It’s amazing that with only a few episodes left in its entire run, Sons of Anarchy can still produce episodes like “Playing with Monsters,” which, while not a bad episode per se, still felt like so much wheel-spinning. Place-setting episodes happen, there’s nothing we can do about it, but that knowledge doesn’t make them any more engrossing to watch. There was a lot of bloodshed in “Monsters,” but it’s hard to tell how much of it will actually mean anything down the line.
This isn’t to say that nothing happens in “Monsters”; this is Sons of Anarchy here, the only way nothing could happen is if we got a bottle episode of nothing but Jax smoking, flaring his nostrils, and angrily flipping his phone closed. The noose is steadily tightening around not only Juice, but August Marks and even Jax.
Unser genuinely wants to help Juice, which is why he’s still stonewalling Jarry. He gets a little information about Tara’s murder from Juice – although nothing that could implicate Gemma; everything still points to the Chinese – and in exchange helps Juice meet with Chibs. The meeting goes as well as you could expect, by which I mean Chibs tells Juice to kill himself. But after Juice leaves, Chib’s facade crumbles a bit and a note of genuine concern seeps into Tommy Flanagan’s voice. It’s a small, sweet moment, the kind you have to savor when everything else is so bloody.
To wit: Jax meets with Tyler (the current leader of the One-Niners) and uses half a kilo of heroin to ensure his support with Jax against Marks (Jax is pissed that Marks is putting the kibosh on his vengeance). Tyler says they’ll help but only if Jax helps him get rid of some dissenters. That’s a weird thing I noticed about “Monsters,” and if you’ve ever played RPGs like Fallout or Borderlands or Baldur’s Gate I’m sure you noticed it too – the tit-for-tat aspect of conversations. “Okay, I’ll help you do X, but ONLY if you help me do Y first.”
Meanwhile, Jury, the head of the Indian Hills chapter of SAMCRO, is still seething about the episode-ending murders from last week. It’s still not explained how he knows or is related to one of the dead men – whose name may or may not be Gib O’Leary – but he’s mad enough to lie to Bobby about it. Or maybe he’s just mad that Bobby identifies himself as “Bobby Elvis.” I see this sometimes in other reviews or comment sections, and it bugs me so goddamn much. You know when the last time Bobby did his Elvis act was? Go ahead, guess. The fucking PILOT. The first episode of season ONE, and we’re still talking about it in the third episode of season SEVEN.
Anyway, there are two surprise massacres tonight, effectively wiping out the dissenting sect of the One-Niners. Once again, these deaths don’t really have any impact, because this show is just wall-to-wall mayhem at this point, but I will allow that Nero looked both distressed and exhilirated to be firing that gun. I wonder how that will affect him in the long run.
My favorite scenes of “Monsters” were Sheriff Jarry’s interactions with the club. She meets them for the first time tonight, after an altercation at Cara Cara (or is it Diosa Norte? I can’t keep track), and right away is super into Chibs. Can’t even pretend not to want to…shit, I can’t think of any Scottish jokes right now. Kiss his Blarney Stone? No, that’s Irish. Fuck. Anyway, Jarry proves to be less of a boy scout than Roosevelt, as she takes a $2,000 bribe to cancel an APB on Juice. But she seems to genuinely care about the city’s well-being, and wants her relationship with the club to be strictly quid pro quo.
So that’s pretty much what happens in “Playing with Monsters.” If this conclusion feels anticlimactic, then it’s fittingly so, because the episode’s end was just Jax beating the shit out of another character we’ll never see again. Charlie Hunnam does unhinged well, and Sons of Anarchy does batshit crazy well. I just don’t want that to be all they do.
A Few Thoughts
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I couldn’t stand that conversation between Jax and Marks. The way Marks talked about himself wasn’t intimidating, it was more like a guy you meet at a bar who’s already four beers deep and wants you to know how tough he is. He called himself the “deadliest” man on the streets; he told Jax, “Don’t cross me”; and followed that with “I have no remorse.” Show, don’t tell
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Damn, Sheriff Jarry, DEM CHEEKBONES DOE
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Jax and Abel have zero chemistry
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The diner where Juice and Chibs met is Frank’s Diner on Olive Avenue in Burbank, about a mile from my house. It was on an episode of Justified last season, and was just as distracting then
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Sorry this review is light on pictures. I picked literally the only one I could find without a watermark. If you work for a website that watermarks all of their pictures, please know that that’s fucking tacky
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God help me, 12 Inches a Slave made me laugh way too hard
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If the RO in SAMCRO stands for “Redwood Original,” why does every charter have the same acronym? Shouldn’t Indian Hills be SAMCIH?
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I don’t know why this popped into my head, but I’d laugh my ass off if at the end of SoA, Jax is revealed to be, like, 25 years old
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