Or conscience/good side. In the Hamlet parallel, I think he's Horatio, though the Hamlet comparison pretty much breaks down in the middle seasons.

Oh yeah. The bit at Gemma's father's house, where he's so reasonable about getting shot, then calling in "Bachman" in the Stephen King episode, then when all the news comes out, and his complaint to Tara & Gemma "you two are killing me!" And the whole pervert thing, where even in the current season someone makes a comment to Gemma alluding to necrophilia or bestiality and her instant comeback is "I'm not Tig."

I actually think that's a strength of the show, because it portrays the characters as human with mundane concerns that, because of their immediacy, outweigh the "big picture." The family was in trouble so they go running. Next to that, no one stops to think about preventing a beaten foe from escaping. I think that's also supposed to be emblematic of the heedless, desperate loyalty the majority of the members give the club. Even Jax, in the moments when he rails against it or seems willing to abandon the club, proves himself a product of its mindset and culture with the excuses he gives Tara in 4.01 for staying in "just a little longer" to earn a nest egg and get away cleanly. The code of macho pride is so much a part of him that he'll endanger his own family just to avoid having to be a house-husband. And that's what the Zoebel thing was about. It was a case of macho pride, punishing him for the harm he did the club. Clay has to be the one to kill him or else it doesn't even count. Like with the Russians, where they eliminate the guards and Kozik grabs and holds Putlova for Jax to be the one to stab him, just as Jax himself was stabbed. If it really was "just business" he'd have been shot with his goons. Zoebel was fleeing, and no longer in a position to hurt the club. He was under the death sentence for the harm he did the Teller-Morrow family, and when a more immediate crisis arose, they rushed off to deal with that. He did not need elimination for the good of the club, he had to die to appease Clay's & Gemma's pride.

She hadn't really done anything to deserve it yet. It wasn't until the next year that her frame-up of Opie really came into the open. And you simply do not get away with assassinating law enforcement officers in good standing. You do that, and the cops stop playing by the rules that restrain their superior man- & firepower. That was touched on in The Godfather (though not made explicit, it was the reason for all subsequent troubles of the Corleone family in that movie - the other families killed Sonny and forced Vito to make peace because Michael's assassination of the police captain had hurt the business of the whole Mafia) and has always been a reality for the police/cop dynamic. That was also why they were so careful to separate Stahl from any other cops (and why she felt okay with Unser there - she didn't realize how out the door he was, mentally or how far out his allegiance had shifted; in normal circumstances, not even a crooked cop would betray another LEO in that manner), and then pin the hit on the IRA (Chibbs drawing the cross & circle on the window in Jimmy O's blood).

And again, with Stahl and Jimmy O, it was the two members with personal grudges (Opie & Chibbs, respectively) who did the actual killing, making it the personal thing.

IMO, that history is only there to add weight to the recent grievances, and to underscore the falsity of Clay's protests that everything he does has been for the good of the club. The Hamlet dynamic has never really been more than an obvious sales pitch to get the show started. The real conflict & theme of the show was always about power and bonds, not the elementary coming of age thing implied early on.

Because that might, at best, have wiped out one chapter, and made every other SoA chapter a target for every other Mayan chapter. They had no personal grievance against any particular Mayans, so there was no reason to wipe out Alvarez & co, once they stripped Zoebel of his protection.

I wouldn't call it cowardice in the name of pragmatism, so much as a kind of unthinking acceptance of the culture and the way things are done in their world. It's kind of like international law or the law of war, which did sort of exist before any Geneva Conventions. Rather, like the rules of the underworld, they are a kind of common mindset about the limits of what is appropriate and what isn't, and those groups or nations that cross the line are marked out as suspect in the minds of their peers. As you point out, taking pragmatism to its rational extension would dictate the removal of the threat. Yet, the swaggering face-offs at gang summits, the posturing and even the violence are a part of what attracts these men to the lifestyle as much as the bikes and babes. None of them really want their enemies completely gone, because who would they "play" with then? They only go to the extreme when personal harm or betrayal takes place.

Too true. I hate to break it to you, but a lot of people had the same issues about season four as it wound down, despite being one of the most dynamic seasons of the show. Because I see the show as being about power and bonds and how they curtail one's choices, I think of the frustration as servicing that theme. The constant frustrations of enemies thwarting or manipulating the club is kind of the price they pay for taking on the lifestyle they do. They rejected law and society when they went "outlaw" as JT mentions in his book, but that also means they have to live in the jungle, by the rule of the jungle. Few people embrace the rule of the jungle thinking they are going to be the antelope or the wildebeast or even the hyena, but not everyone can be a lion or an elephant. Because they reject society's rules, they have no one to complain to when others impose their will or agenda on them. Where civilized people don't have to put up with criminals or corrupts officials dictating to them, or at least can find sympathy or support from elsewhere in the system, the SoA have to take it, because that's what they signed up for.

They kill the Russians, because they can, and because they have a grudge. It has nothing to do with deserving it or not. The Russians being the original wronged party in their grievance has less to do with the outcome, than the fact that Clay & Jax found another ally with enough power to allow them to get away with gunning down Putlova and co.

But I think that might be part of the point. The Sons reject one machine, but another one they can't see is working on them. They are too close to see the cause and effect that keep thwarting them. It was the bonds of family loyalty and common love that allowed them to put aside their differences and overcome the dissension Zoebel had sought to sow in the ranks, but those same qualities led them to abandon their pursuit, because family loyalty and a common love (for Abel instead of Gemma) demanded their attention elsewhere. It's a kind of vicious cycle you see going on. Even with the Russians - they would not have been in a position to get screwed over by the Sons, if they had not first been willing to sell out Jimmy O and betray their own hospitality.

Yeah, I get where you are coming from, and think your points are just as valid as my own perspective. I like the show and I love to overthink things, and this was pretty much an opportunity to get a lot of things I've thought off my chest.

Can't argue with you on that. All I can say in response is that it plays into the notion that for all their rejection of conventional structures and limitations, their chosen lifestyle imposes its own, which leave them frustrated. You can never be free of a social compact. You might scoff at the one of civilization, but there is no superman who can make a go of it on his own, and eventually the pressures of the world force even outlaws to make their own society and laws, entrapping those who seek to break free of societal and moral imposition in a completely different but equally constraining set of rules. To us on the outside, we don't see why these violent murderers and vice peddlers can't just pop a cap in their enemies' asses, but in their own way, they have to follow rules every bit as much as we do, and so they end up just as frustrated as we are by our own bullies. Opie needs the club to survive (spiritually, even if not literally in his case), and Clay is head of the club, so that means he can't kill Clay unless he wants to go down himself. Without Donna, he has nothing else, so he CAN'T turn on the club, and that's what killing the leader means. If SAMCRO decided to seize a moment of Mayan weakness and go all Carthago delenda est, the rest of the outlaw biker world (and those parts of the underworld that have dealings with the SoA & Mayans, like the Galindo cartel or the Real IRA and so on) would eventually pressure them into stopping or get rid of the sons themselves the way nations might unite to put down a rogue state that refuses to follow the same conventions everyone else does. That's not in-show mythology, that's the way the world works. No one likes a game changer, especially not the Powers that Be, because the current game is the one they have mastered to rise to the top. If the game changes, they run the risk of falling behind in the mastery of it, so those with power tend to uphold the status quo.