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Everything the Internet Used to Wrongly Say About Skyler White Is Actually True of Gemma Teller

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 10, 2014 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 10, 2014 |


Basically, the years from 2008 to 2013 were really hard on that bitch, Skyler White, who had the audacity to get upset with her husband for manufacturing methamphetamines and KILLING PEOPLE on Breaking Bad.

What a lousy buzzkill.

People expressed that anger in many ways, but mostly just that one: Calling her a c*nt. Over and over again. There was a lot of debate about whether Skyler’s actions ever justified the hatred, but one thing was for certain: A lot of dudes really got off on ripping on Skyler. In their minds, she finally gave them an excuse to use a lot of sexist language they’d be bottling up around polite company.

They should’ve waited a year, because while there is no excuse for the gendered-insults lobbed toward Skyler White, the unjustified rage they felt for the Breaking Bad character is completely justified when it comes to Sons of Anarchy’s Gemma Teller.

Gemma is the female anti-hero for whom we’ve been waiting. I wouldn’t even call her an anti-hero anymore. She’s just straight-up awful. A despicable, irredeemable, evil f**king terror.

Gemma has always been a manipulative, conniving shit-stain. I mean, basically this show wouldn’t have existed without Gemma: If she hadn’t manipulated Clay into killing her first husband, none of this would’ve happened. Gemma is indirectly responsible for nearly every major character death on this show, and directly responsible for the death of Tara Knowles.

Everyone else has been her pawn, all along.

Tara’s death is where Gemma really turned the corner from interesting in a Machiavellian way into HOLY FUCKING SHIT SHE NEEDS TO DIE, LIKE, YESTERDAY. Not that anyone would have expected Gemma to confess to the murder. But who could’ve expected her to essentially point Jax’s rage at innocent people in last night’s Sons of Anarchy premiere? Who would’ve expected her to stand by and watch as a nice, strapping young Asian man is tortured, has salt literally rubbed into his wounds, and then have a knife stabbed through his skull.

In case you were wondering, a knife through the brain makes a crunching sound. It’s still reverberating in my ears this morning.

Gemma didn’t put that knife into the nice Asian boy’s cranium, but she may as well have. That, of course, is going to set off a chain reaction, as rival gangs pick and choose sides and go to war against each other, which is probably going to result in countless deaths, including — I suspect ultimately — her own son’s. Maybe even her grandson’s.

She is pure evil, and she’s not really doing this for her family — although she is arguing that she’s doing it so that her grandkids won’t “grow up up without knowing the love of a strong woman” — she’s really doing it to save her own ass. And in the process, if her son says to her, “I couldn’t do it without you, Mom. I love you,” she will simply accept the gratitude and go on back to taking care of those grandkids she gained de facto custody of by killing their goddamn mother.

As a character, Gemma Teller deserves every ounce of hatred she is getting today (as long as you leave Katey Sagal, the actress, out of it, and remember always that this is “fiction”). Gemma is a repulsive, abhorrent human being, and deserves to die a slow, agonizing, painful death.

The irony, of course, is that many of the same people who denigrated Skyler White and put Walter White up on a pedestal are probably also rooting for Gemma Teller. Maybe they weren’t sexist after all! Maybe they just like shitty people.

Nah. They’re probably sexist, too.