Sons Of Anarchy season 5 episode 4 review: Stolen Huffy

This review contains spoilers.

5.4 Stolen Huffy

As I said last week, jail is an occupational hazard if you’re a career criminal. Unfortunately, death is also an occupational hazard. This week’s Sons Of Anarchy deals with the fallout from Opie’s sad demise in the previous instalment.  

What this leaves us with is a kind of lopsided episode. There’s a fine tribute to Opie and some… well some other stuff. The majority of screen time outside of Opie’s funeral is given to Gemma following her being bailed out of jail by Wendy (how short on friends is Gemma that she relies on Wendy to pick her up from jail?). When Gemma wasn’t stirring up trouble between Tara and Wendy, it was between Tara and Carla. Gemma convinces Tara that Carla is behind Jax falling off his bike and a rather nasty fight follows.

So far in this series, Tara’s character has suffered from some fairly poor writing – she goes between being a loving mother and beating the hell out of people. I get that the writers want to show the duality of Tara’s character, but it sometimes comes across like multiple personality disorder. 

The best section of the episode was when Jax and Chibs found themselves being chased by some of Nero’s men. The chase was a result of last week’s raid at Nero’s business, and though we still aren’t any closer to finding out who actually called the police, my money’s on Gemma. There was some confusion when the Sons took Emma Jean (who, you’ll remember, Gemma beat up last week) as Nero’s men thought she had called the raid. This ended with the four men pointing guns at each other in a crowded neighbourhood, before Chibs urged them to put their guns down and [sensitive readers should look away now] “…stop killing each other over a bit of gash”. For the first time all series, Chibs outgrosses Tig for the most disgusting line of the episode. And using Glaswegian slang too! Despite the fact that this is a tv show about bikers, some of the sexist talk is a bit much. Nonchalant talk about cutting off a woman’s “…thumb and her tit” is just gratuitous and unpleasant.

It was good to see Lyla brought back in, following Opie’s death, as she had really distanced herself from the club in the previous series. Given what happened to Opie, Jax probably feels obliged to make sure that Lyla and Opie’s kids are looked after. I’m not sure where they could take her character from here, I had assumed that she’d be written out in one way or another following Opie’s death. 

Despite the great send-off for Opie, Stolen Huffy is a pretty non-eventful episode. Obviously, when writers kill off a major character, there are a lot of things to deal with in the following instalment, but this one never really seemed to get going.  Hopefully we’ll be back to business as usual at SAMCRO next week.

Read Stu’s review of the previous episode, Laying Pipe, here.

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