10 Moments That Proved Sons Of Anarchy Was The Best Show On TV

By season five’s ‘Laying Pipe’, Opie is a dead man walking. He’s tried to rebuild his life after Donna’s death, but remains a shell of the man he once was, desperate and alone even in a crowd. Still, he remains the beating heart of SAMCRO: the bruised representation of what the MC was supposed to be, cut across with the broken reality of what they became.

Opie’s death is the hardest scene to watch in all ninety-two episodes of the show. That’s not because of the violence (although seeing him beaten to death by Pope’s cronies in prison to make a point to Jax isn’t a pretty sight), but because Opie was probably the most popular character on the show next to Jackson himself. It’s also because of who he is – Opie is loyalty, brotherhood and idealism, beaten to a pulp by violence, corruption, deceit and death: that’s the Sons Of Anarchy in a nutshell.

When he sacrifices himself for Jax and his brothers, Opie achieves a measure of redemption, the mess his crappy life had become finally balancing out a little. Of course, he leaves his children behind, but he’d already come to suspect they’d be better off being raised by someone else. That’s mirrored directly in the final episode with Jackson’s own decision to allow Wendy and Nero to raise his sons, and to become a kind of sacrifice himself. Even in death, Opie provides an example to Jax of who he should be.