Sons Of Anarchy FX, On the “Sons of Anarchy” downside Tuesday night, Bobby was shot and killed.
On the upside, this gave Gemma someone else to whom she could safely confess her secret. Dead bodies almost never break a confidence.
Her secret, of course, is that she killed Tara, the consequences of which include Bobby getting killed.
Ah, irony.
Truth is, with four episodes remaining, Gemma’s secret is looking less secret by the hour.
The main order of business Tuesday, however, fell again to Jax, who needed to get August Marks and his menacing “security chief” Moses Cartwright to release Bobby.
Release him in one piece, that is. They had already released his right eye and most of the fingers on his left hand, sending them in boxes to Jax. Getting Bobby back one portion at a time didn’t seem like a great long-term option.
Those packages did, however, remind Jax that Marks would be up for a personnel swap.
Jax and the club had been protecting the wife and stepson of a minister the club accidentally killed.
The minister, it turned out, had cut a deal to let Marks buy church property for a phony housing project plan that would actually launder Marks’ drug money.
With the pastor dead, Marks needed the wife and the stepson, Grant, to follow through on the deal and then keep quiet about it.
Jax, conversely, wanted them to remain a threat to Marks as people who could testify that he obtained the church land through coercion.
That threat could kill the whole deal, which meant Jax could use Grant and the wife as leverage, something that Jax otherwise found in short supply as far as dealing with Mark was concerned.
Jax and Marks set up a meet at which Jax agreed to turn over the pastor’s body, give Marks a video that proved the pastor had a sordid closeted sex life and let Marks talk with the stepson — all of which, collectively, would neutralize any threats to the land deal.
In return, Jax would get Bobby and a promise that Marks would not kill the pastor’s wife and Grant.
Marks agreed.
Before Moses packaged Bobby up to drive him to the swap, however, he made a point of breaking Bobby’s jaw. It seemed like just a gratuitous bit of good fun, except that it meant Bobby couldn’t talk.
That meant he couldn’t tell Jax that Marks had stashed a gun in the back of Bobby’s pants.
So after Jax and Marks underwent searches to ensure that neither was packing, Marks grabbed the gun. As the only one with a lethal weapon, he immediately became the alpha guy in the group.
Marks pointed the gun at everyone, but ended up only killing Bobby, probably realizing this would cause Jax the most pain.
Leaving Jax alive came at a price. After the swap meet broke up, Jax moved to expose the crooked land deal anyway. At the end of the episode, Marks was cuffed and placed in the back seat of a police car.
Jax and Chibs watched the collar from their bikes. Moses watched from the sidewalk. In the final scene, Jax and Chibs slowly rode past Moses and they all stared at each other.
Call it a wild hunch that this may not be over yet.
The last scene also underscored an exchange between Marks and Jax at their first meeting. If Jax hadn’t gone after the Chinese, Marks said, none of this would have been necessary. There wouldn’t have been this chain reaction war that left dozens of people dead and everyone making less money than they anticipated.
Jax explained that the Chinese revenge thing was about family and because Marks didn’t have one, he wouldn’t understand.
Then Jax went out of his way to spend quality time with Abel, hugging him and enjoying a family meal together.
Well, it would have been a family meal except Abel said he wasn’t hungry.
Abel looked a little distracted and bothered in general, which probably is normal enough when you’ve overheard Grandma admitting she killed Mom.
Jax told Wendy he wanted to keep Abel for the day, a rare offer given how Jax spends most of his days.
Wendy said he shouldn’t skip school, since he was falling behind and seemed frustrated.
“He’s 5 years old,” said Jax. “He shouldn’t be frustrated.”
How soon we forget being 5.
We don’t know exactly how Jax and Abel spent their Daddy day — it didn’t look like Jax brought him to a meet with August Marks — but we did see Abel in a later scene when Gemma was saying her goodbyes to Bobby.
Before Jax had Bobby buried in the backyard, Gemma whispered to Bobby that she was sorry and that “I had no idea.”
It wasn’t the same kind of direct confession she had delivered to Thomas. It was more like her cryptic confession to Gertie the waitress.
Nonetheless, it was clearly more guilt bubbling over, and it illustrated how Gemma is looking for pretty much anyone to spill to.
An infant, a waitress, a dead body. Coming soon: Gemma confesses to a giant redwood.
In any case, the silent Abel had grabbed himself a chocolate chip cookie and silently wandered out to the yard, where he heard Gemma’s chat with Bobby.
