This post contains mild spoilers up to and including the most recently-aired episode of Sons of Anarchy. If you do not wish to be spoiled, do not read beyond this point. You should keep reading though because maybe you’ll be able to save yourself from watching the last season of SoA even though I can’t.

I’m mad as hell and I’m going to take it for about five more episodes.

Sons of Anarchy has turned into a miserable slog this season. It has been heading that direction for awhile now but there is pretty much nothing to redeem this season. Jax is an idiot but no one seems to be recognizing this fact. They follow him blindly and then seemed to be surprised when things don’t work out. It’s so surprising that raw vengeance isn’t an effective strategy.

I should just stop watching. I should have stopped after the first episode of the season, especially since every episode this season is an hour and a half long instead of an hour long for no good reason. There’s a musical montage every episode and the same idea being stated at least three times in a row in different scenes. It’s absurd. Clearly nobody at FX has the ability to tell Kurt Sutter no.

But I can’t quit.

I’ve made it through 87 episodes and so I feel like five more isn’t so bad in the scheme of things. When I started this show, it seemed like a well-detailed telling of Hamlet set in a Northern California motorcycle club. But Hamlet’s uncle is dead, Ophelia is dead, and Hamlet is no longer speaking with his father’s ghost. Now it’s just a giant pile of garbage but I can’t stop.

This is a problem I’ve had before, especially with shorter-run seasons as in shows on cable or from the UK. I quit Modern Family and Glee with no problem but I saw every episode of Entourage, True Blood, and Dexter. I did drop BBC and Showtime’s Episodes but now I’ve heard that the season after I dropped it was the best one yet. It’s probably the same part of me that thought that it was a good idea to sample 19 new shows this fall. I have a fear of missing out. I don’t need to see a show on the night that it’s aired but I’ve usually seen it within a couple of days and have almost always seen it before the next new episode airs.

I should definitely drop Sons of Anarchy and I should probably think about dropping a few other long-running series at the same time. Instead, I’ll keep slogging through with the hope that December 2’s series finale brings something resembling a satisfying conclusion. My expectations are low so perhaps Sutter and co. have a chance of succeeding.