Since last week I concentrated on the issue of how women are treated within Sons of Anarchy, I didn’t really have a chance to talk about the whole Juice issue. This week, that’s pretty much all there is to talk about. Watching Sons of Anarchy this season is weird on a couple of levels: I have screeners, so I’m watching the episodes a little bit ahead of time, and I can read Kurt Sutter‘s tweets about the season as it’s happening, instead of having no context because I’m not caught up on the show.
Sutter was having a moment on Twitter this week, as I guess some TV blogs have had negative things to say about Juice’s storyline. Specifically, Sutter tweeted, “critics and fans are struggling with the juice racism story. they crave more exposition. they’re not gonna get it. i don’t point story.” I found this really surprising. I don’t read about shows that I review, so I had no idea that this was an issue with people out there. There hasn’t been a single time I wanted more exposition or explanation. I love this storyline – even if I don’t understand it for a goddamn minute.
To me, Juice being half black instead of fully Puerto Rican is completely a semantic issue. The club knew he wasn’t completely white, but they took him anyway. Who gives a shit about who his father is? Now, that’s how I would approach it, but obviously, I don’t share the same decision making process as these guys.
Even if Juice thinks that they’ll kick him out of the club and make him black out his tattoos, surely he has to know that that’s preferable to what they’ll to if they find out that he not only stole coke, but killed another member trying to cover it up. He’s never seen what they’ll do to a guy who happens to have a black father; he’s seen plenty of instances in which traitors have been dealt with.
So from this standpoint, Juice’s actions don’t make any sense – but that’s what makes this so interesting. These are not the actions of a rational man; they are the actions of a desperate man, a man so driven by fear that he will throw away any sense of family and loyalty he has toward the club, in a vain hope that they won’t find out his secret.
Juice has to know that all of his actions are in vain, yet he can’t stop trying. He knows that the new sheriff is out to get the club, and after he has him arrested for possession of cocaine that he was asked to provide, Juice should be even more solid in the knowledge that there’s no way out of this. In fact, maybe he is. Maybe it is the possession of this knowledge that leads him to the edge. The walls are closing in on him, and instead of just coming clean and hoping for the best or simply disappearing and making a new life for himself somewhere, he takes a chain, ties one end to a tree branch, the other end to his neck, and jumps.
For all of their talk of loyalty, is there really any? Opie was almost murdered because they thought he was a rat; Clay murdered John Teller so he could keep running guns; Gemma told Jax that if he worked with ATF, the guys would kill him and there was nothing she could do about it. She said this to her own son. So is it any wonder that instead of Juice coming out and saying, “hey guys, funny story…” he tries to kill himself?
SAMCRO has taken a much darker turn this season. Each week, something happens that makes these guys harder and harder to root for. Each death threat, each woman who has her face bashed against a makeup table makes it more difficult for us, as an audience, to want these guys to continue getting out of their jams. Hurting Juice is just another striking example of this. If any of these guys can be called “good,” it’s him. So to see him go down this road of despair and hopelessness over some bullshit archaic rule is difficult.
As Sutter said himself, “it makes people UNCOMFORTABLE the guys they love to hate are racists. they can be gunrunning misogynist murderers, but they can’t be racist […] juice breaks our fucking heart. the innocent trapped by his own fate.”
But the real question is, is this the end for Juice? I’ve got to say no. He’s still kicking as we fade to black, and the final sounds of the episode sound suspiciously like a tree branch breaking. Besides, if Juice succeeds in killing himself, where does that leave us from a story standpoint? The club will never know his secret if he dies. But if he survives, he has a lot of explaining to do. I can’t wait to hear what he says.
Clacked by Kona Gallagher 
on Oct 18, 2011 @ 23:01 EST5EDT
