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Sons of Anarchy Final Season


ShadowDog
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Guest El Chalupacabra

 

Looks like Driver was the most correct, and the spoiler I saw was too. Pretty much everything that happened was expected, but was nice to see loose ends tied up. I think the biggest question I had was HOW it would go down. Nice touch with Michael Chiklis.

 

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Overall I thought it was great.

 

I certainly don't mind misleading the audience, but should at least be logical. No way the gang would call a Mayhem vote or would Chibs do the slow walk with the gun only to shoot Happy in the arm if they were going to orchestrate the lie that Jax fought them and fled.

 

...and that was the point of shooting Happy in the arm, right?

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The thing to keep in mind here is that Kurt Sutter is a wannabe outlaw and I think the actual audience he has in mind for this show are outlaws and wannabe outlaws. We've heard the stories about how crime was down in inner cities every Tuesday night at 10pm when this show was in season. Criminals and gangbangers love this show. That's the core audience. Of course mainstream people love the show and it has to appeal to that demo, but the ending was what is was because that's the ultimate criminal fantasy. Going out on your own terms after destroying all your enemies. Which explains why Jax didn't fake his death, take his kids, and raise them in some other country. He could have easily done that.

 

I love that it's the Indian Hills charter that becomes Jax's downfall because that's the charter that wasn't even part of SamCro when the series started. They got patched into the club in the season one episode Patch Over. They were the newest charter and angry redhead VP was a relatively new member of that charter because we didn't see him in the episode Patch Over.

 

Back to Jax choosing his own death, it all felt very Neil Gaiman's Sandman to me, so that was appealing. It was ultimately a coward's move though because he basically quit on his kids even knowing what that does to a kid. Sure, he may believe he can't change but Wendy and Nero proved they could. So Jax was a coward. Too scared to try to change so he gave up. It's true to the character so it's not bad writing but it makes him a despicable character.

 

Not to mention that he knows first hand the kind of damage you can do having an intentional bike accident on the highway. The girl he hired last year who was helping with Thomas was motherless because John Teller's bike accident. If you're gonna kill yourself, how about not taking other people with you, ya dick.

 

This is a minor nitpick but that many cops are behind Jax and they couldn't get anybody in front of him to end the chase? Come the fuck on. Weaksauce.

 

The female sheriff and cut Chips off if she wants to, but she has no credibility in Charming as a law officer. She let Chibs smash that in front of another club member. That story will be everywhere. So it's too late for her to put that genie back in the bottle.

 

I wanted the scene where Jax shows up in Bulgaria or wherever and ventilates Zobelle's skull. About the only old score he didn't settle.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

Back to Jax choosing his own death, it all felt very Neil Gaiman's Sandman to me, so that was appealing. It was ultimately a coward's move though because he basically quit on his kids even knowing what that does to a kid. Sure, he may believe he can't change but Wendy and Nero proved they could. So Jax was a coward. Too scared to try to change so he gave up. It's true to the character so it's not bad writing but it makes him a despicable character.

 

Not to mention that he knows first hand the kind of damage you can do having an intentional bike accident on the highway. The girl he hired last year who was helping with Thomas was motherless because John Teller's bike accident. If you're gonna kill yourself, how about not taking other people with you, ya dick.

 

 

Well, I think another way to look at it is he did that so that his fellow SAMCO members wouldn't have to deal with killing him, and had Jax been caught, if the cops didn't just gun him down, he would have definitely been killed in prison, with as many enemies he made. In fact, I personally envisioned him dying in an American Me style shank-fest.

 

Also, I think it WAS to show him as a despicable character. He DID become a monster. Plus, he killed his Mom AND step dad, plus has murdered or had people murder for him, some of them were relatively innocent people, like the mother of the boy who shot up the school. Doesn't get much worse than that. He just finally came to terms with that he was a monster, so the way he died makes sense to me.

 

Not to mention, who is to say Jax wasn't suicidal from the point of Tara's death all along? I think once she died, I think Jax made up his mind that once his kids were out of harms way, he was going to off himself.

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I agree with that-- he was a monster and a coward and that was the point. I think it was in season 3 when the show started to lose me when Jax turned cold-blooded killer. Up until that point every kill was justified in some way. Once they took him dark I wasn't sure where the show was going.

 

Like I said, I didn't mind the anti-hero... it kind of had to end this way to make the whole journey satisfying. If Jax had pulled a Dexter I don't think I would be happy that there's no payback for what he'd done. Breaking Bad did it better, and with more solid writing, but I was still satisfied.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

Yeah I think Sutter didn't want to repeat what he did with Vic Mackey from The Shield, either, who basically beat the system, and that show got a lot of crap for that. It was just everyone else around Vic who suffered. In my personal canon, Milo the Trucker IS Vic Mackey's alias, which makes him as the truck driver even more appropriate.

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I liked the show and the ending but I don't think there's any point in looking too much into it. SOA is basically a shock value show with a Hamlet theme. It appears to me that all Sutter had planned was for Jax to die in the end. Along the way he gave us a lot of sex, violence, and death, a lot of which didn't make much narrative sense.

 

In the end all you can really say about SOA is that it was, for the most part, an entertaining ride.

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Interesting Q and A answering a few questions I raised: http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/12/10/sons-of-anarchy-series-finale/

 

I mean, ultimately, you can't walk into Leonardo Da Vinci's studio and criticize the brush strokes on the Mona Lisa. It's his work of art. (which is why it always rubbed me the wrong way when people got too harsh with Lucas about Star Wars as if they somehow owned it more than he did) This show was very much Sutter's work of art. Yes, TV shows are collaborations but no TV show will ever be as much of one person's singular vision as this show was Sutter's. If we don't like his choices, fine, but we gotta respect they ARE his choices.

 

So, while I would have made different choices here and there, this wasn't my work of art. So the way I judge this is do I feel like Sutter was true to his vision for this show? (which is where Sliders failed) Was it coherent? (which is where X Files failed) Was it ****ing stupid? (Lost) Was it a major big time cop out? (BSG, Dexter)

 

I think this show passes all these tests. It's not an epic series like Breaking Bad but this final season really redeemed the mess that was seasons 4-5. I give it a solid B+ overall.

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The only nit-picking I can bring myself to do is that clunky CGI at the very end. To me, it's not worth my normal criticisms.

 

Also, did anyone get more Jesus Christ out of Final Episode Jax than Hamlet? GAWL, he clobbered us with the imagery, but it was pretty beautiful, IMO. Also, heavy-handed but pretty was Jax tossing his blood-stained white sneakers for his Dad's boots in the beginning-you just KNEW what was coming, basically. I always wondered about those sneakers-how did he keep them so blindingly white? Why did he wear them in the first place?

 

Use of music in this one surpassed my expecations-Adam Raised The Cain made my skin crawl it was SO perfect!

 

Grey, dead Gemma being zipped into a body bag in the Garden of Gethsemane was cool, too.

 

Sutter put in just the right amount of tiny twists and turns to keep me guessing until the moment we saw the semi driver's face.

 

Chibs and Tig as Pres and VP was the ONLY thing I thought would happen the way it did.

 

VERY satisfied with this as the last SoA.

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