Sons Of Anarchy season 4 episode 8 review: Family Recipe

This review contains spoilers.

4.8 Family Recipe

At least once a series, Sons of Anarchy seems to pull out a moment so shocking, that you can’t help but laugh. Congratulations to the fine writers of the show this week, for including a scene where Chucky cooks a pot of chilli with a human head in it, and then gives two police officers a taste!

To be fair, the whole thing plays out like a very macabre Curb Your Enthusiasm, I don’t think for a minute that Chucky wanted to put the severed head in it, but when someone leaves such an incriminating piece of evidence in the car park, when the police are on their way, there wasn’t really any other place for it.

To find out how the head got there, we have to go back a little bit. First of all Juice survived, the branch snapped, and as he was dusting himself off, Chibs turned up looking for him. He used the same excuse he used at the warehouse a few episodes ago with the cocaine: he was having a pee. Chibs blatantly doesn’t believe him, the bruising from the chain apparent, and Juice laughs it off and says that he ran into a security chain.

So, back to the club house they go, in order to get the vote for a change in leadership. This is interrupted when a rival cartel called Lobos Sonora open fire into the building and leave behind a nice old bag of heads. One of the heads belongs to the Mayans’ leader, Armando. One of the Lobos takes a bullet and is left behind. He is taken away to be dealt with by everyone’s favourite sociopath, Happy.

Obviously, gunfire in the town centre in the middle of the day is going to draw a lot of attention, and with the police on the way, Chucky finds that a head has rolled underneath a car, so he hides it in with the vegetables that he is putting the chilli for the garden fundraiser, and well, as I said, I guess there wasn’t really anywhere else he could have put it.

Elsewhere, Roosevelt has found the evidence that Tara has been threatened, and it looks like her boss at the hospital told them. As a result, she is told that they will have police watching her at all times, and also won’t be allowed to go to work as it is too much of a risk.

Tara makes the decision to take the kids and go into hiding until things calm down a bit. I’m not sure if this means that there will be less of Maggie Siff in the tail end of this series, but it would be a shame if so, as she has been one of the strongest characters in the show since it started. I can’t blame her for leaving though, and Jax is quite bittersweet about her departure. With each episode, it is becoming clear that the Sons have really gotten themselves into something that they weren’t expecting in deciding to start muling drugs.

Back to Happy. He cannot get anything from the Lobos member, and eventually resorts to getting the Galindos to help. After an injection of truth serum, his tongue loosens, and it turns out that one of the Mayans, Pedro, is a mole for the Lobos.

After an elaborate trap is set up to get rid of him, they fail to take the bait, meaning that Pedro is not the only mole. Could it be a member of SAMCRO? I could almost guarantee that it is.

After his failed suicide attempt, Juice goes back to the spot, presumably to finish the job, only to be confronted by Chibs, who obviously knows what he’s up to. Cue some shouting, and terrible acting. Chibs’ “what are you doing?” in his thick Glaswegian brogue was a highlight. Chibs is usually one of my favourite characters (being one of my fellow countrymen, I feel that I have to stick by him), but this scene was acted very poorly. Anyway, they shout at each other for a while, and then they hug.

So with Juice surviving, you’d think that the writers wouldn’t kill anyone off until the end of the series to keep people watching, right? Wrong.

This week, we saw the end of Piney. It was pretty sad to see him go, given that he’s been in the show since the start and has been particularly strong in this series, but it was hardly surprising. He has been attempting to blackmail Clay using John Teller’s letters, and has continually shown his disgust with the Sons moving into the drug trade.

We really saw both sides of Clay this week, he was warm and dignified when donating to the garden fundraiser, and then became a complete animal in the dying minutes of the episode. We learn that it was Piney who brought Clay into the Sons all those years ago, and regardless of this, Clay still blows a hole into his chest with a shotgun in order to save himself.

He then writes ‘LS’ (for Lobos Sonora) in his blood on an old picture of the Sons, to make the murder look gang related.

The walls are obviously coming in for Clay. The rest of the club are starting to rebel against him, and he has killed Piney to hide his responsibility for John Teller’s death. I don’t doubt that he’ll try and get rid of Tara before the end of the series.

With every episode, I can’t wait to find out what happens next. In a way, I wish that I had waited until the whole series had been aired before watching, so that I could gorge on it like I did on series one and two. This series has been highly addictive thus far, and I can’t wait to get my fix next week.

Read our review of episode 7, Fruit For The Crows, here.

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