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With this week’s episode, “Toil and Till,” Sons of Anarchy makes the first compelling case for its unending, unrelenting depiction of misery of the season. In fact, I can’t remember the time I was as invested in or even interested by an episode of this show. Considering where I stood last week, we’ll consider this high praise. I genuinely tried to be more positive about the show this week, and am very happy that those efforts dovetailed with an episode that is worth them.

Last week’s premiere got a lot of necessary, but not inherently compelling, exposition out of the way, which means we get to spend this episode settling into this new status quo, before the revealed truth of Tara’s death inevitable blows everything to smithereens. And “Toil and Till” does truly go a long way toward bringing some human dimension back to these characters. Consider Gemma’s conversation with Abel: Are you okay, Grandma? he asks her, and what is her perfect response? “Always.” This is such a quiet, well-acted and -directed moment, the sort that justifies running over time (this week, it’s by a perfectly reasonable sixteen minutes), a character-developing scene that is both given sufficient room to breathe and which allows the audience to refocus our empathy toward that character. Gemma is an awful woman, the worst person on this show by almost any measure, but we know enough about her to begin to understand her, and this one scene reinforces so much about the character.

Similar successes are had this week with Juice and Unser, whose early scene in the episode, while committing the perennial Sons sin of immediately undoing a cliffhanger, is another instance of the show using its history effectively, and allowing small, talky scenes that might otherwise have been cut from the episode, to instead do very important character work. Theo Rossi has gotten me this week to question my judgment of his acting in the premiere. Then, I found him listless and affected; this week I wonder if it’s intentional. Juice as a character is in so far over his head—he’s “basically a child,” according to Unser—and he is posturing at being as ruthless as Jax or Gemma, as being the kind of guy who could kill Unser just to keep a secret. But he’s not that ruthless, and Unser knows it.

Speaking of Wayne Unser, this is a big week for him! The character feels dramatically relevant for the first time in ages, and to have him back in the mix in some official capacity with the law promises a minefield of conflict in the coming weeks. Dayton Callie is great even when the writing is fumbling, so this week, with several great scenes to play, is a real treat just for his performance.

That said, the show still has a massive problem, and that’s the way it depicts Jax and the Sons. It is impossible at this point for the show to have its cake and eat it, too: either the Sons are badass, super cool biker badasses, or they are a group of wrongheaded, violent men who doom themselves and everyone around them. You have to pick one. Walking a strange tightrope between these two depictions of the characters and of the world itself causes too many moments where the whole thing is flat—for instance, any moment in which we are subjected to a reading of Jax’s journal entries. Perhaps the way those two stoners so plainly idolize Jax, up until he murders them, too, is a comment on this very issue. But when every episode still features a motorcycle chase set to a rock song, it seems we’re asked to forget just who, exactly, we are watching, if only until the commercial break.

So when the episode ends on a shot of Jax cradling Abel, a single perfect tear falling down his cheek, while across town, who is Jax’s brother by Jax’s own definition of the word, cradles the dead body of someone he clearly knew and loved more than he suggested to Jax; when the episode ends asking me to appreciate how much of his soul he has lost, well, that falls flat, because Jax is a murderer now, several times over. Any sympathy or desire for redemption that might have once existed for this character is completely gone, but the writing seems completely unaware of this fact. We’re asked to view this violent behavior as a lashing out in the wake of Tara’s death, a single-minded quest for vengeance, but that’s not really a valid request. Jax has been this violent for a very long time now, and he had been knowingly placing Tara’s life in danger since the middle of season four, when his own father-in-law tried to have her killed. That he doesn’t know that his own mother is the most dangerous of all his associates is the only oversight of which Jax can be forgiven at this point. But Tara’s safety? He had already demonstrated a complete lack of concern for that.

Does this make sense for Jax’s arc? Yes, absolutely. His final story arc taking the shape of a willing dive into the darkness is thematically fitting for the show. But this all needed to follow directly from the season four premiere. Instead, Sutter and team crafted two artificial seasons, that treaded water until the characters could reach this point, but which continued upping the ante on the violence and crime anyway. Jax has been on this level for some time, but only now are we asked to take it seriously and take concern. Taken on its own, it works well, and has the potential for much more, but you’re basically required to jettison most of the past two seasons in order to do so.

Then again, maybe disregarding the business with Romeo and for some reason Dave Navarro isn’t the worst that could happen.

