Sons of Anarchy Recap ‘Poor Little Lambs’: And War Followed With Them

Tragedy strikes the Sons of Anarchy after their plan to unravel a rival begins to fall apart and the blowback lands directly on the streets of Charming in the latest episode titled ‘Poor Little Lambs’…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

One of the best parts about Sons of Anarchy week over week is the cinematic feel that creator Kurt Sutter adds to the show with so many elements bouncing around that by the end of an episode, it’s hard to remember what exactly started this entire chain reaction. A great movie should feel like a totally encapsulated story, yet leaving the viewer wanting more. Sons of Anarchy does this with each new episode as the plots get more intricate and deadly, characters become more and more three dimensional and the dialogue is the icing on the cake.

For instance in the latest episode titled ‘Poor Little Lambs’, Gemma visits her grandson’s new pre-school where he’ll be taught by Courtney Love (making her Sons of Anarchy debut), and immediately she exerts her influence on a soccer mom with a heavy hand who keeps beeping the horn for her to get out of the way. Imagine the scene from Mr. Mom when a father doesn’t know which direction he’s supposed to go for drop offs or picks ups, except the ticked off person in this scene is Gemma Teller-Morrow and she doesn’t take shit from anybody, especially Holly Homemaker.

“If you beep at me again, mom, I’m gonna shove that cup so far up your ass you’re going to be shitting mochaccino for a month.”
~ Gemma

And Sutter is never at a loss for irony either when he feeds the next line to Love, who plays Mrs. Harrison, one of Abel’s new teachers who greets the little boy on his first day.

“Damn, grandma’s kind of crazy.”
~ Mrs. Harrison

From that congenial scene at a pre-school, the action picks up in a hurry with the Sons being pulled in at least three or four directions all while trying to stamp out fires they lit just a day or two before. It’s the kind of compelling television that sucks you in and when it’s over, your jaw is on the floor, your eyes are bugged out of your head and you immediate want to watch it over again to see what you might have just missed. Breaking Bad was one of the only other shows that could garner this kind of reaction, but Sons of Anarchy definitely invokes a certain kind of visceral tingling that doesn’t go away when an episode is over. It sticks with you for a few days. Tonight’s episode was no different…

Lake of Fire

The main theme this week on Sons of Anarchy circles around the club’s need to settle things down between the One-Niners and August Marks to prevent the head gangster from digging into their business any further and discovering there’s a plot about to be hatched and it’s all happening right under his nose. The better plan is to keep Marks happy in his other business dealings so he has no reason to start looking at the Sons or the One-Niners as the source of his woes. Tyler comes calling on his new business partner to let him know that three of Henry Lin’s clubs were hit the night before and all of the people involved had black faces.

In other words, the Chinese are looking directly at the One-Niners for retaliation and that’s exactly the kind of problem Marks doesn’t want happening in the streets. Tyler swears he had nothing to do with it (of course he didn’t, the Sons put the Grim Bastards up to it so they could further this brewing war with the Chinese) but to keep Marks in check he’s going to need Jax’s help with something.

It seems Marks has a big business deal for land about to go down, but the partner he’s supposed to have signing off on the papers has gone missing in the last few days. His name? Pastor Jonathan Haddam from Piedmont Grace — the same pantyhose wearing fetishist who fell afoul of the Sons in the opening episode when they were helping the Grim Bastards track down the person responsible for running down three of their members. Haddam is long since dead, but Jax can’t tell Tyler about how it all went down so he instead offers to track down the pastor’s wayward wife, who has power of attorney over his estate. If she signs off on Marks’ land deal, the pimp daddy from Oakland can move forward with his lucrative land deal and never be the wiser to what’s actually going on in the streets.

The find out what Haddem knew and where his wife might be hiding, they have to dig up the body currently buried in the woods. They find a phone but it doesn’t have any numbers in it and not even a ‘I miss you’ text message. No, just videos of the pastor engaging in any number of illicit affairs but the one that helps out the Sons this time around is a show and tell session Haddam shared on tape with none other than Venus Van Dam.

Our favorite transsexual superstar is back and the Sons get in contact thanks to Tig, who has stayed in touch with her ever since their last encounter together. Venus can’t offer up too much help, but does remember a lakehouse cabin where she met the good reverend on a few occasions. She passes along the address and off they go to find the pastor’s wife and hopefully get her to agree to sign the papers so Marks remains oblivious.

