The Wild West

The season finale of Sons of Anarchy aired last night, and I am now left with an unpleasantly bereft sensation. First Mad Men leaves, then Sons, with little to replace them until after the holidays. This blog is going to be a wasteland, excepting the new episodes of Dollhouse this month. And hey, tomorrow I’ll write about the premiere of Steven Seagal: Lawman! (Weeping silently into my keyboard).

The Sons of Anarchy finale certainly wasn’t perfect – there are plot holes and odd inconsistencies, and you do get the sense they tried to cram more into the time than they knew how to handle. Why spend time on a tiny plot point about killing an incarcerated Aryan Brotherhood member when you skip over how Ethan Zobelle could possibly escape a biker gang without his front left tire? Why spend so much time with Agent Stahl when one of your major plot catalysts relies on a relationship (between Zobelle’s daughter and Cameron’s son) that we barely even knew existed? And yet, all the little finicky problems I had with the construction seem both unimportant and even somewhat unfair given the whole episode.

For every moment where I wondered why they couldn’t just throw in a line to polish up a little rough spot in the plot, there were three other lovely details that overwhelmed the disappointment. The entire brief, seemingly unnecessary jail assassination, for instance, led to a gorgeous bit of narrative context with an audiobook voiceover from a forgotten nineteenth-century Irish revolutionary text. (Kurt Sutter found the text on Google Books after searching “sons of anarchy.” In marginally related news, I am a proponent of the whole Google Books endeavor.) Although I was frustrated with the time spent on Agent Stahl at the end, that quiet moment with her alone in the house was a perfect way to set up the ensuing chaos and bloodshed.

Showdown on Main St.

The finale shifted the show into a place it’s been circling and contemplating for a long while, but had yet to fully embrace. After two seasons of flirting with the line between civilization and criminal life and creating tense sparks by rubbing the biker gang world together with mundane everyday life, Sons of Anarchy finally moved all the way into an entirely lawless place. Chief Unser abandoned his post, Gemma decided to kill her rapists herself, and the Sons of Anarchy faced off with the Mayans on Main St., so that Charming suddenly looked a lot like Deadwood. Even Deputy Hale threw in the towel and gave Zobelle to a Sons of Anarchy-imposed justice. By the end, the ambiguous, malleable rules within the Sons of Anarchy’s outlaw code dissolve as their Irish gun supplier steals Jax Teller’s baby son, and the episode concluded with the whole world going down in flames.

Although some of the episode’s construction did seem a little messy, it was almost an appropriate form-meets-content decision. Everything in “Na Triobloidi” was about going outside the bounds, cramming an anvil into a teacup and watching the teacup shatter, and the fact that some of the plot seems to have escaped the momentum of the episode feels consistent with the bigger ideas. Besides, while the insides may have gotten scrambled a bit, the outside symmetry was perfect – Abel has always been an unspoken core of this show, the person who motivates Jax to change the club and who aligns him with family and honor. His absence at the end of this season was such a nice cap to his arrival at the beginning of season one.

Kurt Sutter seems enthusiastic, but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed until Sons of Anarchy is officially renewed for a third season. Now it’s off to drown my TV grief in holiday cookies and A Charlie Brown Christmas.