Regardless, this is a solid episode of Sons, and hopefully it’s indicative of things to come. The show still needs tighter editing; even though this episode actually doesn’t run that long, I think it could comfortable have been cut to a cable hour. The show would be more exciting if it were more concise in its storytelling, and that’s true on the micro-level of episode structure as well as on the macro-level of: this should have been a five season show. But the episode does strong character work, and more importantly, positions characters interestingly for maximum conflict and fallout at the end of the season. In that sense, at least, the show is still honoring its Shakespearean inspiration. If the series can more effectively grapple with the issues of Jax’s history, and I think that even this will become less of an issue as the conclusion nears, then we are in for some potent drama, and a hopefully fitting finale to the series.

Stray Observations:

– The montage at the beginning, which is mercifully silent, actually features some stellar directing and editing, as well as a knowing wink at the show’s unbreakable musical montage addiction. Jax, Gemma and Juice, along with Unser, are positioned as the major players going forward, and that’s a great combination of relationships, so it’s very cool to see them linked visually here, as well as throughout the episode.

– Annabeth Gish is the new commissioner in town, but it remains to be seen exactly how Althea Jarry will figure in at this stage. I’m much more interested in Unser’s new role as consulting investigator.

– This is a show where “the porn warehouse” is a real thing that exists, and also is a suitable alibi.

That’s much more like it. “The Good Listener” may be the second episode of the season, but it feels like the first. Certainly it’s the first real indication this season that Terence Winter does, in fact, have some kind of endgame in mind that he’s working toward. This week also provides significantly more, and better, justification for jumping ahead all the way to 1931. What seemed last week to be an arbitrary decision to bookend the series’ treatment of prohibition, this week is revealed to be something entirely different.

In 1931 we have arrived at a flashpoint, and it’s that flashpoint that gives this episode its newfound verve and urgency. Al Capone is a bona fide celebrity now, giving interviews to Variety and generally trouncing about with the same manic energy that Stephen Graham has gotten so excellent at embodying. He’s also still employing Van Alden and Eli, neither of whom are very well off after these seven years. Luciano, Lansky and Siegel are up to no good together, and one gets the sense that they are in way over their heads. Eli’s son Will is desperate to join the U.S. Attorney’s office—whether this is to take down Nucky, or to get information for him, is left up in the air for now. We even check in on Gillian Darmody, who has been committed to an insane asylum that feels like something out of a retro-Orange is the New Black.

Gillian’s story this week feels the most out of place, like it’s there for the sake of keeping Gretchen Mol on the payroll, but Mol is excellent, and there is a lingering cloud of uncertainty that hangs over both her performance and the staging of her scenes. Especially in a season that seems determined to expound further on the nature of both the Commodore and Nucky’s youth, I expect we will be exploring much further the specific reasons for Gillian’s institutionalization, as well.

Where this episode succeeds, and where the premiere more or less failed, is that everything is interesting in its own right, but also is sufficiently related to the central story of Nucky’s return to the alcohol business. We are here, at this moment in time, because this is where the story ends. Already we can see those threads coming together, if slowly. This feels very much like a premiere episode, and one wonders why we didn’t just cut to the chase sooner; but then, if the rest of the season keeps up at this clip, then the plodding-by-comparison premiere might feel like a more natural deep inhale.

The flashbacks continue, and while they still feel a little gimmicky to me, especially when I’d rather be spending time with the absent members of the ensemble (Narcisse has yet to show up this season, and we don’t follow up with Chalky or Margaret either this week, though I’m only really upset about one of those things), but they do feel more confident this week, and so I feel much more confident about them. As they persist, they accumulate meaning, and begin to develop their own sense of narrative. I’m reminded of nothing more than the flashbacks on Lost, which similarly developed narratives of the characters’ pasts that were meant to reflect their struggles in the present. It might not be the most original way to highlight Nucky as we wind down, but it at least is now showing signs of effectiveness.

Overall this is a much more entertaining and effective episode, and I’m glad to see the season pick up the pace so early on, considering the shorter episode order. I hope very much that we spend more time with Van Alden and Eli as the weeks go on. Both stories are tinged with tragedy, yet the pairing of characters feels like its own sort of buddy cop movie, with the witty repartee and physical comedy that comes with that territory, and it all works tremendously well. Shea Wigham and Michael Shannon have excellent chemistry, and on a show that very rarely finds justification to pair off many of its central characters, this particular pairing is a real treat.

