After a very long wait, the boys from Charming have finally landed in Belfast. I’m sure I speak for most of us when I shout from the rooftops, finally! I know I’ve said it a few times in the past, but with this episode we are getting back to the Sons Of Anarchy that we know and love. One of the few things that really irritated me in this episode was that the opening dialogue suddenly had Chibs speaking in an Irish accent. If you’ve watched any episode with Chibs in it, then you will know that he is Glaswegian. After this incident, he switches back to his usual accent. It’s baffling and I can only assume that whoever directed the episode assumed that Scottish and Irish were the same thing. They aren’t. Anyway, the Sons manage to get about three minutes into the episode before getting into trouble. They are stopped by the police, a scuffle entails and it emerges that the police were paid by someone to take the Sons into custody and deport them. Naturally, everyone assumed that it must be Jimmy. When the Sons are caught in a drive-by shooting later, it is also assumed that it must be Jimmy. I get the feeling now that the writers actually know where they’re going with the rest of the season, which is very reassuring, as I wasn’t convinced prior to this episode. Jax finally gets to meet with Father Ashby, and is reassured that he will get Abel back very soon, but first he will have to get rid of Jimmy. We are shown Abel being picked up by a family at the same time and it is pretty clear that he is being adopted. Whether the Sons will ever find Abel, I’m really not sure. Abel hasn’t had the easiest upbringing either. His mother has barely been mentioned since season one and he witnessed Half Sack being killed. I’ll be very interested to see what happens next with that particular arc. Kozik and Tig are back together for some comic relief back in Charming. After last week’s joyride, Tig has had his license revoked for two years, and as a result, Kozik has to drive him around. There’s a very small hint that the animosity between them has something to do with a girl and, as always, when Kozik and Tig get together, there’s an opportunity for them to knock lumps out of each other. One of the strangest things about almost all of the Sons leaving for Belfast is that they have left themselves wide open to any sort of attack from other gangs. The fact that Tig was left behind was just circumstantial, as he did what he had to. As always, Jacob Hale is cooking up trouble, and is yet again trying to buy Lumpy out of his boxing gym. He initially asks Darby, but Darby shows his sensitive side in an unusually tender scene between him and Lumpy. There’s an incredibly powerful moment in the scene where Lumpy looks at Darby’s swastika tattoo on his chest and his own concentration camp ID on his arm and tells Darby that he can’t make many friends with that kind of hate on his chest. After Darby changes his mind, Hale brings in Salazar to smash up the gym. Salazar has become something of a comical character and his plans to destroy the Sons usually end up in him being a laughing stock. I’d imagine there will be serious repercussions for destroying the gym and hitting Lumpy. In fact, I’d be really surprised if Salazar was even alive by the end of the season. The Sons did leave a prospect in charge to defend the gym should anyone attack, but the prospect hid, and then ran away. I found it hard to believe that the Sons would recruit someone so cowardly. I would have thought that surely there’d be some sort of screening process to join a biker gang. Read our review of the episode 7, Widening Gyre, here.
