TV Review: Sons of Anarchy 5.3, "Laying Pipe"

rating: 4.5

I€™ve talked a lot in recent weeks about the overarching themes and narrative goals of Sons of Anarchy. Despite the multitude of cogs in the series€™ machine, at the end of the day, the show€™s narrative and thematic purpose all boils down to one thing: loyalty. The entire first season served to set up, in various different ways, the lengths to which the members of this motorcycle club would go in order to honor that loyalty. Of course, Sons of Anarchy is also a story about collapse, and as such, by the end of the first season, that loyalty had violently broken down. In €œLaying Pipe,€ the show brings that theme front and center yet again, and, thrillingly, the show€™s treatment of the subject has never been more complex. Opie is dead. And while the utter shock and sadness that stems from this development is enough to give €œLaying Pipe€ high marks, the circumstances surrounding the death of the character is the more substantial reason to applaud the show€™s narrative choice. It€™s undeniable that Opie has been the show€™s most tragic character throughout its history. He lost his wife by the hands of the club in the show€™s first chapter. He lost his father in the show€™s fourth. He€™s lost faith in the club more times than I can count, yet the promise of the club €“ the very idea of it €“ has drawn him back in again and again. In many ways, Opie has been the most unwavering when comes to following the very ideal that is the reason behind SAMCRO€™s existence. He€™s bled for the club, sacrificed for it, and lost almost everything due to his involvement in it. With all of that considered, his death serves dual purposes. What lead to it €“ willing sacrifice €“ means that Opie adhered to the ideal of loyalty (currently manifested more in Jax than in the club itself) to the very end. At the same time, his act simultaneously calls into question whether there€™s any real merit to loyalty at all. What worth does loyalty really have if the people it€™s supposed to protect instead die because of it? What purpose does an organization such as SAMCRO serve if those that need and believe in it most end up victimized by it? Jax has done everything in his power to re-strengthen the fundamental promise his motorcycle club offers, yet that promise has only become more corrupted, more decayed, and more undeniably hollow as time has gone by. With Opie gone, Jax has failed his only real ally, and worse, he did so for the sake of his club. What this means for Jax€™s journey in the following weeks in anyone€™s guess, but with the fundamental thematic bedrock of the show fundamentally broken, yet again, the only real direction this story can head toward is total collapse. That promise of collapse is enough to mark €œLaying Pipe€ as a possible turning point in the series €“ a sort of regaining of narrative strength that I wasn€™t quite sure the show was still capable of. It sure feels like the beginning of the end €“ let€™s hope the series can stick to it.
Contributor

Cole Zercoe hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.