Watch Sons Of Anarchy Balm

Spoilers for tonight's extra-long "Sons of Anarchy" coming up just as soon as I introduce some serious people to some serious fungi...
"Blood family, hometown, all that s--t moves back a row. Once you're patched, members are your family. -Juice
"Balm," the best episode so far of this exceptional second season of "Sons of Anarchy," comes along at a perfect time. "Mad Men" has just gone on hiatus. If you don't have DirecTV, "Friday Night Lights" won't be on TV until next summer. So "Sons of Anarchy" is, at the moment, the best drama on television, and an episode like "Balm" makes it clear the title shouldn't just be by default. So I'm not ashamed to admit that when Gemma told Clay and Jax about her rape, things got very, very dusty in the Sepinwall living room. The genius of that scene - as written by Dave Erickson and Stevie Long, directed by Paris Barclay (from "In Treatment," but also someone Kurt Sutter worked with several times on "The Shield") and played by Katey Sagal, Ron Perlman, Charlie Hunnam and Maggie Siff - is that it's not about everyone getting upset and flipping over tables and swearing revenge. (Though Jax does pound his fist once before realizing that's not what his mother needs at the moment.) After Jax has spent the entire episode preparing to say goodbye to the charter, to his friends, to the life he's built for himself, he rests his hand on Clay's shoulder, and Clay takes it. And Jax takes his SAMCRO tags back on his way out the door. All the rest of it - Donna and Opie and Caracara and power plays - is forgotten, or at least put to the side. Zobelle thought that news of Gemma's rape would have destabilized the club, and maybe if the news had come out when it happened, it would have. If anything's going to save SAMCRO from its current civil war, it's going to be this need to rally around Gemma and kick some righteous ass on the men who hurt her.

And Jax feels anger for his mother, and compassion for his stepfather. And Tara feels proud of Gemma for finally opening up and exposing her vulnerability. Incredible.

All through this season, Sutter and company have done a good job of giving depth to club members outside the core of Clay, Jax, Tig and Opie, and the expanded running time of "Balm" allowed even more of that than usual.

It's really remarkable what they pull off with Chibs here.

The amount of Chibs backstory they dumped on us in this one via Agent Stahl - that Jimmy O had Chibs kicked out of the IRA, gave him his scars and kept his wife and daughter as trophies - should have felt clumsy and shoe-horned, but it didn't.

If the show didn't still have Hale as an example of a lawman who's decently and (mostly) not corrupt, I'd worry that Sutter and company were trying to stack the sympathy deck too much in SAMCRO's favor and away from the cops with the depiction of Stahl. If Ally Walker wasn't so good in the part - and particularly at showing how Stahl enjoys performing for her targets like this is all one big play for her - I would absolutely despise her, instead of largely despising her while admiring the actress playing her.

This is a deep, deep hole that SAMCRO is in. But with one selfless, ego-less gesture Gemma may have finally placed momentum on the club's side. And with this terrific episode - and that extraordinary tearjerking scene at the end of it - "Sons of Anarchy" has all the momentum it needs going into the season's final three episodes.

Some other thoughts on "Balm":

• I obviously got to watch this episode on a screener, without commercials, for 55 minutes straight. How did the show play out over a 90-minute timeslot? Did the commercial breaks seem longer and/or more frequent than usual?

• The episode's title refers to the healing effects of Gemma's confession, but is it in any way supposed to tie in with the prison episode, which was called "Gilead," and which together evoke the famous Lanford Wilson play?

• It's still not clear whether Chuck and/or Darby perished in the Caracara fire, in part because some material about it had to be cut for time from last week's episode, according to Kurt Sutter. The matter will be explained in an upcoming episode.

• The song playing during Gemma's confession was "Mary," by Patty Griffin.

• The chronology of this episode was odd.

• I was remiss in my review of "Gilead" to note how incredibly arrogant and stupid it was for Jax to more or less tell Stahl that he murdered Kohn. And now it looks like that could bite him if Stahl's other avenues of attack fail. Cwarm! Cwarm!") and Tig looking terrifying as he enjoys a rare moment of peace and contentment. (And, during the final montage, the trip turned bad as Tig began crying and apologizing, presumably for killing Donna.)

• Another benefit of the long run time is that we get a scene that doesn't really move the plot along but tells us a lot about the characters and the world, like Gemma trying to talk Jax away from what he'd read in John's book. We find out that John wrote it shortly after the death of their other son, and Gemma implies that John's death might have been suicide, not an accident. The previews for this episode made it seem like Gemma was suggesting he had been murdered - I guess by Clay.

• Tara began the season trying to open up to Jax, understand his world, and make her peace with being an MC member's old lady.

• I also liked how the table vote scene allowed each club member (the ones who weren't hospitalized or tripping on mushrooms, anyway) to have his own reaction to Jax's attempt to go nomad: Clay resigned but not displeased, Bobby quiet and frustrated, Piney outraged, Opie sad and Chibs disbelieving.