‘Sons of Anarchy’ Creator Kurt Sutter Reveals Why This Villain ‘Got Away’

Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter has been answering a lot of fan questions on social media lately, and recently revealed why a certain villain “got away” on the show. A fan asked Sutter why Ethan Zobelle, played by Adam Arkin, got “away in SOA Season 2.” Sutter replied, “Because sometimes s—ty people live and the bad guy wins. There’s a lot od that going around these days.

Zobelle was secretly a Nazi who paraded around as a businessman. He wound up on the wrong side of SAMCRO when he threatened the crew for selling weapons to minorities. Clay and the guys were not fans of his approach, so they defied his demand. Zobelle then had Gemma, Jax’s mother, kidnapped and assaulted as retaliation. He took off after that, and the gang never located him.

In addition to Sons of Anarchy, Sutter also created the hit spinoff Mayans M.C., which will be going into its third season on FX. However, Sutter will not be part of the next season, as he was fired from the show. Sadly for fans, this means that the chances of him getting to do the First Nine prequel — which would follow the early years of the SoA gang — may not happen. “As of now, the possibility of doing that doesn’t look that hopeful. It’s their property. They’re not going to let me take it somewhere else,” Sutter told Deadline in 2019. “Right now, that relationship is in flux. With time and a shift in attitude, will we be able to do it? I don’t know. Hopefully. Maybe.”

He then went on to share some details, saying, “As for how far it got, here’s what I knew I wanted to do. I knew it wasn’t a long series, that I wanted to do a limited series. Ideally, it was nine [or] ten episodes. The model I love is the Sherlock model. I love the idea of doing four two-hour episodes. The way I write, the episodes are way longer than they are supposed to be anyway. So that to me would have been ideal.”

Sutter continued, “To do four movies basically and tell a story that starts in Vietnam with John Teller and Piney and taking it through the last of the first nine members of the club to show up. Which was Clay. And then ending it there. I didn’t want to f— with the mythology that we had laid down. I just wanted to tell the story with the loose pieces we already had. I wanted the tone to be different, because it’s period.”