Sons of Anarchy, "Falx Cerebri": Patience is a virtue

Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I spill some "diet cola" on you...

"That's it? You're gonna run blind off the cliff?" -Hale

As he and his "Shield" colleagues did with the strike team, Kurt Sutter clearly takes great joy in painting Samcro into tight corners, and they don't come much tighter than the one at the end of "Falx Cerebri." Unless Sutter plans to turn this show into a Northern California companion to "Oz," Clay and the boys will get out of jail sooner or later, but getting free, and then staying free, when they were caught red-handed by the cops (and filmed by strategically-placed video cameras), will require an exit strategy worthy of the best of Vic Mackey.

The episode's title is taken from a part of the brain that separates the two hemispheres, and represents the rough divide between the reckless emotion of Clay and the perhaps over-calculation of Jax. Clay has no problem running blind off the cliff, and while Jax would prefer to hang back, his insistence on hanging back and thinking is starting to backfire. He and Piney didn't want to tell Opie the truth about his wife to protect him, and all it's accomplished is to turn Opie into one of Clay's staunchest allies, and to deepen the schism in the group. And while Jax was right to vote against swift vengeance for Otto's eye last week, and right to try to curb the club's bloodlust for Chibs being blown up here, he's piled one too many cautious decisions on top of each other, and now no one in the club wants to hear from him any more. And so the core of the club(*) winds up in jail, and Zobelle is free to do to Charming what he wants.

(*) Minus Piney, who's off on an oddly-timed bender that seems designed to keep the character off-stage at an inconvenient moment in the story arc, and minus Opie, who was busy chasing Ethan and is so tough that flipping off his bike and onto a parked car barely knocked the wind out of him.

Zobelle so far has outsmarted Samcro at every turn, and his daughter Polly looks to be cut from the same evil, efficient cloth. Hale thinks he's intimidating her, but she's just using the honest but not particularly clever cop to bait the hook for her father's enemies. This will be trouble.

And Hale only gets to Polly by confronting Gemma with what Unser told him, which led to one of two hilarious Unser moments of the episode (the other being Unser's cup of radioactive urine), as he was taken completely off-guard when Gemma showed up to chew him out about it.

And fed up with the men in her life, however well-meaning some may be, Gemma winds up doing even more bonding with Tara. With their sunglasses and visible scars, the two look like they could be mother and daughter as they go for target practice outside Luanne's studio. (It's a good thing Gemma co-owns a body shop so she and Tara can get away with going all Thelma & Louise on Ima's car.)

Really, despite the usual Jax/Clay/Opie tension, and the cliffhanger at the end, this was one of the funnier episodes the show has done yet. Sutter and company have done such a good job establishing the characters that we can laugh at things like Gemma's hat box, or Happy shrugging and saying "Okay" when Bobby suggests cutting off Ethan's head in broad daylight, and yet the jokes don't take away from the tension. Not every drama can do that, but some of the great ones can, and at the moment, "Sons of Anarchy" is in "great" territory.

Finally, I'm going to be off work next week and unable to do a review of next week's episode, but I'll try to get some kind of open discussion post scheduled to publish shortly after it ends so you guys can talk about it.

What did everybody else think?