“Sons of Anarchy” recap: Falx Cerebri

By Stacey Harrison

Credit: Prashant Gupta/FX
Credit: Prashant Gupta/FX

Welcome to an hour of everything SAMCRO has worked for crumbling all around it. And the further downward spiral of a once-promising young doctor, made all the more troubling because she simply doesn’t see it.

The gang is licking its wounds after the car bomb, with Chibs laid up in the hospital in critical condition. Honestly, though, I never really doubted he was going to pull through. If they were going to kill him, why would they have him hang on at all? And no offense to the actor involved, but a dramatic death might have been pretty good way to shake things up. It’s not like we’d miss old Chibs all that much, right?

Clay is predictably ape-doody over the whole thing, and demands immediate vengeance against Zobelle. Jax knows he can’t stop it, but cuts a deal with Hale to try to get to Zobelle first and turn him over to the cops, thereby saving the club from walking into what he still feels is a trap.

Clay enlists Unser to help him not only get a home address for Zobelle and/or Weston, but also to deliberately sabotage the forensics investigation to try to avoid any federal involvement. He also proceeds to break into Zobelle’s shop and ransack the living crap out of it.

As for Unser and his attempts to outsmart the CSI guys, this all goes comically wrong when they show up to check out the bombing scene and Juice is getting ready to scrub it all down. Unser realizes this could look bad, so he shows up all indignant, saying he stepped out to relieve himself and came back to this. Later, Unser fills a Big Gulp cup full of his own urine, which he plans to spill all over the scene to mess up the forensics. He unwisely teams up with Juice yet again, and the best the biker can come up with is pretending to accidentally almost run over one of the investigators, and in the commotion have Unser spill the cup. The cup does indeed spill, but instead of on the crime scene, it splatters harmlessly (depending on your perspective, of course) all over the CSI guy’s shirt.

The race to Zobelle puts the mounting tensions within the club in full glare, not only among Jax and Clay, but — in the season’s most affecting and surprising storyline — Jax and Opie. While Jax has done everything he can for his friend, including shielding him from the awful truth that his own SAMCRO brothers were responsible for murdering his wife, while believing they were killing him, mind you, Opie has drawn inward and turned himself into a Sons true believer, loyal to Clay and distrustful of Jax’s dissension. If Shakespeare had written about biker gangs, he definitely would have come up with something like this. Opie goes so far as to tail Jax as he goes off to meet with Hale, only to have Jax lose him later. He reports back to Clay, like a soldier reporting on a reconnaissance mission into enemy territory.

What Jax had gotten from Hale was a home address for Weston. Separately, the Sons get the same address, and they show up only minutes after Jax. Problem is, what they find is Jax in a tense gunfight with a tween Aryan-in-training. Jax about has the situation defused when the guns start blazing outside. He eventually gets them to stop, only to have the kid pull the gun back on him and pull the trigger. No bullets, though. My goodness, could this be the same boy Weston was having such a nice conversation with last week?

Hale digs deeper, making the decision to tell Gemma he knows what happened to her. After weathering her initial fury, he gets her to tell him a little about the assault, namely the young girl who lured her into the trap. They take the info to Darby, who’s on his way to Vegas because he heard something bad’s about to go down. Darby says the girl they’re looking for sounds like Polly, Zobelle’s daughter. Hale meets the girl at the ransacked Impeccable Smokes and puts up with her attitude for a while, then shows the lengths he’s willing to go to make things right. If she doesn’t tell him what he wants to know, he’s going to cut himself with a shard of glass, blame her for it and arrest her. She speaks up pretty quickly after that, telling Hale about a big meeting that night the League is having at a nearby Christian center. Once again, Clay & Co. come across the same information independently, and make plans for an appearance. With lots and lots of guns.

As SAMCRO is approaching the center, with a reluctant Jax joining in, they learn that the cops are on their way. Jax takes this as confirmation of a trap being set, while Clay just believes it speeds up their timetable. They rush in, guns blazing, only to find a rather peaceful gathering of white separatist friends and families. Zobelle then signals Weston, who pushes a button that sets off a few rounds, which gets the Sons firing back. Clay has Zobelle in his sights, but Jax, spying the surveillance cameras all around the place, stops him from firing. The Aryans escape and the entire Sons shooting party, save Opie, who made a last-minute escape, is handcuffed and put into a truck. Opie later crashes his bike into a car but seems to be OK.

One has to wonder what Tara will make of all this. In this episode alone, she’s seen a car bomb, threats of retaliation, and taken shooting lessons from Gemma. She then proceeds to put those lessons to use by firing several rounds into the car of that porn chick who tried to steal Jax a few episodes back. I said it once and I’ll say it again. Sigh.

Stray bullets:

— When the pee-filled cup spills all over the forensics investigator, he notices the smell and asks Unser what exactly was in the cup. The old man replies, “Diet soda. Taste like piss, don’t it?” Heh.

— It’s confirmed that the Irish have something to do with Zobelle’s outfit, but the extent isn’t yet clear.

— Hale comments to Gemma, after she has told him about her rape, that just because he became a cop, doesn’t mean he’s stopped caring about people he grew up with. Hmmm. Wonder what the story is there. Of course, she also tells him that if he tells anyone else about the rape, she’ll cut his heart out.

— The title of the episode, “Falx Cerebri,” refers to a part of the brain, specifically “the scythe-shaped fold of dura mater in the longitudinal fissure between the two cerebral hemispheres,” according to The American Heritage Medical Dictionary. I’m guessing it has something to do with Chibs’ head injury. Anybody got a better explanation?

1 Comment

  1. oh for pity sake. “Falx Cerebri” the divide between the two hemispheres of the brain. The difference between Clay and Jax

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