Gemma Kills Tara: Why It Had To Happen
Though many fans would would say that they had no idea that Tara (Maggie Siff) would die at the hands of Gemma (Katey Sagal) at the end of the bloody Dec. 10 finale, the show’s EP Kurt Sutter told HollywoodLife‘s sister site TVLine that he knew “fairly early on” that Tara would die before the series’ end. According to Kurt, it simply had to be that way for Jax’s (Charlie Hunnam) story to come to its proper end — just like how [YEARS LATER SPOILER ALERT] Dumbledore had to die for Harry Potter to come into his own, Tara had to die for Jax to figure out where he needs to be.
“It’s a major shift in the mythology,” Kurt says. “I knew, ultimately, where I wanted to take Jax in [the] final season… I wanted to remove his ‘True North,’ because I feel like there needs to be this major psychic and emotional shift that has to happen. What direction it will push him in we will see next season. But what happens to a guy like that now that he’s lost both of the people he loves the most, who were able to be his moral compass? With Opie, and now Tara? It really is Jax completely untethered and on his own in the final season.”
Basically, watch out, Charming — Hurricane Jax is on the loose.
Gemma Kills Tara: About That Fork
We understand why Kurt wanted to get rid of Tara — as much as we would have loved for Jax and Tara’s happy ending to work out, we always knew that Sons wasn’t going to be a happy ending kind of show. But did her end really have to include an iron, dirty dish water, and, worst of all, that giant two-pronged kitchen fork? According to Kurt and his real-life wife Katey, that answer is also a solid “yes” — because the murder was not premeditated, and it needed to be separate from the other, gun-heavy SAMCRO deaths on the show.
“I wanted it to be simple and pedestrian and of Gemma’s world, not of the club’s world,” Kurt continues. “I didn’t want it to be a gun or a knife. There’s almost something more horrific in terms of us seeing Gemma in that opening montage washing dishes, and you have no idea that something as simple as dirty dish water and a carving fork would be used as implements of death… Gemma is wired to react — not unlike her son — and then clean up the pieces later…There was a moment where Katey looks back at that fork, so you don’t see her face and it’s almost a moment of, ‘Oh, where did that come from?’”
Truly sickening. It is very safe to say that no true Sons fans will ever be able to look at a carving fork in the same way ever again. As for Katey — who has worked and bonded with Maggie for six years — she says that the only way she could get through the scene was to forget all about Katey and focus only on Gemma.
“The biggest struggle for me was to remain truly with Gemma,” Katey says. “The truth of [Tara’s murder] is that [Gemma’s] not aware of the things going on behind the scenes. I think that’s maybe why it was so hard [for me] to watch, because it was so clear. But in the moment for Gemma, all [she] knew was that [Tara] had ratted. She had betrayed my son, she had betrayed my club, she was taking my grandchildren away — all the things that were Gemma’s center. In that moment, there’s a blind rage that goes on.”
And that moment — a moment that clearly could have been prevented if anyone had bothered to tell Gemma or Unser (Dayton Callie) that Tara didn’t rat — will change Sons of Anarchy as we know it forever. It’s going to be a long year away from SAMCRO, HollywoodLifers — do you agree with Kurt’s justification for Tara’s death? Are you looking forward to seeing a post-Tara Jax? Let us know in the comments!
— Shaunna Murphy
Follow @ShaunnaLMurphy
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