Sure, this was all old DVR material from last year, but the DVD for Sons of Anarchy's fifth season has been released so I'm cool with logging this. At the end of season four, Sons of Anarchy completely whiffed on their finale, choosing to remain stagnant rather than make either of the big changes that were heavily foreshadowed all season long. I was worried that season five would continue with the stagnation and fall into a stretch of bad writing. I was wrong, but that didn't make season five any easier to watch. Season five was actually very hard to watch. It's just brutal. Think, torture-porn comes to tv. Here's a brief list of awful things that happened in season five, and I'm probably missing many others:
-A man witnesses some goons burning his daughter alive
-A man sees his tied up wife casually shot in the head
-A different man has a spurned lover force him to have sex with his new lover in front of her at gunpoint, only for her to commit suicide immediately after
-A man watches his best friend get beaten to death
I mean, holy shit! Oh yeah, the show seemed suddenly progressive by introducing a trans character, only to have her played for laughs and make the rest of the crew uncomfortable. Whatever happened to the fun-loving group of criminals who were just trying to make their community a better place? On Breaking Bad watching a situation go from bad to worse is part of the appeal; on Sons of Anarchy it just makes me feel like the show is pushing too hard to shock its audience. Oh yeah since I'm all caught up now I can add a few more brutal moments from season six, which I'll remind you has only broadcasted two episodes:
-A man drowns another man in a pool of urine
-Women are raped and kept in cages
-A man cheats on his wrongly-imprisoned and fiercely loyal wife with a woman he just met
-Numerous prison rapes
-A woman is suffocated with a pillow minutes after watching her husband get killed, and she has really done nothing wrong, except be the mother of....
-A child who commits a school shooting.
Yeah, I think they're doing away with "plot" and ready to focus solely on shocking. Why am I watching this again?
Same boat here. Part of the appeal of, say, Breaking Bad is that it treats its own horrible events with the gravitas they deserve. Sons of Anarchy seems more content to play the same "yeah, the heroes of this show are shitty people, but look how bad their enemies are!" card year after year.
ReplyDeleteI just want to add, to last year's awful events, a man biting off his own tongue to avoid confessing anything to the police. And was that also the year he slit the nurse's throat, drawing the ire of this year's early "villain of the year" contender in the lawman hooked on heroin?
I don't HATE this show, but I certainly don't really like it anymore. Seasons 1, 2, and 4? Incredible. This shit? Tiring.