Two and a half years have passed since we last watched the Peaky Blinders blackmail, racketeer and murder their way to respectability in interwar England and now they’re back - albeit at their weakest ever.
The last episode of series five saw an assassination on fascist leader Oswald Mosley foiled, multiple Blinders taken out in the fray, and Tommy and Arthur beating a hasty retreat back to the house to regroup. Mad with rage, Tommy puts a pistol to his head to end it all.
Questions shoot around faster than at a Watery Lane showdown: who ratted? Did Mosley discover Tommy’s plan? Where can the Blinders possibly go from here? And who exactly is footing their dry cleaning bill?
With the first episode of the show’s final series finally out, we take stock of all this and more.
Beware: spoilers ahead.
The rally aftermath: someone claims responsibility
The new season is off to a screaming start - quite literally - as we pick up where we left off with Tommy (Cillian Murphy) at the end of his tether after his carefully laid plans for Mosley go awry. He pulls the trigger (gasp!); it’s empty. In a rare display of clarity, brother Arthur (Paul Anderson) had the sense to empty the chamber on their way back from the rally. But long-suffering wife Lizzie (Natasha O’Keefe) hears the click and emerges from the mist to rage at his cowardice. Same, Lizzie, but is there any point in kicking a dog when he’s this far down? All the while a soundtrack of anxious breathing ratchets up feelings of claustrophobia - if you’re looking for soothing weekend wind-down viewing, try Bob Ross’s Joy of Painting on iPlayer instead.
The faint sound of a phone ringing draws Tommy back to the house. It’s Captain Swing (Charlene McKenna), the IRA chief we briefly encountered in S5, calling for an unfriendly chat. She claims responsibility for thwarting Tommy’s plan; bigger forces want Mosley alive. Why exactly is on a need-to-know basis, and poor old Tommy isn’t on the list.
The fallen: the body count sucker punches the Shelbys
She’s got one more bombshell, just in case Tommy hasn’t hit his torment quota for the day. They’re dispatching slain Peaky Blinders to the house so they can be buried appropriately, and three bodies line the driveway, shrouded in white sheets. Two we already know: Barney (Cosmo Jarvis), the ex-army sniper shot in the projector’s booth, and Aberama (Aidan Gillen), stabbed before he could avenge his son.
The third is Polly Gray, the Shelbys’ beloved aunt, and Tommy’s real right hand. There’s been much speculation on how writer and creator Steven Knight would explain the absence of Helen McCrory, who played the Shelby matriarch before she died last April, and this exit feels plausible and fitting. You can pinpoint the exact moment Tommy’s heart breaks as Captain Swing’s words ring in his ears: their deaths are his fault "because you consistently fail to understand your own limitations". The IRA boot heel is firmly on Tommy’s neck.
Funeral for a gypsy queen lights the embers of a fresh family feud
Polly is sent off in gypsy queen style, cremated in a majestic black and gold caravan (in a classy touch, the episode was dedicated to McCrory before the end credits). Michael Gray (Finn Cole) is back with slippery wife Gina (Anya Taylor-Joy), the flames from his mother’s funeral pyre burning brightly in his eyes as he vows to exact revenge on Tommy (have this lot learned nothing?). It doesn’t look like it’ll take much: Tommy’s had more than his fair share of loss, but this time it looks as though a light has been permanently extinguished.
Tommy goes on a business trip
Four years pass, and we find an Arthur-less Tommy on a gathering storm to the French outpost of Miquelon Island just off Newfoundland, a place so pitifully bleak it makes his OG stomping ground of Small Heath, Birmingham look like the Bahamas. It’s the eve before the end of Prohibition, and he’s on a business trip. "Someone may die," Tommy ominously warns the resident Gendarmerie, but presumably not of boredom as it’s not on Zoom.
The local barflies nearly incur that wrath when they take umbrage with Tommy’s request for plain old water at the bar where the meeting is taking place. He’s been off the sauce since Polly died. "Since I forswore alcohol, I’ve become a calmer and more peaceful person", he says in a measured tone while firing warning shots at the wall and wayward pigeons. Ladies and gentlemen: Tommy Shelby, wellness guru - apart from the incessant chain smoking, of course.
The big deal: a new drug route
Another thing he hasn’t done for four years is come face-to-face with Michael, but today the cousins are sitting down with south Boston crooks (namely lackeys of Michael’s uncle-in-law, powerful south Boston gang leader Jack Nelson) to propose a drug-running deal.
