Five F*cked-Up Things That Happen on Sons of Anarchy Season 5 (With A Bonus Of Five More Spoiler-ish Items)

As of this writing, there’s less three days till the much anticipated Season Six of Sons of Anarchy premieres on Tuesday, September 10th on FX. We’ve been psyched since July! Straight up: Mrs. Horror Boom here (who also wrote “Ten F*cked-Up Things That Happen On Sons of Anarchy” about this time last year) needs to warn you now that if you’re easily offended, or don’t want any S5 spoilers, you shouldn’t be reading this.* Season 5 was consistently entertaining, but also especially disturbing. REALLY disturbing shit took place on almost every episode, sometimes twice in the same ep. I still recall more things that made me curse out loud (or yell “HOAH!” with varying degrees of volume at the screen) during S5 than in 1, 2, and 3 combined. Quite a few people die horribly just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were probably thinking wait, what the fuck did I do? as a dying thought.

Guy looks like Jason Vorhees just attacked him with a damn nail gun…

I originally wrote this as a ten-item list (with a bonus five), then stopped when I realized half the items were either A. really, really uncomfortable to put into words, even just documenting them B. really offensive, even for SOA (I had one in the next-to-last draft, then I chickened out and replaced it at the last minute because there was no way to phrase it without sounding creepy) or C. contained spoilers or borderline spoilers. There’s some fans out there who are still waiting for Netflix to get S5 on streaming .* So I compromised and wrote up five, then a bonus five that you should probably skip if you’re waiting to see S5. One more warning! This list is not for the faint of heart or easily offended. Then again, if you watch SOA, you know that the Kurt Sutter-helmed show is not for the faint of heart or easily offended in the first place.

Five Fucked-Up Things That Happen On Sons of Anarchy, Season Five

Note: This first one caused me to wince more than anything else that happened during S5. The prosthetic was waaay too realistic, and the sound effects added in post were really nasty.

1. A man in shackles suddenly and violently bites off his own tongue by slamming his chin down on a table (basically just to emphasize a point). Tongue flops down onto the table, blood everywhere, and while you are still trying to process this…

2. Crying and laughing at the same time***, the man THEN picks up his severed tongue and hurls it across the room at a one-way glass window (he was giving an official statement), where is sticks- splat– and then slides down, leaving a gruesome trail. Good thing this came right before a commercial break aired …in fact I’m sure it was intentional, so horrified viewers at home could regroup and pay attention to the next scene. Scroll to the bottom of the article to see it, that is, if you’re not eating or getting ready to eat …and be thankful it’s not in HD. (Note how fast the guy interviewing him scrambles the hell out of the room)

3. A man beats another man to death by caving in his head with a large glass snowglobe. Not just any snowglobe, a musical snowglobe, and if that’s not Kurt Sutter-esque enough for you, the man deliberately winds it up before he goes to work on the guy’s skull. That way a merry little tinkling tune is playing throughout the murder (the song is nothing identifiable, you think Disney was gonna give them the song rights to “It’s a Small World” for that?). We see blood and bits of brains on the globe after he’s done (with the song still playing).

4. A man (too long of a backstory to go into here) takes revenge on another man by forcing him watch his own teenage daughter (trapped at the bottom of a metal pit among some recently dismembered cadaver parts) get doused with the contents of a can of gasoline and then set on fire. She screams for her “daddy” to save her throughout being burned alive. I think they ended up having her body cremated in the next episode; if so, it must have only taken about 10 seconds– tops– since that’s how long and badly she burned.

5. THIS happens: (not much violence, but very, very NSFW)

Say, I could swear I’ve seen that she-male somewhere before… glad they kept it a surprise till the end credits. Hope we get to see ~~Cletus~~ Venus VanDamme again!

BONUS – SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

1. The following dialogue takes place between a woman and her mother-in-law (pretty sure anyone who’s watched more than a few episodes can figure out who) and the MIL threatens to have her sent to prison so she never gets to see her kids grow up (another long backstory).

