FX
Quick spoilers for last night’s Sons of Anarchy coming up:
The end of season two of Sons of Anarchy took a sharp—if not unforeshadowed— turn with the abduction of Jax’s son, Abel, suddenly making the IRA the foregrounded Big Bad on the series. The second episode of season three, “Oiled,” continued to expand this new field of operations for us, giving us a more detailed picture of the clan in Belfast, including a new figure, the priest Father Ashby, who turns out to be possibly the scariest figure of them all. (To the misfortune of poor guilt-wracked Cameron.)
This being SoA, of course, there is never just one problem for SAMCRO to deal with. There’s also now the issue of the drive-by, the Mayans and what kind of threat the crew is facing on the home front. While “Oiled” kept things on a simmer in Northern Ireland, the Sons took action, and how, back in Charming. And the way it went down makes me wonder if I should be worrying more about Jax’s enemies, or about his relationship with his new BFF, Clay.
Toward the beginning of the episode, Jax tells Unser upon getting sprung from lockup—unrealistically, but this is the world SoA has set up—”I don’t give a shit about retaliation. I’ve got to find my kid.” But while SAMCRO is hard on Abel’s trail, Jax is soon deep into the bloody business of figuring out the who and why behind the shooting. And Clay encourages him, offering him “first crack at the piñata” in the bizarre torture of a man buried up to his neck in the dirt. This disturbs Bobby, who calls Clay out, to be told: “I’m helping him through it.”
Well, it’s cheaper than therapy.
I mentioned earlier that one concern I had about the show was that the founding conflict of the show—the disagreement between Jax and Clay about the club’s aims and violence—was being subsumed by all of SAMCRO’s emergencies. Instead, it seems to be entering a new phase, one in which Jax, filled with rage and frustration over the stealing of his son, is being drawn to the dark side. As interesting as the search for Abel, and the possible Mayan war, will be is the question of just what kind of “help” Clay is giving his stepson.
In subplot-land, meanwhile, Gemma’s exile at her father’s house, while necessarily detached from the rest of the action, is still showing dramatic potential. Gemma confronted her feelings for her mother, saw the evidence of how far gone her father is (at Tig’s expense) and had some interactions with Tig that slyly recalled their characters’ tense history.
The impetus of the stories suggests that the major characters will be pushed farther apart, not closer together, as Jax continues his search for a son who’s across an ocean. So far, though, the separate storylines are holding up well. Gemma and Jax, it seems, are both going to have to deal with troublesome fathers.