FX
Quick spoilers for last night’s Sons of Anarchy coming up after the jump:
A deadline stands between me and a longer write-up of last night’s excellent Sons of Anarchy episode, “Service,” but in the interest of opening things to your comments let me just say it was, well, excellent. The most intriguing way that it played out was that it resolved—or seemed to—some of the tensions that seemed to be inevitably about to rip SAMCRO in half: Jax’s feud with Clay, Opie and the truth about Donna’s death. But is the gang really healed, or are the various paybacks just being pushed off to deal with more pressing business? I’m guessing the latter, but as gripping as the internal divisions in the gang have been, I have to admit it’s a charge to see SAMCRO coming together against its truly heinous white-power enemy.
Meanwhile, I’m glad that the show is still realistically dealing with the psychological aftermath of Gemma’s rape, which is not the sort of thing you can dispense with in a single cathartic confession. (In this way, the storyline is reminiscent of how well Aceveda’s rape was handled—as both a plot device and a long-term character story—on The Shield, on which SoA’s Kurt Sutter was a writer.) As strong as Gemma seems—and as strong as she was in confronting and talking about her ordeal—she’s still wounded, and also aware of how being a rape victim could mark her in the still very patriarchal world of SAMCRO.
The fact that Clay, movingly, takes her back, is a relief, and adds some needed sympathy to his character. But you have to imagine that the aftermath of this season’s events is not over, for Gemma or anyone else.