Sons of Anarchy, "The Sleep of Babies": Missing the target

Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I get Jesus to mow my lawn...

When you watch TV for a living, there are ways that it can ruin the actual experience of watching TV. Because I see so much, and because I'm always trying to watch with a critical eye, I often find myself in a position where I'm trying to out-think the show I'm watching. All though "The Sleep of Babies," I kept asking myself whether Kurt Sutter would be brave -- or maybe foolish -- enough to kill off Opie, and I kept wondering exactly how circumstances would conspire to save him at the last possible second.

But in this case, I didn't so much out-think the show as overthink it. I was so fixated on Opie -- on seeing Opie and Donna look so happy together finally, on watching Ryan Hurst look like the baddest man on the planet during the shootout in the doll warehouse and wondering how on Earth the show could go on without him -- that I never for a second anticipated that tragedy would befall the other half of that couple. So when Opie and Donna swapped cars leaving the party, mere seconds after Tig had pulled away to prepare for the hit, I was thunderstruck, and spent the final minutes of the episode with a knot in my stomach only slightly smaller than the one generated by some of the early scenes in last night's penultimate episode of "The Shield." Great misdirection, and a creative decision that I hope will have repercussions just as deep as when Shane borrowed a grenade on "The Shield."

I'd like to say more about yet another episode that was better than the one before it, but my head is exploding with a cold that doesn't want to leave our house. So I'm going to cut this review shorter than I'd like and leave it to you fine people.

Meanwhile, I'm going to talk to Kurt Sutter on Friday (after taking a look at the season finale, which I haven't had a chance to watch yet) for a season one post-mortem. I'm open to suggestions, if there are particular things you want answers about.

What did everybody else think?