After Jax learned about Father Ashby’s plans to have SAMCRO kill Jimmy O at the end of last week’s episode, I didn’t even consider what that meant for his deal with Agent Stahl. In short, it’s not good, as the promise of bringing Jimmy in to her bosses is the foundation of Stahl’s entire investigation. And if Jimmy dies, so does their deal. That leaves Jax scrambling to convince the rest of the club that they shouldn’t kill Jimmy, and luckily, he manages to do just that without anyone being the wiser. He’s also having some serious trust issues at the moment, and asks Stahl to dig up information on Ashby to better understand why the good priest would be putting his family in the middle of a war they have no stake in.
Jax still wants to talk to Jimmy to hear his side of the story, though, and when they learn that he’ll be in attendance at the drop-off spot for a new batch of guns being transported by SAMBEL across Ireland, Clay volunteers SAMCRO to help out. It’s exactly what Jimmy was hoping for, because it gives him a second chance to take care of them once and for all. The plan is to ambush them at a police checkpoint, but when the Sons get through with no trouble, McGee and Liam are left scratching their heads. At least, that’s what Liam would like McGee to think, but he’s still very much in on the plan. Jax doesn’t trust Liam one bit, either, and tells Juice and Happy to keep an eye on him, although they don’t do a very good job of it. I don’t care if he’s taking a shit – they should have followed him into the woods. If they had, they would have known he was the one who set off the car bomb after the rest of the guys got locked inside the barn by Jimmy’s recruits. Quite miraculously, the only injury among SAMCRO was some shrapnel that hit Opie, but there were several SAMBEL guys who were killed in the attack, including Chibs’ nephew, which he didn’t take too well.
Obviously, Jimmy was never going to show up, and he used SAMCRO’s absence as an opportunity to raid Maureen’s house and take Fiona and Kerrianne back home with him. But when Trinity hears the ruckus from downstairs in the store, she grabs a gun from the cash register and fires a shot at Jimmy’s right-hand man, giving Maureen time to stab Jimmy in the hand and allow Gemma to turn his gun on him. But Fiona won’t let Gemma kill him because she claims doing so would only result in her family being massacred by the IRA. And it’s probably true, though that doesn’t exactly bode well for Jax considering he needs to kill Jimmy if he wants Abel back.
Meanwhile, back in Charming, Unser goes to visit Lumpy at the hospital to find out who attacked him at his gym, and when he tells him that it was a Mexican biker who beat him up, Unser assumes it must be the Mayans. But Tig and the rest of the guys know better, and after learning from Darby that Jacob Hale was behind the attack, they go to Unser with the information. Unfortunately, he thinks that SAMCRO is just out to hurt Hale, and doesn’t believe that he could be involved. That is, not until Oswald fills him in about the truce between SAMCRO and the Mayans, as well as the mysterious investors gobbling up property in Charming. Unser decides to investigate further, only to discover that Hale’s property company is indeed connected to the massive string of buyouts occurring throughout the city.
That’s certainly not going to help Hale’s plan to get the support of the local police to back his run for mayor, but he has bigger problems to worry about in the short term. Salazar wants information on Tara’s whereabouts, and though Hale refuses at first, he’s eventually blackmailed into cooperating. I don’t think Hale wants to get rid of SAMCRO bad enough that he’s willing to put innocent lives in danger, but now that Salazar has that tape recording of Hale’s confession, he’s going to milk it for everything it’s worth. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Hale went running to SAMCRO for help as a result, although it’s hard to imagine he has anything to offer them in exchange.
Of course, he might know where Tara is being held, but I’m not even sure that Salazar intends to keep her alive. Speaking of which, while the kidnapping itself was pretty inevitable (something bad had to happen to Tara in order to convince her to keep the baby), the reveal that Margaret had a giant biker tattoo on her back was jaw-dropping to say the least. It certainly explains her treatment of Tara over the last two seasons – first as the unapproving boss, and now as the caring friend – and it’ll be interesting to learn how that tattoo ties into her past. Granted, just because she even has a tattoo doesn’t necessarily mean she was involved with a biker gang, but based on the way she judges Tara’s relationship with SAMCRO, it definitely seems like it’s out of experience more than anything else. In any event, it was one hell of a cliffhanger, that’s for sure.