Another wild guess: we will see more of Abel before this ends.
The real crack in Gemma’s secret, though, didn’t come from her compulsive confessing.
Now that Juice had given Althea the name of Chris Dunn, the Chinese guy he allegedly saw at Tara’s place the night of the murder, Althea ran some checks on Dunn.
Turns out he had been sleeping off a drunk in a Las Vegas jail cell the night Tara was killed.
Oops.
So now Althea knows this, and she told Wayne. It might not stay inside that circle.
Or it might. Wayne’s Scrabble games with the wounded deputy, it seems, achieved the kind of bonding Wayne was aiming for. The deputy told Althea that she had only seen white supremacists at the place where she and her fellow officer were shot. She didn’t mention that the MC was also there.
And speaking of connected dots, Juice thought his mission of getting close enough to kill Henry Lin was on-track when his white supremacist buddy gave him a knife Juice was able to conceal in a body cavity.
After Althea told Wayne about the Chris Dunn flimflam, though, Wayne advised her to get Juice stashed someplace where he couldn’t get to Lin.
When we last saw him Tuesday, he’d been tossed into solitary.
Bummer.
In other action Tuesday, Gemma sat with Althea long enough to say she was sure Chris Dunn was the guy she saw at Tara’s place the night of the murder.
At that point Althea didn’t know this had to be a lie, but she did ask if Gemma knew anything else about recent local criminality.
Gemma wasn’t feeling the cooperation thing, and the session ended with Althea punching Gemma and Gemma shoving Althea backwards over a chair.
If that ever happens again, says Althea, I’ll put you behind bars.
Oh yeah, said Gemma, well, if that ever happens again I’ll slit your throat.
Girl fight!
Partly to avoid this sort of drama, Nero told Gemma he was going down the next day to sign the papers that would get him out of the strip club business and relocate him to his uncle’s farm, far away.
He asked Gemma again if she would go with him. She didn’t answer again.
Amid all this there wasn’t a lot of room for levity Tuesday. The small handful of jokes mostly revolved around the smell of decomposing bodies. You had to be there.
Tig did get to make a short peripheral crack about his sex life, so it’s good to know that’s still in play.
Curiously, though, romance did surface as things got more and more tense in the MC’s deadly standoff with Marks.
Rat, heretofore a self-acknowledged afterthought, told his girl he loved her, and that he didn’t show it more often because he wasn’t sure how he could love her and also play his position in the club.
“I’m afraid I’ll screw ‘em both up,” he said.
Chibs, meanwhile, had another parking garage rendezvous with Althea, nominally to swap intel.
Chibs, who had been pretty upset over Bobby and other recent business, slipped Althea the letter from the pastor’s wife, the one that said Marks had coerced her into signing the land deal.
Chibs suggested this could be grounds to arrest Marks, which would “restore the balance” among all the warring gangs and turn Charming into Mayberry again.
Althea was skeptical. She also wondered where Gemma got the idea that she was on the take and sleeping with Chibs.
Busted, Chibs admitted he was probably the source of those particular allegations.
Althea said she needed some kind of sign from him whether he cared at all for her. If he didn’t, she said, “We’ll just go back to playing cops and robbers.”
And what kind of sign did she have in mind?
“Take me right here,” she said.
Chibs noted that he had brought an MC buddy with him, and that buddy was sitting on his bike no more than 25 yards away.
“I don’t care,” said Althea.
And neither, in the end, did Chibs.
Still, Jax remained the prize on which viewers needed to keep their eyes.
Early in the episode, Grant started to openly doubt Jax’s strategy for neutralizing Marks.
Specifically, Grant didn’t want Jax to give Marks the video of the pastor’s extracurricular behavior, fearing that even though the pastor was dead, this would destroy the church his mother still hoped to save.
Every time I trust you, Grant said, “Something bad happens.”
Jax, to his credit, admitted that so far this had been true.
The stepson stepped outside, slugged his MC guard and tried to drive way in a van. The MC eventually caught up with him and Jax convinced him to stay with the program.
Later they met with the pastor’s wife to get her on board with the new strategy. She said she was sorry about Jax’s friend.
“It’s me that should be sorry,” Jax replied. “I keep making mistakes, putting the two of you at risk.”
“I think you are a decent man,” the pastor’s wife said. ‘
“I don’t think that’s true,” Jax replied.
