FX
‘Sons of Anarchy’ hits the ground roaring in season 4.
The boys are back in Charming and things are getting interesting fast.
What’s not necessarily good news for Charming is quite good news for TV viewers.
Clay (Ron Perlman), Jax (Charlie Hunnam) and most of the other key members of the Sons of Anarchy, the “motorcycle club” based in Charming, Calif., spent much of last season in Ireland, straightening out some business with their counterparts.
Now they’re home again, though they made a 14-month stopover in a California prison. The fourth season starts on freedom day, and within hours a half dozen high-octane plots have exploded like a torched warehouse full of hot AK-47s.
Some of them naturally involve the women of “SOA,” notably Jax’s mother, Gemma (Katey Sagal) – who was recently a crime victim herself when the Emmys denied her a Best Actress nomination.
Gemma has been doing the grandmother thing, helping care for Jax’s son, Abel, along with Abel’s baby mama, Tara (Maggie Siff). Tara’s an outsider to the Sons and Gemma at first mistrusted her, but the two women have developed some combination of a truck and a sharp-edged bond that’s fascinating to watch and track.
One of the Sons’ missions in Ireland was to reclaim Abel, who had been kidnapped. So now that Jax is back and out of jail, he’s thinking about what kind of life he’s been living and whether that’s the life he wants to share with Tara and Abel.
Does it involve the Sons, where he is the heir apparent leader when Clay steps down? Can it?
You don’t leave the Sons quite as easily as you leave the house to buy a six-pack.
Then there are some business issues with the club, like how it will deal with the latest competition in the gun-running game. This time Clay and company are negotiating with the Russian mob, which has been gaining increasing currency as a reliable TV villain and looks suitably menacing here.
At the same time, the Sons are also facing civic issues inside Charming. As they ride back into town, they notice a new housing development being built by a man whose moral scruples make the Sons look like Gandhi.
So they decide they will try to stop him, which raises the interesting possibility that the Sons could be the good guys in that throwdown.
That in turn resurrects another issue “Sons of Anarchy” raises a lot, which is that morality can be a relative thing in this nasty old world.
In other developments, Clay pays a visit to Charlie Unser (Dayton Callie), who served them well when he was the town’s corrupt sheriff, but has now been fired and lives in a decrepit trailer waiting to die of cancer.
Clay figures he can put some purpose back in Charlie’s life, and if it also helps the Sons with some of their multiple issues, well, so much the better.
Better for us, too. “Sons” has hit the ground roaring.
dhinckley@nydailynews.com