Well, historically, for me it was sometime in the first episode when a bunch of losers fired a million rounds of ammo into a small confined space but no one was actually hurt, but I think it’s safe to say this show jumped the shark from every direction possible most of the time. That said, I enjoyed it a lot. I did miss the last four seasons, though, but recently binged on Netflix and saw it through to the end, more or less in four sittings. That’s extreme, I know, but it was fun. The single most troubling part for me, is the disgust I feel for having to watch Jax torture the Asian dude before killing him with the mini-pitchfork. To actually script a scene in which Jax, for the first time ever, doesn’t question the guy (because the first thing out of the strawman’s mouth would be how could he have done it if he was locked up in Las Vegas at the time - easily verifiable) but tortures him with the gag in was beyond insulting.
This.
Two years later, but : it’s a quote from one of the Austin Powers movies, lampshading the fact that while Austin and his NotBond Girl were supposed to be cruising through rural England, the scenes had very very obviously been filmed on stretches of US highways somewhere in the hills around L.A.
I have a lot of capacity to suspend disbelief, but accepting Tara as a surgeon was an insurmountable task.
That show started in mid-jump. The main reason to watch it was for how ridiculous it could get, and if you liked some of the individual actors, which I did.
If I had to pick a specific moment, though, I guess I’d go with the death of Tara, if only because all of Jax’s actions afterward were deliberately and bitterly divorced from logic, as though Jax had caught logic blowing Jax’s brother and then threw logic out of the house and tossed all of logic’s clothes on the lawn while calling logic a cheating whore.
I am confused by the people who think SOA was a small MC. Per the wiki, just based on what was shown in the show there were 39 charters spread across the US and in 5 other countries. Yes, the mother charter only directly dealt with a few of those clubs in the episodes, but they were much larger of a club that just SAMCRO/SAMDINO/SAMBEL/SAMTAZ and the Tacoma and Indian Hills charters that they interacted with on screen.
I’ve been meaning to get back to the show, but yeah, the baby theft/Ireland adventure threw me off. I didn’t smell greatness on the horizon.
I loved the idea that the show was an extended, modernized, biker version of Hamlet. And I think that it could have been if it hadn’t been successful, the first two seasons were great. But with success, the network heads wanted to draw it out, and that means throwing in random, stupid stuff. I tried to tell myself that the trip to Ireland was the SoA equivalent to Hamlet’s trip to England, but it wasn’t.
I’d like to see them get the cast back together and do a movie or miniseries which continues on from say…episode 14…and then plays out the rest of the plot from Hamlet, after the death of Ophelia. Just ignore all the rest of the TV show that they made.
I think, as has been mentioned, the reason people think it was a small MC is because the show didn’t do a good job of making people think otherwise. Yes, there were international chapters, but SAMCRO itself often looked smalltime. For one thing (and this is all from years old memory so if I’m wrong please tell me), in the beginning, the show was more focused on the Sons relationship with Charming. It was a show about how an MC chapter owned and controlled a small town, the businesses, politics, police, etc. That kept the focus local and therefore it looked small.
Also, one of the Sons was on oxygen and another was a part time Elvis impersonator. That sort of undercut how powerful a group they supposedly were. Then there were times when the membership dwindled to just like 5 or guys or so.
They were often struggling for money and when they did expand into new businesses, it was often something seemingly small scale- a whore house, porn movies. And then something usually went horribly wrong that they were powerless to control which that cut off that money flow and they were right back where they started.
Now maybe this is all normal operations for an MC chapter- 5 to 8 guys, a whore house, some gun running (which they were always on the verge of losing), I have no idea. But the image that projected was that they were always playing catch up. You’d think the mother chapter would have been on a bit more secure footing.
Another, maybe more psychological, aspect is that a lot of the clubs shenanigans happened outdoors in fields, scrub brush, outside a barn, etc. Now, that just might be the topography of the area they did business in, but I think it’s hard to say it didn’t also project a smalltime, rustic feel.