Sons of Anarchy Review: “Black Widower” (7×01)

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.