10 Moments That Proved Sons Of Anarchy Was The Best Show On TV
3. A Mother’s Work, Part I
The brutal attack on Gemma at the end of season two’s opening episode, ‘Albification’, is one of the most harrowing moments in the show’s long and harrowing history, as the new neo-Nazi gang in town decide to throw their weight around and trick SAMCRO into a rash declaration of war… by gang raping the wife of the club’s president.
That the League Of American Nationalists actually believe that this stratagem would have succeeded indicates that they’re way, way over their heads with SAMCRO: had Clay, Jax and the boys found out about the assault on Gemma when it actually happened, they would have killed every last white power white trash one of them directly in their pasty faces and reaped the consequences later Gemma, however, is too proud to admit the fact of her assault, meaning that the MC doesn’t realise the nature of LOAN’s escalation of hostilities until episode ten, ‘Balm’.
In classic Gemma form, the SAMCRO matriarch takes the power back from her attackers by withholding the information about her attack until a moment of her own choosing, not theirs. In this case, when her son Jackson and her husband Clay are on the verge of separating completely, Jax having decided to quit SAMCRO and go Nomad, she brings the two of them together again through the cleansing medium of vengeance, telling her men all about the assault and manipulating them into setting their issues aside.
Of course, had Jax left at that time and taken Tara and the kids with him, Abel wouldn’t have been kidnapped and the four of them could very well have settled somewhere else, far away from Charming and the corrosive effect that SAMCRO has on families. Counting the number of her friends and family who would still be alive had Gemma decided to let Jax go is a seriously depressing exercise.