The thing that surprised me most about this week's episode are the number of times it made me laugh. That's hard to do for a show that cracks more skulls per episode than a plastic surgeon.
It doesn't do so by sacrificing the things that make it great. It's still just as hard-edged, emotional and violent as before. You're just chuckling for all the right reasons, this time.
The opening scene of Bobby doing his best Elvis at a bar-mitzvah intertwined with Luanne's Mad Men porn parody had me laughing because it was just so weird and out of place for this show. It had me wondering if I had the right channel on the dial.
Of course, it wastes no time moving right back to the problems facing SAMCRO and the rest of Charming. The scenes where Gemma and Clay interact in the wake of her rape that she refuses to share with anyone except Chief Wayne and Tara takes its slow toll on their relationship. It's hard to know at this point if she'll crack and let her emotions get the best of her, but her ties to the club run deep. It's more than a living or a way of life. It's her family. She's willing to sacrifice her relationship and even her love to keep it alive. The best revenge against the Aryans is to keep them from winning.
Speaking of the Aryans, I love how the show just feeds you tidbits of Alan Arkin and Henry Rollins' characters without spilling everything all at once. They make interesting villains because we know absolutely zilch about them. And you would expect Rollins' cold, psychopathic attitude to be the one harboring more anger but it turns out it's Arkin who reveals that his dead wife killed in a drive-by is the reason he "got into the game." Anger is a strange fuel. It turns good men into monsters and it just may make Arkin the more dangerous threat than Rollins, even if Arkin doesn't look like he could pick up a man over his head and throw him through a plate glass window.
The ultimate climax (ahem) for this episode was the porn queen trying to step into Tara's sensible shoes by making a play for Jax....
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