When bad things happen, the earth moves. It doesn't matter if it's missing rent or watching a loved one die—things change, the ground beneath our feet shifts, and the only difference between hangnail and holocaust is a matter of degrees. And whatever the degree, our first impulse is to try and get ourselves back to the way life was before the world changed for the worse. Whatever our ambitions, whatever our stated beliefs, deep down, what most of us really want is an illusion of home that cannot be broken no matter how much it cracks. We'll overlook anything, and we'll tell ourselves any lie, if we can just hold on for a few seconds longer to a permanence that wasn't much more than dust to begin with.
At the end of last season, great changes seemed to be coming for the Sons. Jax had discovered that Clay and Tig were responsible for Donna's death, and for the first time, he went against the will of the club and saved the life of a witness Clay wanted killed. The finale ended with him at his father's grave, holding a new copy of the dead man's manifesto, while his mother and Clay watched nervously from the sidelines. The decision he'd spent the last thirteen episodes coming to seem to've finally come to pass. Jax was going to step into the dream his old man left behind, and that would mean going against Clay and Gemma and god only knew who else in the club; and who the hell wasn't stoked to see that battle come to pass?
So it's a little surprising that "Albification," the first episode of season two, opens with Jax and the rest of the club testing out some new guns from Cameron, their IRA-funding connection, as if nothing happened. And, yeah, it's a little disappointing too, as great as it is to see everybody screwing with club flunky Half-Sack and grumbling about the new arrangements. But it quickly becomes clear that there are tensions here that everyone is doing their level best to play around. When Jax takes control of the negotiations, Clay supports his decision, but the eye contact between them goes on longer than it should. During the first montage, we see that things are largely as we left them last summer. Tara is still in town, staying over at Jax's regularly; Gemma is still doing a lot of the leg work taking care of Jax's baby son Abel; and Opie still doesn't know who really shot his wife in the back of the head. Change is coming, though. It's just that everybody's trying to pretend otherwise.
The biggest sign of problems to come arrives in the form of Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins, the Jekyll and Hyde faces of white power. A pair of assholes that make the local skinhead leader, Darby, look infantile, Zobelle (Arkin) and Weston (Rollins) get invited into Charming by good-guy Officer Hale's brother, Jacob. Zobelle runs cigar shops, and hands out cards for the League of American Nationalists, while Weston glowers and gives speeches about how sick it made him to find out the little league his kid was in gave medals to all the kids. This is a new kind of threat for the town, and even if Hale sees through them, the invitation has been made, and the damage is already beginning. These guys are organized, and they have a plan. A polite visit to the SAMCRO clubhouse gives the statement of intent, but it's only when Gemma gets kidnapped and raped by Weston and his men (wearing bald Michael Meyers masks; Weston's tattoo is a give-away) that the seriousness of the problem becomes clear. These are men who are organized, well-funded, and without reservation about getting what they want.