Sons of Anarchy, "Gilead": Jail bait

Spoilers for tonight's "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I let you know that I don't want to be set up...

"I ain't never seen us beat up this bad." -Bobby

That Bobby can say this only midway through the episode, before Agent Stahl turns up again, and before Clay and Jax have a protracted, ugly brawl the likes of which I haven't seen since Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David threw down in "They Live!"... Well, that tells you what kind of awful shape SAMCRO is in by the end of the hour, and what an intense, terrific hour of this increasingly great show "Gilead" was.

This week is going to be lighter on writing time than I would like, so I can't go into everything I liked about "Gilead," but I'll try to make do with the short version.

Kurt Sutter said on Twitter that the episode was an homage to "Oz," his favorite TV show of all time. But while it had that prison setting, and a few convenient shiv attacks and beat-downs out of sight of the guards, it felt very much like a prison-set episode of a Kurt Sutter show, where the protagonists are scrambling to solve an ever-increasing set of problems, most of them of their own making. So we had the SAMCRO guys in jail trying to watch each other's backs and arrange for protection from the Niners, Opie and Sheriff Trammell (who's more overtly in SAMCRO's pocket than the Charming cops are, including Unser) trying and failing to set up the tranny snitch, and Gemma trying to guilt Oswald into springing for the bail money.

And, as per usual on both "Sons of Anarchy" and "The Shield," things mostly worked out, in that the club guys get bailed out before one of them gets killed. But in the larger picture, matters are more screwed-up than ever: Juice is stabbed (which, as Bobby notes, is only going to add to the mountain of debt that Chibs' hospital stay will bring), Trammell is shot, Stahl is back in the picture, Oswald and Gemma are going to be hard on Clay to keep the club from forfeiting the bail money, and Bobby's plea for "a healing" between Clay and Jax instead leads to that savage brawl that solves exactly nothing.

In the end, Clay and his guys go back into the clubhouse (where they plot out all their illegal business), Jax goes into the Teller/Morrow tow office (the one legitimate aspect of SAMCRO), and Gemma and Tara are left standing in the middle. This club needs a healing, but instead it seems more deeply wounded than ever.

Hell of an episode. Hell of a season.

What did everybody else think?