“The Separation of Crows” was a surprisingly bloodless – and focused – episode of Sons of Anarchy, especially compared to this season’s low point, last week’s “Greensleeves.” It gets off to a good start, with the requisite montage set to a somber bluegrass version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” (It’s hard to say if this song relates to what’s going on, because no one understands the lyrics to “All Along the Watchtower.) The cold open concludes with a nicely subdued rooftop scene with Jax and Chibs where Jax says “I love you, Phillip” and Chibs responds “I love you, Jackson.” I swear, I don’t tell my mother “I love you” as much as these murderous bikers do.
Jax is upset at himself for underestimating August Marks, which is an understandable reaction given Tyler’s second thoughts about betraying the man, as well as the new information we learn about Moses Cartwright, who is holding Bobby captive. Namely, that Moses is ex-Special Forces and ex-Blackwater, and so is his team (the Special Forces branch of our military must get really tired of the stereotype that every veteran will turn out to be a villain or a villain’s henchman). Matthew St. Patrick (Six Feet Under) does serviceable work as Moses, but he’s outshined by Mark Boone Junior in all of Moses’s scenes opposite Bobby. For the last few seasons, and especially since Opie’s death, Bobby has served as little more than Jax’s conscience, so it’s kinda cool to see that underneath all of that he’s still a tough son of a bitch.
Meanwhile, the club finds out that Jury is Gib O’Leary’s father, after they meet Gib’s mother, played by Dale Dickey, who after her roles in Winter’s Bone and True Blood really plays against type as a country-fried matriarch who looks like she smells like warm beer. This Jury thing has sat on the shelf for far too long, probably because every episode thus far has included four or five double-crosses and massacres. Needless to say, it doesn’t get resolved in “Crows,” so I guess we’ll have to wait another day to see Jax tearfully put a bullet in Jury’s head, which is absolutely how this will end. (Edit: ignore pretty much this whole paragraph. Somehow I must have managed to fast-forward through way too much of this on my DVR, maybe I thought it was commericals or something like that. Anyway, Jury is dead. My bad, guys.)
And the last subplot concerns Juice, who tells Unser and Jarry that he wants to put in protective custody when he gets to Stockton, and for this he’ll tell them the names of Tara and Roosevelt’s killers (he’s still pinning it on the Chinese). Unser immediately deduces that Juice is on orders to kill Lin for SAMCRO. Dayton Callie has been playing Unser for six years now, and he looks every bit as resigned and world-weary as he should be by now. Callie wears this like a second skin, just like he did as Charlie Utter on Deadwood.
I was still frustrated by “The Separation of Crows,” though. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have some breathing room, but Kurt Sutter (and first time SoA director Charles Murray) slammed on the brakes so hard that the car started tailspinning. When I say this was a talky episode, I mean it; most of it was spent promising the audience that something impactful would happen soon, just not today. Nevertheless, it was a step up from last week, and if Sutter can keep making improvements, however incremental, he and the show might be able to stick the landing.
A Few Thoughts
- Nero invites Wendy and the boys to live on the farm with him and Gemma. At first blush, this seems like an impossibility, but after what I consider to be Jax’s inevitable death, it’s almost certainly how the series will end
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Abel got sent home for hitting a kid. I couldn’t care less about Abel or his shitty subplots or shitty acting
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Tig took a potshot at the guy who swatted his kid. I thought that was a nice touch. Always good to see the soft side of an admitted necrophiliac murderer who’s in love with a transgendered woman
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The version of “All Along the Watchtower” that began the episode was better than the version that ended it, although I do appreciate the symmetry
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Bobby lost a finger, but in spite of that, the body count tonight was ZERO. I’m honestly amazed at Sutter’s restraint (Edit: ignore this too; the body count was one)
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