Sons of Anarchy Review: “Faith and Despondency” (7×10)

Well, it’s about time.

In the last moments of “Faith and Despondency” the truth about Tara’s murder is finally revealed. Of course this is done in a way that isn’t totally incontrovertible; I can already envision the seventy-minute fetch quest to find Gemma that will culminate in a dramatic cliffhanger.

The thing about this episode is that it is long. Like, more than ninety minutes long, including commercials. Multiple set pieces are repeated wholesale from previous episodes this season. Characters whose names I don’t even know run back and forth in circles, shooting at each other. The episode is too long by half, and the pacing is miserable to boot.

Look, Sons isn’t without its strengths. We all know this. But its focus is so often on process, on plots that are complicated not for any dramatic reason but simply for the sake of being so. Major pieces of this episode are entirely occupied by ciphers rather than characters, by henchmen and soldiers. The only problem is, the plot is not inherently interesting to begin with, and by this point it has been stretched beyond thin. “Faith and Despondency” is the final contortion, the last unnecessary twist before endgame.

And so you have an episode where Abel gouge into his skin with a fork at school, and then blames Gemma for it. You have Juice being raped by Tully. You have Moses (Marks’s lieutenant) first beating the shit out of Rat, and then having his own eye ripped out by Jax. You have Chibs and Jarry beating the shit out of each other, and then fucking. You have literally every single typical Sons move in the book. A lot of times with this show (and with other popular shows like The Following), “dark and gritty” gets conflated with “serious and dramatic.” The climactic moment of this episode is not the serious and dramatic portion of the story. It’s an inevitable revelation that is so overdue it hardly causes any shock. And as for the material that leads up to it, any effect it does have on the audience is solely because it is so graphic, so twisted, so disturbing, and so obviously calculated to be so. The bodies are piled high—adding any more just doesn’t have an impact at this point.

It’s a shame, because there’s some great stuff this episode. Unser gets a nice little arc this week, and his assistance with the White Power guy that tries to kill the wounded cop gets him back into SAMCRO’s good graces, just in time, I imagine, for him to corroborate Abel’s story through some good old-fashioned detective work. There is a fantastic scene with Tig and Venus that feels like it belongs on another show entirely. Kim Coates and Walton Goggins are each so great, they make me long for a version of Sons that is composed entirely of scenes like this. When they’re lost amid the unending misery porn, it’s much harder for them to have much of an impact.

And the actual scene at the end, where first Jax tells Abel that Wendy is his biological mother, and then where Abel tells Jax about Gemma, is actually tense, and makes good use of the expanded run time (for once!). Jax’s decision to tell Abel on the spot like that is presumptuous, and Drea De Matteo runs through too many emotions to name as Wendy watches the conversation. But ultimately she is overjoyed, and despite the history of these two characters (and perhaps even because of it), there is something truly heartwarming about this scene as a conclusion.

Which, of course, is why it isn’t the conclusion. Just as Jax’s family gets itself back together, the final tear brings it irreparably apart. There’s a simple reason why the show has delayed this moment so long: there is no turning back from it. And so the final, drawn out push toward just gets more and more tense with each second. There is a tragic logic to the whole sequence, especially in the idea that murder is to Abel just another solution to a problem. Knowing that Wendy is his mother is all he needs to be understand why Gemma would kill Tara. By staging the reveal this way, the writers are able to make it not just about Tara’s murder, but also directly about the effect that SAMCRO life as a whole has had on Abel. That’s a great position to be in for the final act.

So, hey: I’ve been kvetching waiting for us to get to this point, and we’re finally here. The landing was perhaps a little bumpy, but we’re here. I’d be lying if I said I’m not looking forward to it.

Stray Observations

• The girl Jax sleeps with (the very same girl he rescued from fucking Greensleeves) looks eerily like Tara. She also cracks wise, all, “you know, before we all get gunned down by Chinese gangsters” which, uh, is not the kind of joke I’d make if I were her. She follows this up by calling Jax a good guy, even though “I don’t know much about you, or your club.” Sweetheart, you more or less covered it with the Chinese gangsters bit.
• You know what is totally not sexy? Whatever the hell is going on with Chibs and Jarry. I don’t care if Jarry swings first, because I don’t know anything about Jarry at all. It’s another notch on the “gritty” belt, but it’s nonsensical, and its problematically violent to boot.
• Did Theo Rossi Show His Ass? Everyone showed their ass.