When they arrive at the house, all is quiet on the Western front until the Sons break in and moments later footsteps creep across the floor just seconds before a shotgun blast rings out, tagging Tig in the process. The Sons run after the fleeing car, but whoever is driving isn’t a cunning stunt man and he plants the car in the lake nearby. Once Jax helps to rescue the people inside, it turns out the wheelman is a scared stepson, who was protecting his mother (who is addicted to heroin), believing these guys were here as representatives of August Marks.

It seems Haddam got all mixed up with Damon Pope years ago to secure the land he needed to open up his church and now Marks is cashing in on the same kind of favor. He wants Haddam to sell him back the land and become a partner where they will receive Federal loans to build low-income housing for families that will never get made. The scheme is to take the money and then claim the area was too dangerous or construction costs got too high, and because the money was vouched for by a pastor of a locally owned church with good standing as a non-profit organization, Marks gets away scot-free with a boatload of government cash to stuff in his pillow cases. If you want a full explanation of the scam, a similar thing went down on a famous Sopranos episode from season 4 of the series.

Jax is out of options with this whole situation. He’s got a man down and a bad guy bearing down on him if they don’t deliver. So he tells the mother and stepson to sign the papers and give Marks what he wants, but in exchange they’ll make sure nothing happens to them in the process. It’s the cleanest getaway they can have right now while staying alive. At one point when they dots start getting connected Tig says ‘it’s a small word after all’ and he’s right on the money. The repercussions from the shootout at the season’s open is now reverberating into the business the Sons are trying to conduct today.

Bobby: “Remember when our biggest problem was which Mayan to kill?”
Jax: “Simpler times”
Bobby: “Simpler men”

Things only get more complicated from here…

Unhinged

Following Gemma’s encounter with soccer mom of the year, she’s off to Diosa where she’s redecorating in the wake of Nero’s departure from that location. He also managed to bring in Collette to help run the place while he’s working in Stockton because the other girls around there aren’t capable of punching numbers into a calculator without getting so confused it looks as if they are about to burst into flames. Collette has a brief interaction with Gemma and she pulls a little bit of the mommy card on her, but the madam is smart enough not to tug at those purse strings just yet. Later on, Gemma even warms up to Collette a little bit although as we find out later in the episode, that new friendship was all for naught.

While at Diosa, Nero gets a visit from Sheriff Jarry with a full platoon of her officers in tow. They are looking for the person responsible for tuning up Ken Haas — the father of the escort who slapped Gemma last week — because he’s in the hospital with broken ribs, a broken jaw and a few other injuries and miraculously he’s recanting his previous statement and no longer pressing charges. Nero dummies up about it because he really does have no clue what happened until the cops leave and he confronts Gemma.

She comes clean that Jax put a hurting on Mr. Haas as a favor to him to ensure he didn’t go to jail for protecting her that day. Nero sees right through that excuse and he sees the pattern of behavior Jax is following right now and that only means things are going to get worse.

“Your boy, he’s unchained right now. He’s looking for any excuse to rage. I understand it. The problem is it gets to a point, Gem, where it ain’t about revenge anymore. You’re doing it because it just feels good.”
~ Nero

Gemma’s problems are only mounting from here because Sheriff Jarry also informs Wayne that District Attorney Patterson has gone ahead and ordered the all points bulletin on Juice and it’s gone statewide. Meaning any cop that sees him has to pick him up and bring him in for questioning, which puts him on the cop’s radar as well as putting him at risk of being found out by the Sons. Gemma goes into overdrive to force Juice to finally pack up and leave town once and for all before the cops find him first.

Each day Juice spends isolated from the world, his mind is quickly coming undone. As we catch up to him in this latest episode, Juice is sitting outside his shower talking about all the things he did to help the club in some dire moments and the loyalty he showed them.

“The club’s gotta know that” Juice mutters to himself just seconds before Wendy and Wayne show up to keep an eye on him. He barely speaks to them before he grabs a coffee, drops his towel and jumps in the shower as it’s clear he was talking to himself while imagining somebody else was in the room to listen to him. Later when Gemma arrives to tell Juice it’s time to go, he finally snaps and tells them that the loneliness is getting to him and he’s not built to be isolated like this — he’s ‘getting lost in the details of nothing and nothing can pull me out of it’. Something’s got to give and as he breaks down in tears, Wendy and Wayne look at his neatly packed guns and hand sanitizer while wondering if there’s any coming back from this and Gemma stares at the only person alive who knows she killed Tara and he’s coming unhinged at the seams.

