10 Moments That Proved Sons Of Anarchy Was The Best Show On TV
7. If I Spike You, You’ll Know You’ve Been Spoken To
Season five saw the show’s brutality quotient become ramped up to horrifying proportions, but it would be one of the quieter moments of horror that weighed the heaviest.
In ‘Darthy’, the main story of the episode features Jackson’s attempts, as club president, to have his predecessor Clay removed from the MC completely, and to force a vote on whether the club should execute him for his many crimes against SAMCRO. This is a dual vote Jax has been working towards ever since season two… so you can imagine his rage when the club votes to exile Clay, but not to kill him. Club law binds the president, and there’s nothing he can do about it right then and there.
Meanwhile, Jackson’s junkie ex-wife Wendy, the mother of his oldest son Abel, has returned to Charming, clean and sober. Insisting on some quality time with her son, Wendy isn’t subtle about hinting that she’ll apply for full custody if they don’t tell the kid who his real mummy is.
Busting into her apartment, Jax throws her against the wall and intimidates her, telling her that he’s going to report her for threatening to kidnap his son… and he’ll demand a drug test. Then he forcibly injects her with heroin, taking out his frustration with Clay on his ex-wife in a moment of callous brutality all the more tragic because it’s something Clay would do. In fact, it’s something Clay’s wife (Jackson’s own mother, Gemma) has already done, in the pilot episode of the show, to force Wendy to leave town in the first place.
It’s arguably the first time in the show that Jax does something truly awful without a motivation arising from his better judgement, and it’s certainly his first step on that downhill plunge to becoming the man he hates the most.