AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Soa seasons3/20/2023 ![]() (Nor can you later, further let the club off the hook by saying that, it turns out, no one will care as long as Juice’s birth certificate doesn’t say he’s black.) If you’re going to go that route-if you are literally going to compare the situation to the systematic murder of black people in American history-you need to be making a statement, not just setting up for an almost slapstick moment in which the tree branch breaks, saving a character you don’t want to kill off and can’t lose for plot purposes. ![]() The message is plain, that SAMCRO is as culpable as if its members had strung Juice up themselves. It has to top itself with dramatic events that feel like they could come out of the final season of a TV series-but it has to stay on the air.įor instance, the midseason episode in which Juice hangs himself, torn between his loyalty to the club and its racist charter, holds back nothing dramatically “Strange Fruit,” the powerful Billie Holiday song about lynching in the South, plays over the final sequence. Its appeal comes from raw passions and oh-my-God moments, but it has to reset to the basic structure: the Sons battle an outside enemy while tensions simmer at the top of the organization. This is a problem SOA has had to wrestle with as the show has gone on and become FX’s highest-rated drama. But that didn’t make the way the case fell apart feel like any less of a deus ex machina. Mechanically, the way Potter’s case fell apart makes sense: it keeps the Sons out of jail, it keeps Jax in town and it keeps the club under the thumb of the cartel, in the process setting up plenty of action for the future. (I actually enjoyed season 3’s Irish mythology, but not the way it back-burnered the Clay-Jax conflict.) Episode by episode it’s been thrilling, and there have been some excellent arcs: Juice’s encounter with SAMCRO’s racist legacy Lincoln Potter’s weird, but in the end oddly noble, pursuit of the RICO case creator Kurt Sutter’s own turn as Otto and especially, Opie’s finally being pushed over the edge.īut it’s sometimes hard not to notice the plot machinations that are going on to make sure that problems are set up for the future and that its core conflicts are not resolved too soon. Overall, it’s the strongest the show has been since season 2. This has been my reservation about SOA this season. (And does anyone doubt that he’s going to find a way, if not to come back, then to make a serious run at it or undermine Jax?) There needed to be a big moment, but Clay also needed to stay in the picture. He could as well have been confronted, the truth could have gotten out, he could have faced the repercussions of his violence and lost the gavel–but that doesn’t satisfy like a gunshot to the chest. So I didn’t feel that Clay “needed” to die, but it also felt like he didn’t need to get shot in the first place–except to set up a cliffhanger in which we thought he might die. But it ended the season with some too-convenient plotting, leading to a resolution-Clay still alive with a seat at the table, Tara and Gemma squaring off–that felt like a concession to the TV need to make sure the show can, in fact, go on, and on, and on. In these last few episodes, it made it clear: the way Clay has run the club is corrosive, people know it, and it can’t go on. Season 4 did that, often powerfully, and refocused the series after two seasons in which Jax and Clay were often driven by external forces to fight on the same side. What was more important to me was that SOA commit to the stakes it set when it started–Jax’s moral battle for the soul of the club. I didn’t need Clay Morrow to die at the end of “To Be,” not exactly. Oh, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Working for the CIA the whole time! At the end of “To Be,” despite a plethora of murder weapons-gun, knife, poison-the new king and the old king were still on stage, with a new queen (Tara) staring down the old one (Gemma). Unlike Sons of Anarchy, Hamlet was a play, which meant that it could achieve finality Hamlet famously dithered between action and inaction, but by the end of the proceedings, there were a lot of important corpses on stage. ![]() Where the Prince of Denmark delved into his father’s betrayal and murder by Hamlet’s mother and new husband, the Prince of SAMCRO gradually learned about the fate of his own father, betrayed by his mother Gemma and her new old man, Clay. The two-part season 4 finale of Sons of Anarchy was titled “To Be,” a direct declaration, if you needed one, that the series had returned to its initial form, patterned loosely on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Follow for last night’s Sons of Anarchy season finale below:
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |