointed with how off track it got during the last season, and part of me thinks it was done more for ratings than anything else.  Jax spent the whole show trying to figure out how to get away from this violence, yet Season 7 was by far the bloodiest, most brutal season of the series.  I get that viewers probably didn’t want to see a reflective and introspective season filled with hope and love and whatever else, but I do not buy Jax doing a total 180 and letting these ideals go out the window.  These were thoughts and feelings that he almost died expressing.  It all meant so much to him yet he abandoned it very quickly.

I don’t know how I would’ve ended it.  I guess I would’ve liked to see Jax own up to what he did.  Killing himself didn’t really make up for his horrible character.  Dealing with his actions and trying to change and loving his family enough to give them the parts of himself that were still good would’ve been his ultimate sacrifice.  His dilemma was that he couldn’t give up the club for his family; I would’ve liked to have seen him in a strong enough position to make that choice.  But the fact is that he never chose his family over the club, even in death.  He never has to confront who he is or what he’s done, he just wipes everyone off the map, including himself, which turns out to be little more than an act of cowardice.

I guess I wish that the show had come back around to where it started.  Did I really expect the MC to go straight?  No, not really.  But I had hoped that we’d see something progressive.  Sure, all the old beefs may have been squashed, but the MC is still the same old MC it always was.  Maybe Bobby could’ve been the one to turn it around or at least get the ball rolling for the next generation, but the closest thing we had left to Jax, ideologically speaking, was shot in the head after being horribly maimed.  Would we have ever gotten a version of SAMCRO that went on charity rides instead of stealing, killing, and pillaging?  No.  But Jax wanted to “fix the club,” and all we’re left with is the same bunch of men who’ve only ever earned a living by going outside of the boundaries that hold of the rest of civilization together.

Written by The Cubist