In the closing moments as Gemma gets ready to drive Juice to her father’s house she contemplates and then loads up a gun with a silencer on it. Maybe she’s finally convinced herself that Juice being alive is just like leaving evidence floating in the wind. Better to burn it to the ground than risk it landing in the wrong hands. What Gemma doesn’t know is Juice is loading up with the same kind of weapon for their drive to the country. Whether he plans on using the gun to take out Gemma or just to escape so he doesn’t have to leave the family he says he loves so much, I’m not sure, but Juice is clearly rattled and it’s not going to be long before he either explodes out against those who keep trying to save him or he’s imploding and ready to sever all connections with the outside world.

Oh and Gemma’s crazy watch this week goes up a few more notches as she holds another full blown conversation with her dead daughter-in-law after dropping Abel off at pre-school. As if she’s giving her updates from beyond the grave, Gemma is telling Tara about Abel’s first day and how he’s starting to look like he’s ready to grow up and be just like his father.

“I’m going to take Wendy’s lead on that private school. It’s expensive as shit. I just don’t get it. I never sent Jax or Thomas to any daycare or Jim-Bob Jamboree shit. It feels lazy to me. Dropping of your kids for strangers to raise. But I know it’s what you’d want. Schools are different now. Kids gotta keep up. Who knows, maybe Thomas will be a doctor like you.

“But Abel — I can see it in his eyes. He is his daddy’s son.”

Juice and Gemma are hiding secrets, both are talking to the air, and now it just seems like a matter of time before one or both of them take a tumble off the cliff of sanity.

White Lines

Another story this week involves the Sons trying to sell off the final two bricks of heroin they snatched from the Chinese a couple of weeks back and the meeting they tried to have with Ron Tully before August Marks showed up, barking orders and handing out death threats. Tully is setting up a meeting between his people and the Sons to exchange the heroin and get a street value added up so they can get paid.

Jax, Chibs and a couple of others break away from the business with Haddam long enough to go deliver the goods to Tully’s people. What Jax doesn’t know is that Sheriff Jarry informed her officers earlier in the day to bring him or Chibs in when they see them to talk about the beatdown Ken Haas received to put him in the hospital. When the motorcycles go ripping through town, deputies Cane and Eglee spot them as they are walking out of a diner and decide to follow and bring them in. Little do they know they are walking into a death trap.

When Jax and the guys arrive to begin negotiations with the Aryan Brotherhood, the cops pull up just behind them and realize they are witnessing something big going down. Before Cane is able to call for backup, machine gun fire rings out and he’s killed instantly. Eglee (who you probably remember as the lead deputy that used to work for Unser while he was still chief of police) escapes briefly but she catches four bullets to the back for her trouble.

Jax and Chibs know this is exactly the kind of trouble they don’t need right now. They are able to cool down the situation enough to convince the white supremacists that they didn’t show up knowing the cops were tailing them, but they still have two dead officers on the side of a dusty road, a heroin deal gone horribly wrong and at the end of it, Jax still has to explain all of this to Tully while trying not to upset the delicate balance he’s sharing with the brotherhood currently. The problems could still get bigger for the Sons because Eglee survived and while she’s in intensive care currently, her old boss Unser is sitting vigil by her side. You start to wonder at what point does Unser see enough of this death and violence and finally try to put an end to it all himself?

Here Comes the Boom

Back at the ice cream shop, Jax is irate with what just happened. He had no beef with the local police and he just made inroads with the sheriff and now she’s got two dead deputies on her hands and if anyone spotted them coming or going, the club is going to get dismantled by the local police. When Sheriff Jarry shows up, Jax isn’t sure if he’s going to be met by a handshake or a SWAT team crashing through the windows.

He gets neither really, but she’s not aware that the Sons had anything to do with the shooting. She is there to ask questions, which of course they deny, but when Jarry finally brings up Ken Haas, Jax comes clean in a moment of salvation.

“I did it. Guy’s a scumbag who beats and extorts his own daughter. I made sure that doesn’t happen again.”
~ Jax

Upstairs while Jax is dealing with the sheriff, Tig is being tended to by Venus Van Dam, who was the first person he called when he got shot. The flirtation between these two characters was an interesting wrinkle to toss into the story a few seasons back, but the fact that they keep bringing it around again is just brilliant. Also, for a series that quite often smacks racial divide right in the face with a baseball bat, to see Sons of Anarchy tackle a subject like the unsuspecting feelings shared between Tig and Venus is not only endearing but hopelessly romantic.

As Tig stares up at his muse as she cares for him while he’s wounded, he asks where she came from.

