Editor's note: Your regular recapper is swamped with work from the day job, plus throwing a birthday celebration for a toddler, so mr. sobell has stepped in for the week. Please enjoy

Clay and his three idiots are arguing about their idiotic plot gone awry. The plan was to create pressure on Jax so that Clay would be rightfully restored to his place at the table and the three idiots get to wet their beaks with the Sons' illegal activities. But Clay is fretful that a murder investigation is going to come back to haunt him.

Gemma wakes up after a night of passion with the host of The Soup. After returning from the bathroom to have a good cry about what she did -- she could have had Mankini, goddmanit! -- she returns to the room to find that The Soup host has up and split with all her stuff. They are saving a fortune on Katey Sagal's wardrobe this year, what with all the sheets she goes wrapped around in.

Jax wants Unser to tell him what he knows. Unser uses very small words to explain to Jax that the three idiots are likely responsible and that DNA will be the deciding factor. A lifetime of watching CSI has clued Jax in to the fact that Clay is the idiot puppet master pulling his idiot puppets' strings.

Unser pokes around with two of the idiots -- one of them sporting noticeable wounds that look like they'd come from a struggle with a now-dead cop's wife. His investigation produces a lot of pronounced stares and threats meant to sound affable.

Gemma calls Jimmy Smits for help with her predicament and he tells the motorcycle gang and they show up and Gemma is like, "Oh, Christ, my son," and Jax is all, "When did my mother turn into the town bicycle?" Anyhow she confesses to a one-night stand gone bad, which produces a lot of eye-rolling from Jimmy Smits and moralizing from Jax. But it looks like we're off on a wacky adventure with the Sons or the most violent Soup sketch ever.

Tara's looking up something related to Otto in a plot line I don't care about. She and Clay have a not particularly warm interaction that Juice catches sight of. He seems to be realizing that he's hitched his wagon to wrong aging star.

So the host of The Soup is a con man who makes a habit of loving the ladies and then making off with their stuff. Sadly, he took Gemma's boosted car to a chop shop run by Jimmy Smits' associates. Joel McHale's panicked double-take is every bit as delightful as you might imagine. Car chase! Bike chase! Squealing tires! Look out! Joel's got a gun! He proves to be as accurate a shot as that bit where he shoots the interns. Anyhow, they punch him around a bit, but the presence of witnesses saves him from a beating that Lindsay Lohan would like watch on continuous loop every day for the next year. Jax and company resolve to remove all of his walking-around money, and Joel slinks back to the another part of the basic cable spectrum.

One of Clay's idiots warns him about Unser's mounting suspicions. They decide that what this show needs is less Unser.

Tara's brainstorm is to try and give Otto things that remind him of the good times with Samcro. Like I said, I don't care about this. It reeks of mythology.

And now it's time for the talk that every child wants to have with their parent: Why are you being such an embarrassing whore, Mom? I mean Jimmy Smits, I can understand, but the other guy... his show is like on permanent hiatus. Anyhow, it all goes back to Thomas Teller dying and weird family dynamics and why can't we go back to punching Joel McHale?

So Clay shows up at Unser's trailer and Unser spends the entire conversation pointing a rifle in the vicinity of Clay, which does not make for an unawkward encounter. Clay is probably more disturbed by the bulletin board pointing the accusatory finger of accusation in Clay's general direction. Clay dangles the prospect of Unser becoming police chief as a way to buy off Unser; Unser imagines he'll likely be dead of cancer soon enough, which will harm his employment prospects. Clay confirms that it is indeed the Nomads who are responsible. Unser could probably reach that conclusion himself since two of those Nomads just burst in to shoot him. However, Unser has the drop on them, and shoots one, while Clay shoots the other, which pretty much takes care of him being implicated by anything the now dead Nomads might say about his involvement in all of this. Clay wins! Clay always wins! Unser's going to keep Clay out of the mix, but this still figures to not go well for the club. Oh, also there's still one Nomad out there.

The club learns that the Nomads tried to kill Unser and try to make sense of it all -- why they did it, who's calling the shots. It's like watching everyone trying to solve a difficult math problem.

Anyhow, Gemma goes over to comfort Unser, who for some reason apologizes for calling Gemma on her overall awfulness last week. She tells him to think nothing of it.

Tara has a make-nice call with Gemma at Jax's urging. Gemma's going to watch the kids while Jax and Tara have their cabin getaway. That seemed to be resolved rather quickly.

Anyhow, Joel McHale is about to scam another chick at a motel, but Jimmy Smits is there to lay down some L.A. Law on him. Joel is beaten so hard he probably thinks Community got renewed for six seasons and a movie.

Juice puts two and two together to figure that Clay set up the Nomads. Clay convinces him that the Nomads were working for someone else -- certainly not ol' Clay -- and because Juice has already overdrawn on his bank of deductive reasoning he buys it. Jax shows up to confront Clay: He knows that Clay is using the Nomads to undermine his leadership and, more important, that it's backfired. From what I can gather, Clay mumbles a denial, and they're going to find someone named Frankie and get to the bottom of everything and let the club decide who lives and who dies, in Jax's words.

Someone wants to decide before that, apparently. Jax is riding up to the cabin with Chibs when a van pulls up alongside them and lets rip with some automatic weapon fire. They go off the side of the road, and manage to shoot one of their two masked assailants. That it's an African-American behind the mask does not bode well for the Pope-SAMCRO alliance.

While driving the boys home, Gemma runs into her some problems, too -- these are of the self-inflicted variety. Either she's drifting off at the wheel or that doobie she smoked with Unser earlier took effect at an inopportune moment, but whatever the reason, she drifted in front of a semi, and drove off the road, and she's unconscious, and the younger Teller kid is screaming, and the older boy looks to have suffered a mortal injury and boy, am I glad I stayed up late to watch this.

Mr. sobell leaves the biker shows to his wife, who will eventually throw off the shackles of her day job and return to her rightful recapping gig.

-- Mr. Sobell