7.6 Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em Some cliffhangers, however, are just frustrating and not much else. When this episode ended with Juice finally about to meet his maker (and presumably about to reveal the truth about Gemma’s involvement in Tara’s death) I was neither outraged nor exhilarated. I just rolled my eyes. Cliffhangers only work when they have built up sufficient tension and investment in the outcome, otherwise they are just annoying. When they are tacked on to an episode of television as dry and boring as this one, they are incredibly irritating. All through this episode I figured that the time was right for Juice to die, and that all of the dull club deals and clumsy race relations issues would be soon forgotten thanks to an emotional and shocking ending that would mark the ultimate turning point into where we all know this is heading; Jax and Gemma’s faceoff. Instead, we got lots and lots and lots of scenes of the Sons clashing with Neo-Nazis and carrying out hushed meetings with allies. Apart from being a little bit lost through all of it, I was mostly just bored and waiting for something to happen. And don’t even get me started on Gemma’s entirely pointless burgeoning friendship with Lea Michelle’s thankless guest role (while I am aware this may be setting up a future subplot, does anyone really care?). This episode was desperate water treading from the get go and couldn’t even give us the satisfaction of a decent ending. Juice blurting out the truth would have been a perfect cliffhanger; it would distinctly shift the story and mean that there was no turning back. Another truth about cliffhangers is that in ninety percent of cases the outcome is easy to predict. It defies storytelling logic to end one episode with a character on the verge of death and begin the next with them dying (unless you’re the writers of Breaking Bad and you can pull it off). Doing so robs so much impact, and it is the primary reason we knew that Gemma would be fine after last week’s conclusion. Honestly, the only thing of any interest to happen this week was a sudden interest in painting the Sons as the equivalent of enlightened racial crusaders in a racist world. This series has always had a strange and uncomfortable relationship with depictions of race (remember how Juice almost killed himself rather than tell the club his father was black?) and to suddenly have Jax describe himself as a man ‘not living in 1956’ while Marilyn Manson refers to him as having a ‘love of all things brown’ seems to have come completely out of nowhere. All this among scenes of black men being murdered as a peace offering to some white supremacists. It all just leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth, like every time the Sons refer to other ethnicities purely by colour. A series about bikers does not necessarily have to be politically correct, but it can’t suddenly start claiming enlightenment at the eleventh hour to engineer some artificial conflict with Neo-Nazis. If this was not the final season, I probably would have given up by now. As it stands, I can only hope the last six episodes give me something fond to remember about this show. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