Miquelon Island, "an island with no morals or opinions”, is beyond the reach of American and Canadian law, making it perfectly placed to transport illicit cargo - yep, they’re still trading the purest heroin Shanghai has to offer. It’s helpful that Tommy has friends there, relationships forged in the WW1 trenches (honestly, it’s a wonder the Allies won at all). For a fee, they’ll turn a blind eye to boats carrying opium to Boston whereupon Uncle Jack can hold up his end of the bargain and pump it into the veins of freshly minted junkies across the States. The assembled suits want to seal the deal with a wee dram, but Tommy rejects the booze: "Whisky is just fuel for the loud engines inside your head", he says philosophically. They sneer, but Tommy gets the last laugh, revealing a rat in their operation in the spirit of "corporate hygiene": it proves to be a bombshell that ruffles more feathers than the scabby pigeons in the bar downstairs.
World’s worst Santa award goes to - Arthur Shelby
Back at the Shelby homestead, Lizzie is throwing an early Christmas party before she and the kids, Charlie and Ruby, join Tommy across the Atlantic for a wholesome Canadian holiday. Arthur is doing his best to traumatise the children with a smacked up version of Santa: he’s been on a four year bender since Polly’s demise, leaving Ada to try and fill her shoes but she too, is treading water, rudderless. Lizzie surmises, "No more Polly, no more whisky - no more Tommy".
Michael is nicked, Gina throws a party
After the meeting, Tommy tips off US border control to the drugs in Michael’s briefcase. He’s nicked, and faces a ticked off Gina who visits him in the slammer. Believing it’s the rat his cousin warned of, he presses her about when Uncle Jack will break him out but Gina is elusive. It looks like Michael is behind bars for the foreseeable, especially with a wife who seems so indifferent to his incarceration. The honeymoon period is well and truly over.
Tommy makes an ultimatum
While he eats prison gruel, Billy no-mates Gina is having a party for one in her gilded mansion when a visitor comes to call - it’s the relation she loves to hate, Tommy. She smirks when pressed for a response to his drugs proposition, but her nerve rapidly dissolves when he discloses who really had Michael arrested. It was, he explains, to force Uncle Jack’s hand; will he use his influence to release his drug smuggler nephew and attract scandalous headlines, or risk his reputation in south Boston and lose grip on his business? If he doesn’t play ball, Tommy has another buyer lined up: Jack’s enemies, the east Boston Jews, run by none other than the Solomons. It’s only a matter of time before the indestructible and infinitely watchable Alfie (Tom Hardy) is back for a final round of bloodshed.
Ruby’s illness is a nightmare for Tommy
As well as going teetotal, Tommy has started to show interest in the few members of his family who still speak to him. On the phone with Lizzie, he discovers daughter Ruby, who’s been running wild with Johnny Dogs’ kids, has a fever so they can’t catch the boat as planned. His fatherly concern rapidly escalates to full-blown panic when he hears his little girl is not only deliriously rambling worrying phrases in Romany, but she’s had visions of a man with green eyes too. Has she inherited Polly’s sight? Has she been cursed like Tommy’s ex-wife Grace? It certainly seems to have lit a fire under Tommy, who orders Lizzie to keep her out of school, away from horses, and hang a black Madonna from her neck - presumably standard procedure before the invention of Calpol. He’s so shaken that he plans to get the first steamer back, but not before a quick pit-stop to see Michael.
The end of Michael Gray?
Keen to close the deal, he offers his cousin $5m to handle the drugs shipment. Michael reaches back four years to spit out IRA Captain Swing’s words back at him: “you didn’t learn when my mother died at the hands of your ambition, you didn’t learn your limitations."
Tommy shoots the final arrow, telling him that Uncle Jack bought five boat tickets bound for England to strike deals with whisky distilleries: one for himself, his wife, his mistress, President Roosevelt’s son (mysterious) and his niece Gina Gray. But not Michael, suggesting he intends to let him rot in the nick.
Verdict
If the last nine years and 30 episodes have taught us anything, it’s that beginning a new season of Peaky Blinders is like starting a mystery needlepoint project - nothing really makes sense yet and there are a whole lot of loose ends. But I’m not worried: Knight has form for keeping things simmering until a boiling point crescendo and we’re only at the very start of the show’s curtain call.
Episode one is all about setting the stage for what’s to come, and although I could have done with slightly less recapping in dialogue from the characters - it felt rather forced to someone who obsessively re-watched all five seasons in the space of a week - they’re no doubt useful cues for anyone with a life.
It’s hard to know what to make of the new faces: we’ve barely heard or seen anything of Captain Swing or Uncle Jack, but if he’s anything like his niece, he’ll be a right wrong’un.
As for little Ruby, what does tikna mora, one of the Romany phrases she’s been feverishly uttering, mean? Is there a Rosetta Stone for this? One thing’s for sure; it must be serious to spur single-minded Tommy to get the first boat home. Is the man with green eyes a premonition or a representation of something sinister? And where do Alfie Solomons and Stephen Graham’s character fit into all this?
