Past indiscretions come back to haunt the club as Jax searches for the wife of a man recently killed by SAMCRO.

“DAMN, GRANDMA’S KINDA CRAZY.”

Note: The following review goes into detail about the episode. SPOILER ALERT!

When a show with the body count of Sons of Anarchy reaches its final season, the stakes get raised as main characters get killed off. That’s why I was on the edge of my seat when Tig got shot completely out of nowhere. While Tig seems to have managed to survive his brush with death, I’m hoping to see plenty of moments like this between now and the end of the season. It looks like things are about to escalate in a huge way after the bloodbath at the end of the episode.

So it seems like somebody has ratted Jax and the club out to the Chinese, and the retaliation was swift and brutal. After the grenade attack at Scoops that nearly took out everybody, a few of Lin’s men paid a visit to Diosa Norte and slaughtered everybody inside, including Colette. Colette realizing what was about to happen as Lin’s men pulled out their guns added another layer of despair to the situation, as did Jax discovering her amongst the dead. Earlier in the episode, the show had been positioning Colette to possibly reconnect with Jax romantically but it all proved to be one big red herring.

Jury would appear to be the number one suspect for turning the club in, but when you think about it, I’m not entirely certain he would have known about the location of the gun warehouse. The warehouse location points to Charlie Barosky turning on SAMCRO, with his previous boasts about nothing happening on the docks without his know-how possibly being quite telling. Peter Weller can play a great villain, so setting him up as opposition to SAMCRO could be a wonderful twist for the final season. Barosky is as corrupt as they come, so it would have only taken a good financial offer for him to turn on Jax, although, I would suspect that he didn’t mean for Colette to be caught in the crossfire.

It wasn’t a very good week for Jax at all, as his proposed deal with the Aryan Brotherhood to sell them Lin’s drugs ended up with two Charming PD officers shot. If Jax’s plan was to succeed, it needed to go off without a hitch, but it’s already falling to pieces. His new alliance with Sheriff Janny was nearly over before it really began, as no matter how much money he pays her, cops can’t be dropping dead left, right, and center. I still have my suspicions about Janny and how swiftly she succumbed to bribery, but for now it seems like she’s an ally who is also getting quite close to Chibs. Jax needs to keep the Sheriff on side, and also doesn’t need the Aryan Brotherhood thinking he tried to set them up. There’s going to be some major damage control in play next week.

Gemma continues to lie through her teeth to virtually everyone, and she has also kept up her new habit of having full blown conversations with Tara. I wasn’t certain if she was indeed talking to Tara earlier in the season, but there could be no doubt about it this week. I guess the question now is whether Gemma has gone a little loopy and is actually seeing Tara in some sort of hallucination, or if she’s just having these “conversations” as some sort of coping mechanism to deal with the guilt. She dodged a bullet or two this week sneaking out of Diosa early to deal with Juice, which is just another example of Gemma having nine lives. Her encounter with Abel’s teacher (played by Courtney Love) was amusing, and it’ll be fun to see them interact again.

The “problem of the week” that SAMCRO had to deal with wasn’t particularly special, but it did end up adding a lot to the episode. For one thing, one of those religious figures that Jax and the Sons gunned down a few weeks ago turned out to be August Mark’s business partner, leading to a search for the man’s wife. This led to Venus Van Dam re-entering the story, played delightfully again by Walton Goggins. Finding out that she and Tig had kept in touch wasn’t too surprising, but the moment they shared after Tig got shot was surprisingly touching and hinted at a possible happy ending for one of SAMCRO’s most bizarre members. I’m a little worried about Tig possibly picking up a nasty infection from his wounds however, but for now he is happy being tended to by Venus.

Juice seems to be finally on his way out of town, probably several weeks too late. His breakdown here would definitely make you worry about his state of mind, and the presence of several guns in his possession increases the potential for something drastic happening. He’s now heading out of town with Gemma on her way to her father’s house, but I’m not even sure if they’ll make it there. Juice is one gigantic loose end for Gemma to tie up, and with her also packing a gun, she may end up trying to take him out.

THE BREAKDOWN

In many ways, this was a classic episode of Sons of Anarchy. We had a couple of light-hearted moments, a problem for the club to solve, and then all hell broke loose. I’ve spoken about how Jax was playing a dangerous game and that it was only a matter of time before everything came crashing down, and it appears like that time has come. I wasn’t expecting it so soon in the season, but right now it appears that things are only going to get worse for SAMCRO.

Was it Jury or Borosky who ratted on the club, or was it someone else entirely? Let us know in the comments below.

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