The Waiver Wire

Throughout the fifth season of Sons of Anarchy, Mike Aurigemma will take an in-depth look at the show. As always, beware of spoilers.

For other episode discussions, check our pop culture page.

This was an episode that started off kind of slow in my opinion and then just ramped  up as it went on. 

The bad for this episode was Gemma getting conned by Joel McHale as I did not see the need to really add this into the storyline at all.  This may have further complications down the road as I am not sure we are done seeing McHale be a guest star on this show, but who knows.  The only interesting thing that came out of this is that we saw Nero lose his cool in that moment.  We have yet to see that side of him and I still feel like there is something about him and his crew that we will find out sooner rather than later.

The rest of this episode was absolutely on point.  We once again saw Clay work his magic to try to get people to think that it was not him ordering the home invasions.  I really thought we were going to see the end of Unser in this episode, but I underestimated how smart Clay is as he ended up killing the nomads that he sent to over to Unser’s house.  It is clear that Unser still has his doubts about Clay so I think he will end up being another casualty at the hands of Clay at some point in this season. 

In this episode we also saw Jax confront Clay, but of course Clay was able to stand tall and deny everything without even blinking an eye.  I am not sure whether the hit on Jax and Chibs was ordered by Clay or the Niners.  That is definitely something that Clay would do, but for some reason I feel like this was just random luck for Clay that may take some of the heat off of him going forward.

The hit on Jax will definitely stir up some trouble with Pope again and we all know that he is not going to go away any time soon.  We have not even see the deals happen between the club and Pope yet so I definitely expect that to pick up in the coming episodes.

To me, the most important character to watch is Juice.  He has been by Clay throughout all of this, but now we see him listening to what Tara had to say to Clay so that may change his opinion.  Juice also is one of the only ones besides Unser that knows Clay was there to kill the nomads.  That is going to come out eventually and Clay knows this as well so I am sure he is prepared for it.  The question becomes what will happen to Juice when Clay does not need him any longer or when Juice finds out too much about what Clay has been orchestrating.  Unfortunately, I cannot see this ending well for one of my favorite characters in Juice and we also cannot forget that he was snitching on the club not too long ago.

The last thing that we saw was the continued downfall of Gemma.  It seems like she has been doing worse since splitting from Clay than he has.  She got her car and money stolen after another night of sex with some random guy.  Then and worst of all she was given a chance by Tara and Jax to take care of the kids and after smoking with Unser we saw her fall asleep while driving and crash into a tree.  Now I do not think that the kids will be killed from this as that would just be too much put on her in my opinion.  But this will definitely make Tara turn against her and could be the last straw for Jax as well.  Usually, I do not like anything that has to do with Gemma, but in this case I think there is some potential as we see her complete downfall this season.