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(S02E13) "Any idea where we're headed?" /"No." - Chief Unser to Gemma

If you're looking for someone to yak to at the office tomorrow about the second season closer of Sons of Anarchy but don't want to open your meathole to someone who has no idea what you're talking about, there's one sure-fire way to tell without having to say a word: check their fingernails. They will be bitten right down to the bone.

The 90-minute episode was a real tension builder from beginning to end and it not only managed to solve some of the protagonists' problems in very creative and interesting ways, but it also created new ones that just made me hungrier for season three. It couldn't come soon enough if I had a time machine.

There was another observation from the last episode of Sons of Anarchy that I noticed, or maybe I just didn't want to acknowledge that I noticed it.

Just before Clay, Jax and company finally move in on Ethan Zobelle's cigar store for what will presumably be their final kill, Ethan and his daughter share an uncomfortably long kiss.

Granted these two think they are going to have their brains splattered against the walls by their scorned enemies and are in fear of their ever-loving lives, but the kiss they shared seemed to suggest that something else might be going on between then. So...

(S02E12) "Either you or me goes home in a bag." - Jax to A.J.

The showdown we've been waiting all season to see finally happened tonight and even though it didn't end the way the antagonists deserved (i.e. heads removed where the shoulder meets the neck, placed on a stick and paraded around town on a substandard Japanese import), it still had my head spinning.

The show opens with SAMCRO preparing for their big, inevitable smackdown with the League by keeping all of their loved ones under lock and key at the clubhouse. But instead of just jumping into the fray head first with baseball bats twisted in barb-wire and all, they do what they should have done from the beginning: they plotted and planned. They turned the tables on the League and by doing so, turned the League on each other.

"Pull the trigger man. That's the only way this leather is coming off my back." - Jax to Alvarez, the head of the Mayans who orders him to give up his club jacket

Jax is supposed to be the hero of this little modern day Shakesperian epic, but he's starting to look more and more like the enemy in each episode.

I don't mean that he'll be the one in the end who has been scheming the whole time behind SAMCRO's back with the white power. This is a well-crafted, slow paced, high caliber drama, not a badly written Schwarzenegger movie with a thrown together twist ending (cough, Total Recall, cough).

Jax is more of an enemy of himself. He might have good intentions at heart, but his moves are nowhere near his brain. Maybe his loyalty to his family runs deeper than he ever imagined. Logic and family hardly make a decent cocktail. Anyone with a brother-in-law can tell you that.

(S02E06) "It's not your time yet, man. This is Clay's club. You either back down or get in line, before somebody gets hurt." - Opie to Jax

It was really hard to find a good quote for this week's episode. I watched the bastard four times before I found the one I did and I'm not entirely thrilled with it.

That's because this week's show was all action and little talk.

The tension between SAMCRO and the Aryans got turned up to 11 when they planted a car bomb in the shop that almost turned Chibs into a fried fish filet that would need a gallon of malt vinegar to be edible. This not only made for a perfect set-up against the club but also within it, driving an even deeper wedge between Clay, Jax and each of their alliances.