[This is a review of Sons of Anarchy season 6, episode 10. There will be SPOILERS.]
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While Jax has been diligently looking after the needs of SAMCRO and attempting to expand its legitimate business interests by opening up another Diosa with the help of Kim Dickens and Peter Weller, his home life has been trying to quietly sneak out the back door.
But in typical Sons of Anarchy fashion, the act of sneaking out the back door doesn’t entail something as simple as, say, actually sneaking away. It involves several extended episodes worth of making deals with ex-junkies (at the time), fake pregnancies and miscarriages, and a stack of legal documents to be signed, all so a lawyer can be tricked into an ex-cop's trailer to break the attorney-client privilege, therefore bringing the elaborate ruse crashing down around the woman who cooked it up in the first place.
To some extent, this overly complicated ruse of Tara's, to ensure her soon-to-be ex-husband and ex-mother-in-law have no legal claim to Thomas and Abel, is the bi-product of having been exposed to a sub-culture in which overly elaborate ruses are as commonplace as lengthy monologues detailing the goings-on of other individuals and the need to stare pensively out windows, at walls or something else off in the distance. So it's unsurprising that this would seem like a logical way out of a bad situation.
In that regard, Tara's plan (and its subsequent, inevitable failure) managed to eat up ten extra-long episodes without producing much in the way of actual conflict or action. It was, to its credit, intriguing in the sense that the show managed to keep the finer details of it at bay for several episodes and, therefore, generated some sustained interest from the audience. But what it really boils down to is the question of whether or not Tara – or someone else, since there is an awful lot of close-ups on handguns going on – will have a one-on-one with Mr. Mayhem as a result of her futile transgressions against Jax and the club.
Naturally, 'Huang Wu' seems to imply that Gemma is the one most aggrieved by Tara's plan, as it would have exposed her for the duplicitous, violent control freak she is (albeit through duplicitous means). Of course, because she's alone in facing the verbal onslaught that is a conversation with Gemma – as Jax is too busy fooling around with his new business partner, and seems otherwise unwilling to have a basic conversation with his wife, who is clearly under incredible emotional duress – we share in Tara's feelings that "nobody can help" her now.
Part of that stems from the fact that Jax hates deeper than he loves, or so his mother would have Tara believe. That alone is enough to get Dr. Knowles-Teller to seek some sort of protection and assurance from Tyne Patterson. But, as luck would have it, Tyne is all tied-up in Jax's soon-to-be overly elaborate deal in which he delivers Galen and a portion of the IRA in exchange for SAMCRO's immunity on all gun charges (naturally), and for Tara's punishment to be reduced to a small fine and some community service.
Is any of this communicated to the one person who might also benefit from such information? No. Why? Because now the audience gets to wonder just where Tara will wind up, now that she's hit rock bottom. The expectation, of course, being: the one place people don't come back from.
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Sons of Anarchy continues next Tuesday with 'Aon Rud Persanta' @10pm on FX.
Photos: Prashant Gupta/FX