Sons of Anarchy executive producer Paris Barclay compares the final year of the show to ‘The Godfather’ trilogy because the characters that started out in the original certainly weren’t the same ones left alive at the end….
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
Any time a final season approaches, all bets are off when it comes to the characters in terms of who might be written off or in the case of a series like ‘Sons of Anarchy’ who will be left alive when the last reel runs out. Creator Kurt Sutter hasn’t been afraid to push the envelope with his show for the past six seasons and it’s unlikely he’ll change for the final year.
Beloved characters like Ryan Hurst’s Opie have already said goodbye, and a seemingly untouchable person like Maggie Siff’s Tara even met her demise last season. The final season could have any number of deaths for the main characters on the show, and as executive producer Paris Barclay tells it, the body count will definitely get higher.
As he explains, the Sons of Anarchy as a motorcycle club have done a huge number of misdeeds over the last six seasons including murder, betrayal, thievery and just about every other crime you can think of and at some point all of things will come back to bite them. Barclay predicts this season we will see more revenge on the club than ever before.
“The theme is what Arthur Miller says is the theme of every drama — the chickens come home to roost. So all the things we’ve done, most of which has been bad over the last seven seasons, eventually people have to pay for them,” Barclay told Nerdcore Movement.
“That happens on an individual level for many of our characters. It happens on sort of a meta-level for the show. We’ve gotten away with doing a lot of shit and I’m not just talking about shooting 12 Chinese people in a warehouse. We’ve gotten away with stuff that in the real world, I just don’t think could have gone on this long. So in the final season, people have to pay and they will.”
Now Sutter has teased that he only sees two members of the club dying this season, but in reality no one knows for sure how many people will be left when the show comes to an end. What Barclay can reveal is that when ‘Sons of Anarchy’ is finished, that’s it for those characters and the story Sutter first envisioned seven years ago.
There won’t be a hanging conflict or characters left alive for a future ‘Sons of Anarchy’ movie to develop. In other words, nobody is safe and by the time the final episode airs in early December, expect the look of the show to be much different than the one that debuts on September 9.
“There will be someone left. The club, I think I can say pretty safely, will not be the same at the end of the season. It’s not like we’re trying to save something to do a movie like everybody else does. The story Kurt wants to tell ends up with the chickens coming home to roost. So bad things are going to happen,” Barclay said.
“It’s like The Godfather — not too many people you saw at the beginning are there at the end.”
A grim prediction for certain and the only way to see it all unravel is to tune into ‘Sons of Anarchy’ starting Tuesday night, September 9 at 10pm ET to find out the answers.
