Of course Juice didn’t kill Gemma. Of fucking course he didn’t. I mean, he only had about a thousand reasons to do so, so it makes perfect sense that he just let her walk away. It’s not like Kurt Sutter is trying to give Katey Sagal as many chances for an Emmy nomination as she can get (which she’s deserved in the past, but not so much for this season). “Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em” was a good example of Sons of Anarchy‘s two biggest problems this season: a hopelessly convoluted storyline, and characters living way past their sell-by date.
“Smoke ‘Em” deals with the fallout from last week’s “Some Strange Eruption,” but that’s a pretty obvious thing to say, because every SoA episode is dealing with the fallout of the one that came before.
The club sets up plans to meet with Leland (Ron Tully’s No. 2) to fix things after the heroin they were going to give the Aryan Brotherhood was confiscated when it was used to set up Lin. They’re also making plans with the One-Niners and the Grim Bastards (and their ridiculous Day-Glo bikes) to take down August Marks, and they’re planning to convince the Irish to sell guns to the Mayans. Holy shit, I’m starting to see why every episode is supersized this year. To the show’s credit, director Guy Ferland, a longtime SoA vet, keeps the action moving at a nice clip, and the breathless pace leaves you no choice but to keep up.
Gemma, meanwhile, walks to a diner, where she continues to talk to Ghost Tara (these monologues are almost certainly going to be her Emmy submissions) and befriends a waitress named Gertie, played nicely by Glee‘s Lea Michele. Sagal has always excelled in scenes where she acts opposite younger actresses, and her scenes with Michele are no exception. Gemma Teller – a lying, murderous sociopath – has an unshakable maternal instinct, and maybe it’s because I’m in the tank for this show, but scenes like hers and Gertie’s make Gemma much more sympathetic.
Sutter is clearly using “Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em” to build to something, and at this point I hope it’s more than a massacre, because we get one of those in every single episode now, and they’ve lost their impact. (In “Smoke ‘Em,” the club helps the Grim Bastards take out a rival gang, then uses their dead bodies to convince Leland and his Nazi crew that they kill black people for fun).
There are a couple bombs waiting to go off next week, but to be perfectly honest I don’t have a lot of faith in any impact they’ll have. “Smoke ‘Em” ends with Jax and the club taking Juice out to meet Mr. Mayhem, and it makes you wonder if Juice will fire the biggest Chekhov’s Gun on the show, the true identity of Tara’s killer. Elsewhere, Deputy Eglee wakes up and tells Unser that she wants him to know who was there when she and Cain were shot, but at the rate everyone is dodging death she’s probably going to say “A bunch of Nazis I’ve never seen before.”
Sutter has said that only two patches will die this season. Juice is for sure one of them, but I hope that Orlin West doesn’t count as the other. That guy didn’t get a single line this season before Lin’s crew gunned him down. I really think Jax needs to die – and if Sutter is still using Hamlet as his playbook, he has to – but I’m losing faith that there will be any more impactful deaths after Clay and Tara got killed last season. And look, I’m not saying that everyone needs to die in order for this show to be good, but the goddamn logo of the club is a grim reaper. I’m sick of seeing extras die. Go ahead and kill people, Sutter, but make it count.
A Few Thoughts
- I’m really enjoying Marilyn Manson as Ron Tully. “Why don’t we burn that cross when we get to it?”
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Jax tentatively offers to patch over the Grim Bastards, making them Sons of Anarchy. I’d like to see that, but I would’ve liked to see it even more if it happened two or three seasons ago
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Gemma’s web of lies is quickly unraveling, but it doesn’t really matter if Juice tells Jax the truth. If Gemma says that Juice is lying, Jax will believe her
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