As anybody who's watched "Sons of Anarchy" knows, the FX channel's highest-rated show rivals "Game of Thrones" when it comes to killing off characters. And that's a pattern that doesn't sound like it's about to change as the seventh and final season of the show debuts at 10 p.m. Tuesday night with an extended, one-hour and 45-minute episode.
Warning: spoilers about what happened on Season 6 are coming right up, so if you haven't yet watched the prior season, or seen its shattering final moments, you know what to do.
"It's a very violent season," is how star Charlie Hunnam described what's coming up in Season 7, as he was surrounded by TV reporters and critics at this summer's Television Critics Association summer press tour.
The violent events, Hunnam said, "emerge pretty naturally out of the story," and fit the show he described as "a really interesting and beautiful balance between pulpy drama and Shakespearean drama."
But, Hunnam added, the show's opinionated and fiery creator, Kurt Sutter, was feeling even less need to restrain himself than usual.
"It's Kurt's last season of writing the show," Hunnam said. "He's never been really one for pulling punches, but now in the last season, there's really no reason to keep anything in reserve."
That much we could have predicted. "Sons of Anarchy" tells the story of Jackson "Jax" Teller (Hunnam), leader of a motorcycle club involved in assorted illegal activities in the deceptively named town of Charming, Calif. In its prior six seasons, the show has consistently walked right up to the edge -- and then gone ahead and marched right over it -- when it comes to showing the bloody, brutal extremes Jax, his club members, and their rivals will go to when it comes to looking out for their own.
Season 6 ended with one of the show's most horrifying scenes yet, as Jax's mother, Gemma (Katey Sagal) brutally murdered Jax's wife, Tara, in the mistaken belief that Tara was going to testify against Jax. Adding to the mayhem, the Charming sheriff walked in on the bloody scene, along with tormented club member Juice (Theo Rossi), who was hiding from Jax, after Jax told him he knows Juice betrayed him. Juice shot the sheriff in the back, killing him, and he and Gemma fled.
When Jax entered the house, he found Tara lying in a pool of blood, and the sheriff dead, with no clue who committed the terrible crime.
As Season 7 begins, Jax is doing a short stint behind bars on a parole violation (where he has his own violent activities, as part of a peace-brokering deal with a white supremacist inmate played by Marilyn Manson.)
But once Jax gets sprung, he has one goal -- getting revenge on whoever killed Tara. But he has no idea that his own mother is the murderer.
Looking ahead to Season 7 in a panel at the TV critics' press tour, Sagal said of her character, "She's somewhat duplicitous," which is putting it mildly.
"What's coming out of her mouth and what's going on in her brain are two different things," Sagal said. "And as you'll see as the season progresses, she's made adjustments to the situation based on her basic instinct, which is to survive and to keep her family together. She is still all about that."
Hunnam said the final season finds Jax giving up any grand plans or vision for trying to get the club out of illegal businesses.
"One of the things that I had decided just in terms of understanding where Jax was, was that this final betrayal and tragedy in his life had completely demolished any potential of him trusting anyone outside of his immediate circle." In his scenes, Hunnam said he trying trying to instill in Jax "that sense that, unless you are my Mom, my children, or one of the Sons of Anarchy, you better look out."
The new season picks up about 10 days after the Season 6 finale, Hunnam said. "Jax is in a very kind of schizophrenic state, I think. I mean, he's obviously very, very sad and vulnerable and kind of broken, but there's a huge amount of vengeance and anger in his heart."
The Season 6 scene of Gemma attacking Tara -- first with an iron, then trying to drown her in a sinkful of water, and finally stabbing her in the head with a fork -- was one of the most disturbing in the show's history.
But when asked about whether he worries about going too far with such scenes, Sutter said, "I don't think anything we've ever done, no matter how obscure or outrageous, has been inorganic, has been unbelievable, as a result of the heightened circumstances and the players involved. And the reason why it was a fork is because it was there.
"It's not that my goal is to disturb people," Sutter said. "But I also want that reaction to when beloved characters go away. I want people to be upset." When viewers get angry or outraged when characters die, Sutter said, "To me, that means that you're writing characters that are relatable. You're writing characters that are believable. And you're writing characters that people want to show up each week, which means, quite frankly, that I'm doing my job."
-- Kristi Turnquist