By Jeffrey Pierre / Entertainment Director
With three episodes left in the final season, Kurt Sutter, the creator of “Sons of Anarchy,” managed to pack enough action and drama in Tuesday’s episode to make it stand out as the best episode this season.
Sutter, who worked as a producer and actor on FX’s “The Shield,” showed his true genius as a writer, and as an individual who fully understands the human condition.
There is a concrete line that determines when something is ‘too pornagraphic’ to air on cable, but the opening scene danced freely on the edge of that line as a soft-core lovemaking montage moved from character to character, looking into their night-time escapades.
Each 10-second clip revealed a side—a softer and emotional side, for some—of the biker club: Jackson “Jax” Teller had a moment with a prostitute resembling Tara, his deceased wife; Alexander “Tig” Trager had a shocking scene with a transgendered man, Venus Van Dam played by Justified’s Walton Goggins.
The shock-value alone forces you to question how this will play out, and why Tig, a hardcore heterosexual biker, is putting himself in this problematic situation.
The show did what many great shows never do, especially with just three episodes to go, and that is tying up all loose ends. The final season’s main conflict—the lie Gemma Teller-Morrow, played by Katey Sagal (Sutter’s wife), tells her son Jax, which sends him on a dark and violent path— finally reaches its climax.
For an outsider, the show’s storyline is solid, but for someone who has watched these character develop, the show is perfection.
Despite the violence and mayhem, each character and scene re-explores and redefines the concept of love, family and brotherhood.
The scene between Tig and Venus is one of the best love scenes aired on television. The show initially presents Tig and Venus’ relationship as a moment of weakness and curiosity, especially for Tig (he shoots a man in the crotch for airing out his dirty laundry out of embarrassment). Theres moment where we expect Tig to kill or end things with Venus, but Tig walks into a dark room where a contemplative Venus utters, “You’re a man who dares to dance with the freaks. I perpetuate that deviance for you, allow you to show the world you live outside the box. But I know that’s where it ends for us and I understand it comes with the territory of my complicated identity.”
The room is still. Up until this point, Venus was solely a sexual deviant, occasionally doing favors for the club. She, who was purposely scripted as a symbol of folly and indiscretion, becomes human.
Tig’s unexpected response? The classic, “You see all the bad in me but love me regardless; I’ve never had that and I want to be with you.”
It was a moment for LGBTQA rights. It’s very rare writers script homosexual characters that you root for.
That’s just a glimpse inside Sutter’s genius.
On the surface, there aren’t new ideas in the plot line of “Sons of Anarchy.” It’s a show about racially based gangs in Calif., brotherhood and loyalty, a son follows in the footsteps of his father (or fathers, if you want to consider Clay). But, something that makes this angle a bit fresher, the gangs are biker gangs.
With all the cliches working against the show, Sutter still managed to put together a crafty six seasons, entering the endpoint of the seventh season.
The themes—love, family and brotherhood— affect every aspect of the show, even the violence and murder. Gemma, who will soon have to confess that she killed her son’s wife, is the embodiment of this, because she did it for family. Gemma kills Tara, Jax’s wife, under the impression that she sold out the club to the police for a deal. She then lies to Jax, who actually made the deal with police, because she know’s the truth would kill him. She blames a rival Chinese gang lead by Henry Lin. As a result, the club wages an ill-advised war, not because they are warriors but for the love they have for the club’s leader, a grieving Jax Teller.
Moreover, the men and women who fall into the web spun by Sons, show an unconditional kind of love that, like Venus, loves despite flaws.
Some would call them foolish to place themselves in such a destructive lifestyle, but that’s exactly how Sutter redefines the dynamics of simple emotions.
But as the season comes to a close, the show will becomes less about the purity of their kinship, and more about the darker side of love— loving something and someone, literally to death, while being completely unaware that you are the cancer.
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