‘Sons of Anarchy: Playing With Monsters’ recap: It’s a black day

Since it’s a show that is simply drowning in plot, “Sons of Anarchy” can sometimes fall into the habit of producing table-setter episodes, placing characters into conflicts the viewer found inevitable, sometimes forcing us to spend 60 minutes waiting for things to get interesting.

“Playing With Monsters” was certainly one of those necessary marches forward, but to my delight and surprise, it was actually an effective episode that I found enjoying more so than the final season’s first two offerings.

While Jax remains in something of an irredeemable position, his misguided quest for vengeance is somewhat beyond my capability to care. But there are plenty of other comings and goings in Charming that produce nice moments for Juice, Nero, Chibs and Gemma, and the coming clash with August Marks has handcuffed my attention in a way that any place-holder beef with Henry Lin ever could.

Juice’s desperate run-in with Chibs was a powerful scene. Watching poor, poor Juice beg for a way back into the club is painfully relatable, like watching a friend slog through a relationship you know will only end poorly. He is completely lost without the club, as he failed to build a life for himself outside of it, and endangers his own life (and Unser’s) just to confirm that he and the Sons are really, truly, broken up.

This problem isn’t going away since Juice is incapable of leaving Charming for good. It’s only a matter of time before Jax realizes where he’s been hiding and who has been helping him. I’ve said time and again that the show works better when the club and the people close to it are dealing with internal issues rather than the scramble for power in the San Joaquin Valley underworld. I’m not sure if Chibs is truly ready to kill Juice (he’s helped spare his life before) and seeing Jax and his VP cross swords could be intriguing.

In the A-plot, Jax has a lot of One Niners killed, both directly and indirectly, in the show’s latest attempt to mask his savagery as some kind of master manipulation. This winds up as an ends-justify-the-means scenario for me, because while I don’t care how Jax solved the Niners beef, the idea that his attempt to destroy Lin will lead the Sons into conflict with August Marks works just fine for me. Unlike Lin, we know Marks is a dangerous and cunning enemy.

We all saw what he did to LaRoy back in Season 5 (for those who don’t remember the fate of former One Niners O.G., let’s just say it involved a lot of limbs and small pieces), and we know he’s adopted Damon Pope’s methodology and machine. Marks is too powerful for Jax to face head-on, so hopefully the Sons’ problem-solving skills will become more creative, and he’s a villain many members of the club have a reason to loathe. I’m sure Tig, and most of his friends, haven’t really gotten over the way Marks’ mentor dispatched Tig’s daughter.

The fiasco with the Niners’ rogue set also forced Nero to pick up his gun one more time, and the toll he paid for it was immediately apparent. Ever since meeting Jackson, Nero has resisted the urge to slide back to his gangbanger ways, even though he’s been compromising his escort business and creeping closer and closer to this cliff for a while now. This show isn’t much for subtlety, but the quiet shots of Nero silently disappointed with himself after he opened fire on the Niner crew, and then again as he stewed at Gemma’s table, were worth the price of admission.

Well, I basically went the whole review without saying anything negative. Guess we can just close up shop. See you next week.… I forgot about our new Sheriff Althea Jerry. Corrupt Cop #4624 in a Kurt Sutter show. Let’s hope she learns from Unser and finds a way to play both ends against the middle, like he did with Clay, rather than falling into one of this show’s worst tropes.

That one dig aside, “Sons” seems to have found its game after stumbling out of the gate. Hopefully, episodes like this will become the rule rather than the exception.

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