ECONOMY OF (FOUR LETTER) WORDS: Baby. That'll do, really.
I was sitting here trying to express my frustration and disappointment with the just-concluded season of Sons of Anarchy. The screed was getting longer and longer. The tirade was getting more and more torrid. The rant was veering from the vaguely literate to the indulgently vulgar and consuming punctuation conspicuously (primarily of the parenthetical and interrobang varieties).
Then I remembered a comment from one of our worthy readers (Amber, here) that adequately captured the general disappointment with Shoot 'Em Up a few years ago. It seems to me that it applies equally well to the Sons of Anarchy situation this season: simply put, it had too many babies in it.
Cut Abel The Kidnapped Wonder-MacGuffin out of the storyline and it could have been perfectly serviceable run of episodes. There would have been time for so much more of the good stuff about law vs. order, practice vs. principle, love vs. lifestyle, that previously threatened to make this show more than a bad soap opera dressed up in black leather and dirty denim. In fact, if Jax Teller hadn't gone all Sally Field on us this season, it would have saved cast, crew, audience, and production company the time, expense, strain, and embarrassment of that thumpingly ill-scripted and implausible trip to Ireland. None of that was remotely necessary, and it was all done at the expense of more interesting themes, plot lines, and characters--the very things that drew me in last season.
Really, my list of gripes is profanity-laced and never-ending, but that sums it up: too many babies.
Late to the discussion here, but my gripe isn't really with Abel, the baby that exists (although as Sepinwall points out, her's mostly a prop) but with the added one we'll see next year since Tara is pregnant. If the Sons are in prison and they do a jump ahead, Jax will have two children toddling around. Too much domestication for this show.
ReplyDeletePlotwise with the kid-search, what made me crazy was the whole lack of urgency. Your kid's been taken to another country by some murderous thugs, and you go over there and have time for long talks, partying, sleeping in, etc. Implausible in so many ways.
Late to the discussion here, but my gripe isn't really with Abel, the baby that exists (although as Sepinwall points out, her's mostly a prop) but with the added one we'll see next year since Tara is pregnant. If the Sons are in prison and they do a jump ahead, Jax will have two children toddling around. Too much domestication for this show.
ReplyDeletePlotwise with the kid-search, what made me crazy was the whole lack of urgency. Your kid's been taken to another country by some murderous thugs, and you go over there and have time for long talks, partying, sleeping in, etc. Implausible in so many ways.
Late to the discussion here, but my gripe isn't really with Abel, the baby that exists (although as Sepinwall points out, her's mostly a prop) but with the added one we'll see next year since Tara is pregnant. If the Sons are in prison and they do a jump ahead, Jax will have two children toddling around. Too much domestication for this show.
ReplyDeletePlotwise with the kid-search, what made me crazy was the whole lack of urgency. Your kid's been taken to another country by some murderous thugs, and you go over there and have time for long talks, partying, sleeping in, etc. Implausible in so many ways.