Saturday, 8 December 2012

Sons of Anarchy (Season 2)

Courtesy of Wikipedia
Genre: Crime, Drama, Action, Comedy
Rating: A

The second season of Sons of Anarchy nicely takes the set up that was the first season and expands on it.  This season is far better than the first, with a more concise and clearer plot and a higher degree of threat to the club.  The issues surrounding the first season are still at force here, especially the threat of ATF and the way that Tara (Siff) fits into Jax (Hunnam)’s world, but there are also whole new threats to the world of Sam Crow and the issues between Clay (Perlman) and Jax begin to really come into the light.  Jax, meanwhile, learns that Donna’s death was at the hands of a club member on the order of Clay and begins to use this as a means of challenging Clay, although never so severely so as to outright challenge Clay’s continued leadership.  Rounding things out is the club’s involvement in the pornography studio run by Big Otto (Sutter)’s wife, Luanne (Dendrie Taylor), who is being threatened by another studio run by Georgie Caruso (Tom Arnold), and the reparation of the relationship between SAMCRO and the Real IRA when its head Jimmy O’Phelan (Titus Welliver) comes stateside.

The big threat of the season is the new-to-Charming white separatists group, the League of American Nationalists (LOAN), who quickly begin to try to drive the Sons out of Charming – early on in the series, this results in the kidnapping and gang rape of Gemma Morrow (Sagal).  Gemma hides the rape from Clay, Jax, and other SAMCRO members, telling only Unster (Callie) and Tara, who try to help her deal with the attack throughout the season.  Tara, meanwhile is trying to figure out just what her role is as Jax’s Old Lady, and how to reconcile it with her role as a doctor at the hospital. 

I think, so far, my favourite moment of this series has to be when Gemma and Tara finally bonded. Over guns. In the parking lot behind a porn film studio run in part by the club. The whole idea of Gemma being this over protective bitchy mother who spends a lot of time trying to control how her son lives his life got old really fast. Really, really fast. I love how this season Gemma seems to have decided to accept Tara and the role that she now plays in Jax’s life and has set out to help Tara adjust to life as an “old lady.” There are a lot of moments that really showed this transition, but my favourite was definitely when Gemma re-armed Tara and taught her how to shoot – and provided her with a way to take out some of her stress and assert her dominance. It was an interesting development and I think really showed just how Gemma went from being a girl not unlike Tara to the matriarch that she is now, as well as suggesting that with time Tara will fill in the role of matriarch herself.

 I also really like the journey that you can see each of the characters embarking on.  This season is a lot easier to follow than the first one, with things seeming to make a lot more sense and being a lot more cohesive.  I also really, really like the whole idea of Tara and Jax being together and dealing with that, instead of not being together and wanting to but pretending to not want to... yeah, that part got annoying really fast last season.  I know things aren't going to be all hunky dory for the lovers and their MC in the future, but somehow the fact that they at least have each other gives me hope.  That is, until you consider the fact that this is supposed to be inspired by Hamlet, where everyone dies horribly.

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