After last week’s cliffhanger left the survival of Chibbs up for question, I honestly believed that Jax would amend his decision against immediate retaliation and mount a full-scale war against LOAN himself. Luckily, Chibbs is going to be just fine, and as it turns out, Jax is a lot cooler in the head than I thought. While he’s just as bloodthirsty as the others for revenge, he’s still playing it smart by doing whatever he can to delay the inevitable. So when Clay approaches Wayne about tracking down Ethan and AJ (who have since gone off the grid), Jax does the same with David, only he promises that they’ll actually play things by the book.
While they wait around for that intel, Wayne and Juice set out to clean up the crime scene before the Feds arrive. Unfortunately, they come earlier than expected, and catch Juice standing in front of the car with a hose and a jug of bleach. He plays it off as having a serious case of OCD and is let off the hook, but when they try another plan involving spilling urine on the tech’s lab kit (and thus ruining the results of the test), Wayne accidentally spills it all over the actual tech instead. That means the Feds are going to know the real truth behind the explosion, and though the car bomb won’t incriminate the Sons, it does bring a lot of unwanted attention to some of their other unsavory hobbies. In fact, it’s even scared the Irish gun suppliers into meeting with LOAN. We don’t know what that meeting was about just yet, but seeing as how Ethan originally wanted the Sons to stop selling guns to the minority gangs, I think I have a pretty good idea.
Meanwhile, Tara’s freaking out about everyone’s safety following the attack on the club (namely hers), so Gemma gives her a gun from her surprisingly extensive collection and takes her shooting behind Luanne’s studio using porn posters as targets. What started out as yet another bonding moment between Gemma and Tara, however, quickly turned into a refreshing bit of comedy when the pair started shooting up the car of that porn star who was hitting on Jax a few weeks back. It wasn’t entirely necessary to the episode – especially since it was already a pretty slow-burning hour of television – but it was a nice addition nonetheless.
Speaking of slow burns, last night’s main storyline took quite a while to get going. However, once Jax and David followed up on a tip about the location of AJ Weston – only to get shot at by his brainwashed son – it practically sprinted to its unlikely finish line. Jax has been warning the club for some time now that Ethan is smarter than the average thug, so when David took a grinning Polly into the station after learning that her father would be attending a membership rally later that night, you just knew that the Sons were being played once again. When the rest of the club finds out about the rally, Clay leads a welcoming committee to go pick him up, despite Jax’s warning that local cops are already on the way. Unfortunately, no one listens, and when they bust into the building armed with guns, they discover that the rally in question is actually just a charity dinner.
Seconds later, the cops arrive, and everyone but Opie (who manages to get the hell out of dodge, though not before crashing his bike) is taken away. I’m not exactly sure how SAMCRO is going to get themselves out of this mess (they were caught both red-handed and on-camera), but there’s no way the series could survive with most of the team locked up in jail. On a side note, though, next week’s prison episode looks positively awesome.
