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This week’s episode of Sons of Anarchy was low on surprises with its major plot threads all going in their natural and expected directions. In the grand scheme of the season though, this was a necessary evil to set the stage for the final episodes, but it left viewers with what could be called little more than a transitional episode.

First off, Frankie meets his long-overdue demise in a manner anyone could’ve seen coming. No one really thought Jax’s plan would go off like he’d planned, not even Jax himself. Clay was going to find him first, Frankie was going to die before he could say a single thing to incriminate Clay and Jax’s only means of gaining the needed intel was going to become that other plan of his involving Gemma getting back in bed with the beast.

Admittedly, the identity of the shooter came as a bit of a surprise, as I’d expected it would be Clay all along; however, the rest played out almost exactly as I (and everyone else) had predicted.

Likewise, so too did things with Gemma. It was clear from past episodes that Nero was finding it a challenge to back off like Jax had told him, so the developments between him and Gemma went along more or less as expected. What was even more apparent was what Gemma would do in the end, which is get back with Clay and squeeze the information Jax needs out of him so she can become a part of her grandchildren’s lives once more.

As she tells Jax, she can count the moments of true happiness in her life on one hand: Jax, his brother, Abel, and Thomas. So while she likes Nero and wants to hold onto that, her grandchildren, her family, they take precedence. It was a foregone conclusion that she would go along with Jax’s offer. We just needed an episode for her to properly warm up to it because offering oneself up to a man like Clay isn’t a decision to be made quickly or taken lightly.

Juice’s fate (and guilt), on the other hand, was decided in a shockingly swift fashion by Jax. It was only last week that the Sheriff notified him of there being a rat in his midst, but that was apparently more than enough time for him to work out the identity of said rat. It would seem that it took mere seconds for him to deduce who it was, as well as decide what it was he was going to do about it.  Juice betrayed the trust of both him and the club and it appears as if he’ll pay for it with his life.

Though he still has hope, the episode ending with Jax on his tail, I can’t see them giving him a second reprieve. He was marked for death last season, yet somehow he survived. If Frankie’s death was long-overdue, then his has racked up late fees that would cost a small fortune.

Then again, Sutter loves to tease viewers like this, building up to an explosion before promptly diffusing matters (ex. Unser’s recent brush with death), so Juice escaping death another time around is entirely in the realm of possibility. If Jax weren’t handling him alone, but instead had brought the club in on it, I’d expect Juice to implicate Clay in some fashion before they went through with killing him. Sutter’ll find some other way to wimp out, though, I imagine. It’s one of the things he’s best at.

Another thing he’s good at is providing viewers with moments that come completely out of nowhere, such as Tara doing as Otto had done and smelling Luann’s perfume then subsequently pleasuring herself. I haven’t a clue where he’s going with this. I hope nowhere, because I’d rather forget that idiocy ever occurred. It’d just be an unwelcome distraction from more important storylines, ones that appear as if they’re finally on their way to being resolved.

Just focus on having Otto recant his statement and Clay being found out by the club, Sutter. Don’t complicate things.