~~Gemma~~ MIL: …at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing you were locked up and getting fist-raped until they’re well into their twenties. (punches the other woman in the stomach, hard). Hope you aren’t pregnant. (leaves)

2. A pretty big guy leaps from his hospital bed, attacks a petite nurse and smashes her head into a wall, then brutally stabs her in the neck five times with an ornate gold and silver crucifix (which used to belong to his retired porn star wife, who was beaten to death and dumped in a ditch a few seasons ago). So much blood spurts all over him (and the walls) that he looks like a leading lady in some French ‘new extremist’ horror movie about halfway in. The nurse was just minding her own business before he attacked her, by the way.

3. A man goes to his ex-wife’s apartment, charms her into letting him in to talk, then roughs her up and slams a large hypodermic needle filled with a speedball into her shoulder even as she begs him not to do it (made more horrifying by the fact that she’s a recovered drug addict now working an a rehab center, where they do drug testing).

4. A rival gang member (named Diego) being chased by the club on foot sees a woman getting into her SUV, so without looking he yanks her out of the car and shoves her over, then leaps into the driver’s seat to jack the car. Unfortunately (for him), he didn’t see her pet pit bull in the back seat, who immediately attacks him. Nero (Jimmy Smits plays this upscale bordello owner), turns his back to lean against the door to keep it closed as the guy screams, definitely fighting a losing battle with the dog (he deserved it, trust me). Dialogue between the cheerful Sons at the scene- Jax: “That shit’s gotta hurt!” (Laughing) Nero: “We should probably let him out.” Chibs: “That’d be the good Catholic thing to do.” End of scene.

5. The end result can only seen on the S5 Blu-ray “Extended Episode” version: we see the Sons and Nero sauntering down a busy sidewalk to meet up with a fellow Latino gang that they have a better relationship with. One of them asks what happened to Diego, and someone answers, grinning, “Oh, we gave him a ride out of town.” They step aside from a colorful ‘rocking pony’ (one of the coin-operated mechanical ones that are made for small children to give them a ride when they rock back and forth) they’d all been standing around to reveal a half-conscious, bloodied Diego tied to it. The icing on the cake is that they dressed him in a full-length pink formal gown that looks like the one Gwyneth Paltrow wore to the Oscars that one year when she won Best Actress, except this one has more taffeta and sequins. “Hey man, I think pink’s your color,” one guy tells him while another loads in more quarters.

Now that I think of it, those last two aren’t that fucked-up, considering that Diego did a bunch of horrible things, including running an illegal dog-fighting operation where the losing dogs got taken out around back and shot, then dumped into big plastic yard-waste disposal-type bins (we see them full of other abused, discarded dogs–the Sons who see this are visibly shaken). Before I saw the “extended scene” that didn’t air on FX, I assumed they let the dog kill him as poetic justice. Plus, Tig rescues one of the dogs and take her back to the clubhouse, adopting her, so the dog is one of the few characters in a happy place by the end of the S5 finale. Let’s hope that whatever mayhem goes down during S6 of SOA—and Kurt Sutter promised/warned us and the press in numerous interviews this would be ‘the bloodiest, deadliest, most brutal season yet’– that at least the dog ends up making it through okay.

Here’s the scene with the …with the …tongue (again, be glad the quality isn’t perfect):

Check out the extra-large Related Articles bit below this piece for more goods –and spoilers, if you want ’em—on Season Six of Sons of Anarchy. The last two articles focus on the very fucked-up (even for SOA) things that transpire on the Season 6 Premiere, “Straw”, including probably the ugliest and most twisted murder-by-drawning scene ever aired on TV (so far). There were probably enough for a ‘fucked-up things that happen in E0601’ piece, but no way am I going there.

Finally, here’s the latest S6 trailer:

*If you’re one of my relatives over age 60 or, actually, even a friend who knows me but doesn’t like to watch anything violent on TV or in movies, please stop reading NOW, especially if you happened to pick this day to finally check out my blog. Come back later this week when I’m writing about Insidious Chapter 2 or something.

**These fans on Netflix are ANGRY (if that was the only way I had to watch the show and had to wait a goddamned year while avoiding spoilers, I would be too).

***We’ve seen the Season 6 premiere since this was posted, and if the character had known what was coming for him– in the cold open for Chrissake– he probably would have just cried. GAH.