‘Sons of Anarchy’ review: Is [spoiler] really dead?

“Sons of Anarchy” has brought us many a memorable moment over the past five seasons, but even we do not think we have seen anything as devastating as what happened during Tuesday night’s new episode.

Want to avoid spoilers? Then you should probably stop reading now; and yes, you have been warned.

In a ruthless beatdown inside of a prison (with a crowbar, no less), we ended up seeing he end of one Opie Winston near the end of the episode. In between what happened with Tig’s daughter last season and then this episode, Damon Pope is turning out to quite possibly be the biggest “big bad” of them all. He has now taken two lives important to this show, and has done so without having any of the blood technically on his hands.

In dealing with this (which is not easy, given that Opie was one of our favorite characters), it was hard to really even concentrate on anything else, whether it be Gemma starting to mess with Nero’s business (or even being arrested) and Clay continuing to look like hardly the villain that Damon is all of a sudden. At the end of the episode, Jax promised revenge over watching his best friend die and not being able to do anything about it … but the path to revenge is not going to be an easy one here. He is going to have the passion, sure, but he also needs the focus. Right now, his head is all over the place just as our tears are all over the floor.

Are you just as stunned as we are by what transpired here? If you want to see what is going to be coming up later in the season, you can check out some more scoop via executive producer Kurt Sutter over at the link here.

Photo: FX