They operate in a place called Charming, which is somewhere on a fantasy map in the dusty corners of the San Joaquin Valley. The Sons were founded by a group of Vietnam veterans with postwar paramilitary inclinations, and they have tried to keep narcotics and nut cases from infiltrating their borders, protecting businesses for a fee. The group’s legal front is an auto-body shop, but the growth in its portfolio can be attributed mostly to work in gun trafficking, the inventory funneled in by the Irish mob via the Russians. Hispanic gangs, the Chinese mafia and an Italian crime family are all the subjects of various and shifting feuds and alliances.

Charming represents a certain strain of fear that has thrived on and off in American culture since the 1950s: the notion that assault is potentially coming from all sides. The threat, in this instance, is not only from rival criminal enterprises but also from real estate con artists, weak law enforcement, shifty corporate interests and hospital bureaucrats. Property and possessions always seem to be in jeopardy in Charming, but their owners rarely materialize. The small-town decency and way of life that the Sons ostensibly angle to preserve are entirely mythic, a matter astutely recognized by the show’s virtual refusal to give us much sense of the community beyond the bikers’ insular world and the affronts to it.

Within that world, women are both victims and agents of vengeance. The current season deals with the fallout from the dispute with the League, and has the Sons’ matriarch on the lam. She is Gemma Teller Morrow, wife of the club’s leader and mother of its restless second in command; and she is played splendidly by Katey Sagal, as a woman too proud to let the men around her clean up a pretty horrific mess.

On the surface “Sons of Anarchy” is one long testosterone ride, but the most emotionally complex relationships and the finest performances belong to the women. Maggie Siff is outstanding as a pediatrician whose unlikely love affair with Gemma’s son has left her emboldened and has firmly recalibrated her priorities. Though the two women began inauspiciously they have evolved to a place of mutual dependence and honesty, and the transition has been one of the show’s most richly developed. As an exploration of the impact of aggressive, let’s call them alternative, career choices on family life, the series allows its female characters the freedom not to wallow in the trite ambivalence of their romantic choices.