As always, the show is much more interesting when all the other characters orbit around Nucky, while Nucky himself rests in stasis at the center of the whole thing. There is very much that sense here, and thanks to the flashbacks, there is a specific request from the show for us to consider Nucky the way we would the Commodore—as a toxic, manipulative, corrosive villain, in too many lives to count. We’ll see if the narrative plays out. The episode leaves us with a shot of Tonino’s open earhole, the first shot in what will likely be a much bloodier war. Nucky’s attempts at outright gangster-ism have landed him in trouble before, and this one is likely to do so again. Thankfully, on the strength of this episode, we have reason to look forward to the playing out.

Stray Observations:

– Just a note on the scoring this week: In the Emmy Spotlight series it was useful to highlight acting, directing, and writing as separate categories. Reviewing weekly, though, a lot of these things are consistent from week to week, purposefully so. I’ll call out specific notes of interest in the review, but I’m not breaking the score down into categories, as it requires way too many mathematical gymnastics to get to an appropriate overall score. I’ll still grade the episode out of ten, but it’s going to be much more holistic. I’ll break down a full season score at the end, and that’ll be where we go from here.

Welcome to season seven (!) of Sons of Anarchy! I hope you are ready to have some fun, because I sure as hell am. If you’ll remember, last season ended with Gemma bashing Tara’s head in with a kitchen fork, followed shortly by Juice shooting the woefully underdeveloped Officer Roosevelt in cold blood to protect Gemma from prosecution. Last season was otherwise pretty uneventful, to be honest—lots of tangents, talking circles, continued poor decisions, and awful scenes of murder and violence, including Clay’s long overdue demise, all culminating with Jax cradling his dead wife’s body in his arms.

You know, in case you’d forgotten what kind of show this is.

“Black Widower” opens and closes with a musical montage, because of course it does, and in between are about seventeen hours of scheming, violence, and boredom. Juice does naked pushups, and ends up in hiding from SAMCRO along with Drea Di Matteo. Jax is in prison, mutilating someone, for some reason, by carving a swastika into his torso. Unser, who is somehow still on this show, visits Tara’s grave, and hopefully feels at least some responsibility for her murder, but probably doesn’t. No words are spoken for a solid five minutes and holy shit this is going to be two and a half hours of this nonsense, isn’t it?

In what is probably the strongest scene of the episode—which comes in the first half hour, so, you know, cause for concern—an impassioned Patterson (played by the absolutely fantastic CCH Pounder) lets loose on Jax, insisting to him that the violence he carries on will destroy what little is left of his family. Then Patterson lets him out of jail, unable to find any evidence to pin Tara’s murder on him. And what is the Verizon blurb summarizing this episode? “Jax makes vengeance a priority for the club following Tara’s murder.” Their shoot first, ask questions later approach leads to the club teaming up with the Grim Bastards, when they accidentally murder a handful of debauched bastards. Upon realizing the mistake, Jax shrugs and murders the last one.

Jesus Christ.

This is an empty, disgusting, soulless show. Kurt Sutter and his team constantly posture at having deeper, more meaningful things to say about violence, and its corrosive impact on the lives of the Teller family. But nihilism is not a moral stance. Saying “violence begets more violence,” and using that as an excuse to show a paraplegic man being dragged violently across the street whilst chained to the back of a motorcycle; or to show your show’s hero carving a swastika into a man and slicing out his teeth, just to make an introduction; or to have one of your female leads brutally murder the other, only to never admit, and in fact to baldly lie to her son about it; none of this is justified. None of it has even the remotest artistic value, not anymore, and frankly not since probably season four.

The last episode of this show I can recall having even the slightest emotional impact on me as a viewer was “Hands,” in which Clay brutally beat Gemma following her attempt to escape the marriage by way of shooting him in the face. The scene is harrowing, fraught with tension that has been earned through several years of careful character work and an intense chemistry between Ron Perlman and Katey Sagal. Everything, literally everything, since that episode has been a steep downhill slide of diminishing returns. Violence for its own sake no longer shocks. Betrayals are now routine. The increasingly convoluted club politics and machinations were never especially interesting, but now are so obtuse and complicated as to be incomprehensible. And at the center of it all is a cast of characters that feel entirely like strangers.

Are there even any real characters left on this show? Or is everything a set piece for Gemma’s latest manipulation, or else the latest “shocking,” graphic burst of violence that Sutter and company can dream up? Outside of Jax and occasionally Juice, the club is full of ciphers and two-dimensional characters. When is the last time we spent any meaningful time with Chibs, or Tig, or Bobby Elvis? You might even have a hard time just naming all the members anymore. And despite several major character deaths, the cast has gotten larger, adding Di Matteo, Jimmy Smits’ Nero, Pounder, and a cavalcade of guest stars that the show will almost certainly fail to serve.