“Well, my sweet Alex, I was born a man, but I believe my true genesis happened later when I was stirred by the gods of love and beauty and transformed into an angel whose soul purpose is to bring light to the shadows and a little bit of joy to all those lost souls who can no longer find it.”
~ Venus Van Dam

A moment later after a knowing stare, Tig gently caresses Venus on the face and then draws her near where he plants a big kiss and guess what — she kisses him right back. This definitely isn’t the typical relationship you’d ever expect a biker in a motorcycle club to have, but then again this is California, right? Tig and Venus were destined to be together because she accepts him for who he is and he does the exact same for her. They may have been damaged at one point in their lives, but together they can heal in some way and that’s all either of them have ever wanted. Someone to make them whole. The loving scene is the last for the entire episode, however, because things deteriorate in a hurry.

With Jarry still discussing her concerns with Jax, a van pulls up outside and a Chinese man leaps from the door and chucks something at the window, catching everyone’s attention. The second object he throws crashes through their window and the entire crew realizes it’s a live grenade that’s about to explode. Everyone dives for cover and in the wake of the explosion, the Sons have now managed to lose two home bases inside of a year. Noticeably, Chibs immediately took down Jarry and made sure she was alright while shielding her with his own body. Following the explostion as the investigation gets underway, Chibs offers to drive home the sheriff and they share an embrace in the car, both of them obviously shaken from the day’s events. Chibs joins his buddy Tig in finding love, but how long will they each be alive to enjoy it?

Meanwhile at Diosa, Lin’s No. 2 walks in with a few of his associates as they start to look around the place. At the same time, Happy points out the fact that the man who showed up to blow a whole through the ice cream shop wasn’t there to send a message. He was there to destroy the Sons of Anarchy.

“This wasn’t a message brother. That dude saw us in the shop — it was straight up retaliation.”
~ Happy

Bobby knows at that moment that somebody sold them out and Lin is onto their plan to come after his organization. While they didn’t show any big revelation in the episodes, all signs point to Jury being the culprit behind the Chinese blowback. He was part of the crew that took down their shipment. He knows where the bodies are buried. He has the shotgun used to kill some of Lin’s men — because it’s the same gun that killed his own son. Jury seems to have calculated a response and the best way to strike back at the Sons is to rip the heart of the charter out and leave them bleeding so badly there’s no way to survive. Jury can’t take them on by himself, hell bent on revenge, so my money is on the fact that he sold out his brothers as payback for their deception and murder of his son.

Before they can contemplate who is behind the pin getting pulled in that grenade, Nero comes swooping in asking questions about what just went down. When the Sons tell him it was Lin striking back at them, he’s in disbelief. That is until he receives a call from Lin’s No. 2 with a friendly explanation of what’s about to go down.

“What happens at Diosa will impact you, but it’s meant for the Sons of Anarchy”

The phone goes dead, machine guns come out and Collette can only whisper ‘oh my god’ before the Asian gang mows down all of the girls in the club, viciously cutting them all down in a hail of bullets. At the same time, the gun warehouse where the Sons have their weapons stored, West lies dead currently bleeding out in one of the empty crates, clearly after being ransacked by the Chinese. When the Sons arrive at Diosa, they find everybody dead including Collette, who was the one woman besides Tara that seemed to bring Jax some peace during these troubled times. Now she’s dead, too.

Jax’s plan this entire time was to work his way into Lin’s organization and then burrow a hole through him from the inside out. Now the Chinese are aware of what the Sons of been doing an even worse they calculated a strike to hit them where it hurts the most. One pipeline for money has been eviscerated, the weapons they need to fight back are gone, the makeshift clubhouse is gone and there’s a member dead. Lin hit the Sons hard right where they live and breathe and Jax is left in the wake of it, surrounded by dead women and unanswered questions about where to go from here.

Notes of Anarchy:

— The final song in tonight’s episode was a cover of the classic tune ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’ as performed by Franky Perez and the Forest Rangers. You can pick up the song right here via iTunes

The title of tonight’s episode ‘Poor Little Lambs’ seems to reference the girls at Diosa, who were just innocent bystanders caught in the middle of a war between the Sons and the Chinese.

— Nero knows that Juice is still around but he’s not telling Gemma why he’s interested. He knows that Juice killed Darvany on Jax’s orders, but why keep that a secret? To protect Jax? Or to protect something else?

— How long before Jury reappears to face the reaper for his actions? I have a hard time believing anyone else was responsible for what happened on tonight’s episode except for the leader of the Indian Hills charter who was betrayed by his brothers.

On the next Sons of Anarchy, the fallout from the Chinese blowback continues to hit Charming as the club goes after Henry Lin for killing Tara and now cutting down Charming in the process…