Sons of Anarchy, "Eureka": Head out on the highway

Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I file the serial numbers off my extra gun...

"Charming's a special town. Not many folks take to it. I like to think the town chooses its occupants. Right ones stay; wrong ones disappear." -Unser

This killer second season of "Sons of Anarchy" just keeps getting better, doesn't it? Kurt Sutter and company (here Kurt co-writes with Brett Conrad, with Guy Ferland directing) are expanding the scope of what they can do - with this episode offering us the image of the full Samcro roster (augmented with a lot of help from Central Casting) out on their blood run, plus the action of Jax and Piney's assault on the bounty hunters' motel room - but they're also going much deeper into who these characters are and the many ways that their association with the club, and with Charming, is messing them up.

Last week, the Jax/Clay feud had to co-exist with the tension between Clay and Gemma. But with the club out on the road, and with Tig's capture by the bounty hunters complicating the gun deal, things come to a very violent head between these two. But more interesting than the fight itself, or the grousing beforehand, is seeing who's taking which side. Piney's clearly with Jax because he knows about Donna, while Opie sides with Clay precisely because he doesn't know about that, and because he's thrown himself so deeply into the club that he's going to blindly follow its leader. It made sense at the time for Jax and Piney not to tell him, but this is very bad now. The only way to get Opie on their side is to tell him the truth, at which point he may feel almost as betrayed by his father and his best friend as by his president. It's bad enough that Clay and Tig did this, but for Jax and Piney to not tell him - to let him keep liking and trusting the men who murdered Donna, and to let them stay alive when all Opie cares about is killing anyone involved - well, I just keep thinking about how good Opie is with explosives and worrying that this season is going to end with a lot of them going off.

On the flip side, I think we all assumed that one of this season's story arcs was going to be about Gemma stalking and killing (or badly hurting) AJ and the other men who attacked her. Instead, she spots his telltale tattoo in episode four, follows him, with gun in hand, and... can't pull the trigger.

Why not? Is it because she can hear AJ's conversation with his son and that humanizes him too much? Is it because he damaged her so badly that she's still afraid of him, even in a situation where she has all the power and he faces all the danger? Or has the experience - and the help and compassion she's received since from people like Unser and Tara and Neeta - altered her in a different way? Monstrous as the rape was, is it possible it's forced her to view the world in a different way? That she's not as cold and hard and vengeful as she used to be? Or is she just hanging around in the chapel because she won't have to talk to strangers in there?

Whatever the reason, Katey Sagal continues to knock it out of the park on this storyline, and I like how she played Gemma's hand tremors so they looked very much like Clay's arthritic mitts when he's in the middle of an attack.

Some other thoughts on "Eureka":

• Clay's difficulty in getting the bike up was a nice art-imitates-life moment, as Ron Perlman has struggled more than the other actors in mastering the art of riding. He's better now than he was at the start of the series ("I don’t talk to him; he doesn’t talk to me," he jokes), but when I asked him about the learning process back at press tour, he said:

Well, the interesting thing about Clay is that we’re dealing with a character whose riding days are probably coming closer to an end than a beginning. He’s got these problems with his hands. He’s got this oncoming profound arthritis which will disable him from being able to ride, which is one of the story points that we kind of revisit every once in a while. So that helps me in my disposition about my relationship with the bike. But the show is really so heavy on the presidency and all of the things that that entails that the riding of the bike, thankfully, is just, sort of an accessory to a very complex network of who the guy is.

• It's so rare to see Maggie Siff smile in character, as either Tara or as Rachel Mencken, that it was kind of startling when she flashed her teeth after seeing little Abel in his Samcro knit cap? And how soon before FX or the studio tries to merchandise those things?

• In addition to his showdown with Ethan, quoted above, I loved Unser's continued exasperation with having to be Gemma's friend and protector, particularly the way he says, "What am I supposed to do with that?" after Gemma admits to pointing a gun at the woman in the other car. And Unser later reminds us of how long he's known Gemma, and how well he knows her, while again painting a parallel between Gemma and Tara. Is one of the stories of the series going to be Gemma softening just as Tara gets harder to handle her life as Jax's "old lady"? And how soon before that hospital administrator starts being more overt in her objections to all of Tara's visitors from both sides of the law?

• The bald, intense club member who rode with Jax, Piney, Chibbs and Half-Sack on the rescue mission is Happy, played by technical advisor David Labrava. He appeared in several episodes last year, but it had been a while since he played a prominent role. But if you're going on an armed raid, he's clearly a guy you want on your side.

What did everybody else think?