Peaky Blinders season finale: Tommy Shelby, immortal – media

There will be no redemption for big gangster Thomas Michael Shelby. Even if he claims, “I am not a devil. I am a mortal man.” But how could someone who still kills and allows people to be killed, who corrupts, bribes, covers up and lies and betrays their own family, become a better person at all?

Because that is, at least supposedly, Tommy Shelby’s goal in the final season of Peaky Blinders: Becoming a better person, changing the world, taking care of your family. But if you look at his methods, little has changed and the member of parliament who sits in the British Parliament, bears the title OBE and corresponds with Winston Churchill, is of course still the unscrupulous crook from the streets of Birmingham.

With undercuts, tweed jackets, watch chains and billowing coats, the Peaky Blinders – razor blades sewn into their caps – became cult figures and Stephen Knight’s series a hit. Knight’s parents grew up in Small Heath where the Peaky Blinders, the real ones, really ruled back then, they told their son about the gang. Nostalgic gangster mythology at its finest. This also explains why Knight just can’t let go now.

At the top Tommy Shelby, traumatized by the war and otherwise completely broken

Initially smiled at by the critics, the series soon developed a pull. Idris Elba and Brad Pitt are fans, Snoop Dogg covered Nick Cave’s legendary theme song “Red Right Hand”, hairdressers had to cut undercuts and the Times according to British boy names, Arthur – the oldest, but also most broken of the four Shelby brothers – ranked high. The brutal fight scenes, in slow motion and accompanied by music from Joy Division to Radiohead to David Bowie, were reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s cinema with their splatter-like aesthetics. And at the center of everything was always Thomas Shelby, traumatized by the war, completely broken. Cillian Murphy plays the gang leader, hopelessly overgrown, whiskey-always, deep-voiced, cold-eyed, and walking like he’s going through a full-body scanner the whole time.

Even if he is now an influential politician and his sister Ada now wears Chanel: The Peaky Blinders are in crisis. By the end of the fifth season, Shelby was already cracked, an assassination attempt on the fascist Oswald Mosley had gone wrong, Shelby held a pistol to his temple and ran screaming into the fog. Well, early in season six he’s lying in the mud, he just barely survived.

The assassination killed three of his people, including Aunt Polly, the family matriarch. Losing them broke Tommy Shelby. “No more Polly, no more whiskey, no more Tommy,” summarizes his wife Lizzie. Polly actress Helen McCrory is diagnosed with cancer in April 2021 died before filming of the final season began. Polly’s whisper, which Tommy hears at night, is now the leitmotif: “There will be war in this family and one of you will die.”

It’s 1933, the fascists under Mosley are gaining ground, bricks fly through windows with death threats. But the real challenges for Tommy Shelby come from deep within his family. And that doesn’t just mean Michael and Gina Gray (terrific: Anya Taylor-Joy), who want to restructure their uncle’s company because America can’t do anything with the “shady razor gang”. Eventually, Thomas Shelby, always on the lookout for the one enemy he can’t defeat, thinks he’s found it.

Luckily, the finale also shows what makes “Peaky Blinders” special

He fights and fights. And that will be celebrated in the final season. Everything is kept in a gloomy light anyway, the weather is always bad, the faces are sunken, but when Tommy wrestles with himself and his demons, it gets pitch black. In slow scenes, the torment of the head of the family drags on, who swears: “I will become a better person”. And then he sleeps with the fascist’s wife, the fascist.

Open detailed view

Luckily you realize in the finale what the appeal of Peaky Blinders over so many seasons: the plot twists, the action scenes, the equipment and a terrific soundtrack (insider tip: Sinéad O’Connor’s “In this heart”). At the latest when Arthur Shelby, in the first episodes still an opium-intoxicated caricature of himself, and Jeremiah Jesus with breathing masks are standing in the mustard gas fog, it seems so exaggerated that a comic adaptation is considered possible.

Like Stephen Knight, the creator of the show, to the Guardians toldare several spinoffs of Peaky Blinders planned. Among other things, a ballet – hard weapons on the tutu? – and a movie. That explains a lot. Because the final season is well done, but it’s not a bang, it’s not fireworks, and that is: an honest ending.

Why not just stop with a big bang?

Several characters emerge that would be promising to develop, new storylines are opened, Tom Hardy is back as Jewish gang boss Alfie Solomons (“As for death, as someone who’s been dead years, I can only recommend it”) and Tommy Shelby, well, you’ll see. In the end there are too many unanswered questions, as if the makers had prepared everything with this season for the finale after the finale, for example for a cinema film.

It’s not like the following movie has to ruin the end of the series in principle: At the sopranos the movie grabbed more than ten years after the end a history of the series on at Downton Abbey the final Christmas episode sealed the end of the nobility, Sex and the City managed to make a point with Mr. Big and the walk-in closet. But rarely has there been a series finale with so many frayed ends as that of Peaky Blinders. But like Stephen Knight in the Guardians says: “The idea at peaky was to perpetuate this mythology, to perpetuate this legend.” One thing is certain: There will be no redemption for Thomas Shelby.

Six episodes, on Netflix.

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