But the biggest sin of this show is the ridiculous, faux-weight that it forces upon a plot that is paper-thin, sensational, and lacking any depth. Jax gives a lengthy speech at some point in the interminable middle of this episode, pontificating about his reluctance to “sit in this chair,” lamenting the “direction he tried to take this club in”, and you know, it’s a fucking motorcycle club. Stop fucking shooting people. Leave the damn club. The lesson has been learned, time and again, and every horrible thing that has happened has been brought upon the club by its own actions. Instead Jax gives a speech that affirms the club’s actions. He demands that each man at the table be prepared to “kill and die” for the man next to him. The entire scene is framed as an affirmation of the brotherhood on display, the fraternal connection that is so important to the club and ostensibly to the show.

In a scene that seems meant to directly mirror it, Gemma tells Juice that she is “the only thread holding this family together,” when every single event of the past several seasons has demonstrated nothing of the sort. She is the titular black widow, a cancer upon everything she touches, and yet you get the sense that the show thinks her a protagonist, especially with Unser and Nero both fawning all over her. Or at least, the narrative gives no opposing figure, no modicum of heroism or even just basic decency to counteract the manipulation and deceit. Everyone is equally awful, and only the rationalizations vary. If the show does eventually give Gemma her comeuppance, and I suspect it will, even that will be robbed of any significance or catharsis, coming as it will several seasons too late.

When the episode ends, Jax tortures and murders a random Chinese gangster, innocent of Tara’s murder if not of anything else, and the background music intones that “nothing really matters” as Jax literally rubs salt in the man’s wounds. Have truer words been spoken? Everything in the show, it amounts to nothing and less. There is no heart here, just unending violence and gratuitous spectacle, more of the same, over and over, and bloated beyond any reasonable length of narrative. There are no further depths to which the show or its characters can sink. Its continued insistence on reveling in pulp operatic violence does nothing to further its cause, nothing to deepen its thematic value. It does nothing at all. The show is loosely based on Hamlet, which of course deals with similar themes. But Shakespeare does it in about three hours, and with a lot more style and substance than Sons could ever hope to achieve at this point in its long, stupid run.

Stray Observations:

– For all its many, many failings, the show does feature some great acting on a consistent basis. CCH Pounder is fantastic as DA Patterson, and one hopes she continues to have an increased presence, as she’s perhaps the only decent character around anymore. Jimmy Smits gives Nero far more gravitas than is present on the page. Gemma is horrid, but Katey Sagal is a captivating screen presence, and she manages somehow to sell the magnetic quality that keeps all of these idiot men in Gemma’s toxic orbit. And Charlie Hunnam does his best with a character that has become increasingly hard to sympathize with or even understand, but even if he does play a good noble leading man, the performance of nobility will only become more grating as Jax’s behavior becomes more deplorable.

– That said, some of the acting leaves a lot to be desired, especially from Theo Rossi and Drea Di Matteo, who both are very flat throughout this episode–though, given the story Rossi is saddled with, and the almost complete lack of material for Di Matteo, you can hardly blame them.

– In calculating the acting score below, I’m also accounting for the criminal mismanagement of the show’s ensemble cast in this episode.

– The episode is also handsomely directed, especially the closing scene in Gemma’s kitchen, where Jax commits a murder that mirrors Gemma’s murder of Tara. But even handsomely directed nihilistic violence is still pretty gross to me.

– I should also note that I really did like this show, once upon a time, and I took on these reviews in part because I hope to see a return to form before the final scene. So as much fun as it is to write scathing reviews, I’m also pretty disappointed that this is the start we’re off to.

– One of these days, I hope FX realizes that the way it gives its drama showrunners, and especially Sutter, carte blanche when it comes to running times hurts the shows more than it helps them. The 42-minute hour (closer to 50 for cable) has existed as a format for a very long time for good reason: it works. This premiere is so bloated, taking several scenes to explain and set up scenarios that need little to no explanation or set-up. Indulging the every whim of the show’s writers (any show’s writers, really) is an epically bad idea. I doubt there is a strong story nestled within this episode, but it would at least be a tighter story, and there is so much extraneous material that I have absolutely no doubt that it could be cut to 42 minutes without losing a single essential frame.

– The closing montage is set to a cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that I will never be able to unhear, and which is the episode’s greatest offense.

– We will not be discussing Anarchy Afterword in these review, unless it is to hope fervently that the fad of post-show discussion shows ends, and soon.