"Right now you're not my mother, you're just a member's old lady and I'm telling you this is what you need to do to protect Sam Crow." - Jax to Gemma
If last week's episode was about the role and power of women in the Sons of Anarchy, this week was centered on a boy's club in every sense of the definition. How those little boys can often eschew the wisdom afforded them from the opposite sex in order to fill their most basic needs. Where "Turning and Turning" concerned itself with highlighting Gemma, Tara, Stahl and Maureen's power over SAMCRO, this week's "The Push" showcased a club of men handling their business like a group of drunken fraternity boys.
If television has taught us anything about gangs, it's that they are highly oiled machines of black market dealings, insane connections and stealth cunning enabling them to rule an underworld we really only imagine and surely never see. We know the Sons of Anarchy are into illicit business and are usually flush with cash. They handle their business ruthlessly, efficiently and effectively. But tonight we saw a very different side of the club. A side rife with infighting, pettiness, money issues, frat-like initiations, problem solving with testosterone. Tonight's episode showed us a club trying to find answers using brawn rather than brains.
Show creator Kurt Sutter has been down this road before. in his previous work with The Shield, Sutter helped establish Vic Mackey's never-ending search for a way out of a self-created problem. Vic Mackey always thought he was the smartest guy in the room and never met a problem he couldn't shoot his way out of. But as that show detailed, rarely did a solution come without its consequences. And if Mackey's crew taught us anything, violence was never the way out of a dilemma. In fact, often times the perceived solutions only created a downward vortex that grew wider and wider as it reached the bottom.
Much of the same thing has happened with the Sons of Anarchy, especially with Jax's secret alliance with Agent Stahl and his machinations to get Sam Crow out of Charming and into Belfast. A way out of the club's predicament is not easy or entirely realistic. And though Jax thought he saw a way out of the gang with one last, oh I promise, just this one last deal to save his family and club, he's quickly realizing there is no easy way out of a mess like his.
And his efforts to save his son, while initially only involving a deal-with-the-devil relationship with Stahl has spread to effect Chief Unser, and Elliot Oswalt, and Tara, and the Mayans, and Gemma, and really everyone else in the Sam Crow universe. He wants peaceful solutions, but only knows violence as a means to an end. It's a tricky spot to be in.
The rest of the club really just falls in line with the boyish mentality. Whether it was the way they fraternity-style hazed the new prospects (more on this in a bit), kept others out of the club because of some mysterious old beef between dudes (more on this too), heisted drugs from a rival gang for a quick cash grab (and this), or took a "me first" mentality to a miserable world they've created. This was a case a macho-male dominance all the way through.
So it was fitting the episode ended with Jax making the choice to leave Tara, after her total sacrifice, under the justification of saving her the pain. The Sam Crow world is too delicate for the women not willing to fall into line as old ladies. Or so the club would have you think. But remember, this club is governed by men, but run by women. And the club members would benefit from remembering as much.
Other thoughts with a ton of silencer bullets...
- Speaking of The Shield, I just need to mention again that I love Kenny Johnson as Kozik. He's sort of playing the same clueless character looking for acceptance. Except this time he's got a patch rather than a badge. And speaking of him, biker gangs need to get transfer letters? What is this, some sort of worker's union? Additionally, what exactly is his beef with Tig? I would like to think it concerns a woman, but I have a feeling it's something much more mundane than even that. The rest of the club doesn't seem to care at all about what Kozik did so it can't be that bad.
- New prospects have to pay $75 bucks a month? Again, what is this? A worker's union?
- Poor Chief Unser. This guy clearly doesn't know which end is up now. He's aware Clay and company have just used him as a pawn all these years. And he only wants to keep Charming safe. I get the feeling there is just a little fight left in him in order for him to die a man who did his best for Charming. And that might mean helping take down Sam Crow as a final salvo.
- Man Stahl is sneakier than I ever thought possible. Getting Gemma to admit the rape as part of the statement and blaming Stahl's Fed girlfriend could be a work of genius or it could be like the Vic Mackey problem-solution vortex I talked about before. I am predicting the latter.
- A not so triumphant return of Darby, thought to be lost in the Caracara fires of last year. For some reason tonight I was thinking about Darby and how his story was never fully resolved last year. I wasn't sure if the writers were content to have his character just fade away in mysterious puff of smoke or if they had some higher purpose for his secretive non-demise. I think it was a healthy marriage of the two as his disappearance gave the writers a fair amount of leeway with which to reintroduce him. Meaning: he could return in anyway that helped the story without sacrificing the log lines. Tonight was such the case. By having Darby see the Sons dealing drugs from the vantage of his clinic visit, they used his knowledge of the gang and unknown whereabouts to jeopardize Sam Crow's business without cluttering the story.
- Pornstars drive Priuses. I think that's a good sign for us a society.
- It's a little bit of a stretch to believe the Mayans and Sam Crow could settle their differences in such a short period of time, like one day. That part of the plot rang a little false for me.
