Peaky Blinders, Series 6, Ep. 1
BBC1, last night
Rating: 
A man enters a bar in the roughest and most difficult city in the world and orders a glass of water.
This sounds like a joke setting – but it’s the beginning of the end for Peaky Blinders (BBC1).
Writer Stephen Knight’s incomparably stylish, incredibly bloody gangster drama is back for its latest series, without even stopping for the opening credits or their sinister themed tune, Nick Cave’s thunderous Red Right Hand.
Fragmented blurring images from the previous season shot across the screen, as if the central character Thomas Shelby (Killian Murphy) was watching his life flash before his eyes.
The sound of his dying first wife’s last heavy breath echoed deafeningly in his ears, and, sinking to his ankles in mud like the battlefields of Flanders, where Tommy lost his mind, he screamed and raised a revolver to his brain.
We left him there for the last time, in 2019. This time he pulled the trigger. The gun was empty – his brother Arthur (Paul Anderson), who loved him, took the bullets.
His second wife, Lizzie, who despised him, burst through the mud in her satin pajamas to throw bullets at his head and call him a coward.
To any viewer who comes to the show recently, this blizzard of highly stylized images may seem incomprehensible.
do not worry. Everyone feels this way when they first encounter Peaky Blinders. When the drama debuted on BBC2 in 2013, it looked like an inappropriate mix of heavy rock soundtrack, historical fantasy, comic book villains and ballet violence in a funny cadence, with a double handful of the supernatural.
Writer Stephen Knight’s incomparably stylish, incredibly bloody gangster drama is back for its latest series, without even pausing for the opening credits or their sinister themed tune, Nick Cave’s thunderous Red Right Hand
It’s still all that, but after half a dozen episodes, the colliding elements combine into a hypnotic collage – like one of those eye-catching kaleidoscopic paintings that merge into a three-dimensional portrait if you watch them long enough.
Telly snobs will tell you that they were attracted from the beginning, but the truth is that the first two series attracted a small audience. It wasn’t until the show aired on Netflix that it found its fans.
Today it is so popular that a film is planned after this final season. Tragically, this will happen without the central figure of Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly. The 52-year-old mother of two, who was married to actor Damien Lewis, died last year after a secret battle with cancer.
Her absence could lead to the decision to give up music and titles. Instead, we watched Tommy cut a bag of corpses sent by IRA mobsters who killed Polly for unexplained reasons. Tommy’s grief seemed unfeigned. He knelt and wept over her.
Murphy said: “Helen was my closest colleague in Peaky and one of the best actors I’ve worked against. Every material, every scene … she made it special. She could make strength and vulnerability, one after another.
In a long funeral procession, Polly’s wooden caravan was set on fire with her body and all her belongings inside, in homage to the family’s Gypsy roots. At the end of the class, an inscription dedicated the episode to McCrory’s memory. Again there was no music – this time only bird songs.
Since Polly is dead and Arthur is a hopeless opium, the whole focus is now on Tommy. Prior to that, he was not only a whiskey smuggler and arms dealer, but also a rising MP.
Telly snobs will tell you that they were attracted from the beginning, but the truth is that the first two series attracted a small audience. It wasn’t until the show aired on Netflix that it found its fans
His political career seems to have been abandoned, but his feud with his cousin Michael (Finn Cole), Polly’s son. Tommy arranged for Michael to be jailed on drug charges, and then began the slow seduction of his wife, the puppet-like American mall Gina (Anya Taylor-Joy).
It is straight from the pages of the history of jazz chroniclers John O’Hara or Damon Runnon.
Tommy himself is more like Gary Cooper as a cowboy, written by a miserable French philosopher. When he walked into that Canadian bar and announced his name, “Je m’appelle Thomas Shelby,” it could have been High Noon, rethought by Jean-Paul Sartre. There was a short discussion about the meaning of life with the locals, a bunch of depressed existentialists. “Since I swore alcohol, I’ve become a calmer and more peaceful person,” Tommy explained before pulling out a knife and a pistol.
In the ensuing melee, a man’s face was cut off and the pigeon was shot. Everyone was trying to get the sober Tommy to break his promise. Gina smiled as she waved a glass of brandy under his nose. A Boston thug filled a glass with rechargeable acid and ordered him to remove it. Tommy refused. “Now I realize that whiskey is just fuel for the powerful engines in your head,” he was quoted as saying by William Blake.
For now, he is in the wagon pulled by a horse. Everyone can guess how long before they fall. But when he does, there will be all the hell to pay.