Peaky Blinders: Season 4 – Episode 4 ‘Dangerous’ REVIEW

Last week, Changretta mentioned he knows of a Small Heath local who bears a grudge against Arthur for killing her son in a boxing match. So this week sees the other shoe drop when she pops into the Shelby Company Ltd. to invite Arthur round for completely non-suspicious afternoon tea. Tommy, of course, spots this as a trap instantly, and prepares a trap of his own. But then Changretta surprises everyone when it turns out that this trap is exactly what he suspected and it’s traps within traps. It’s all very complicated and exciting.

Instead of Arthur, Changretta’s mob actually go after Michael, who’s still helpless in hospital. For a moment, it all looks pretty hopeless for him – but this is only a tease, a way for Changretta to send Polly the message that he’s accepting her deal, and also of telling her ‘we can murder your son any time we like’. When the rest of the gang roll up minutes later, Michael claims that they’ve scared Changretta away – and, being no fool, he doesn’t take long to work out that Polly’s offering up Tommy. Most startlingly, though, even after Polly confirms this, he doesn’t warn Tommy.

Despite this frantic opening, narrowly missing some real blood and thunder – and more importantly, the promise of blood and thunder to come – Tommy spends a lot of this week doing anything other than taking part the raging gang war he’s landed them in. Most prominently, he has his one-time girlfriend May Carleton come to visit (she denies being a lady, and Lizzie agrees), ostensibly to board a horse on her land but obviously actually testing the waters for another fling.

He claims she’ll have to spend the night in Birmingham because of a train strike – which really isn’t so different from the old date-rapist’s standby of ‘uh-oh, we’re out of petrol’, but is a lot more of a power move coming from a man who could well have engineered the strike. Then he takes her down to his still, a surprisingly classy operation considering it’s backyard gin made to his crook dad’s recipe. You might at any point expect him to turn to camera, flourish a bottle, and give the ad pitch. It isn’t just a hobby, though, he’s been shipping it over to an America scourged by Prohibition. 

He also finds the time to take young Bonnie Gold down the gym, get him formally registered as a boxer, and arranges a match for him with Goliath, a fighter who could only possibly be a fellow welterweight on Pluto. Goliath’s from Camden Town, over in the big smoke down South, and you know what that means – the glorious return of Tom Hardy’s Alfie Solomons. His skin condition hasn’t improved and he’s still devouring the entire set in one cockney-timbred gulp and I could watch him all day. And given he’s already cheerfully, chirpily betrayed Tommy twice over, it’s surely this charm that’s keeping him going in-universe as well.

Obviously, he steals every scene they let him near – partly because he’s basically in one never-ending profane monologue. As a moonshiner himself, he has opinions on Tommy’s still, attempting to clear out its infestation of starlings by shooting them. He also crosses paths and strong words with Aidan Gillen’s Aberama Gold, and while Gillen is no stranger to overacting and silly accents, it’s like a little boy with a handheld fan trying to fight a tropical cyclone.

To Tommy’s credit, he hasn’t completely forgotten about the gang war, trying to have Alfie sow discord between Changretta and the Sabini mob, who are providing local support. And to Gillen’s credit, he’s a good deal more convincing as a cold-blooded killer than he is wobbling about sounding tough. When he ambushes Changretta out in the woods, there’s a wonderfully eerie moment when Changretta and his boys get out of the car briefly, then return and realise the driver’s had his throat slashed. As Changretta himself gets away, Gold shoots a nearby policeman – something which he justifies quite convicingly to Tommy later, but which he clearly does for the sport.

While Tommy basically enjoys his success, the rest of the gang are having a more miserable time of it. Ada is sent to negotiate with Jessie – which is thoughtless on the face of it, since her late husband was a communist, and becomes thoughtless in whole different directions when it comes out that Tommy’s basically just giving the unions what they want on the off-chance that there might actually be a revolution.

Elsewhere, Lizzie, already jealous that Tommy is angling to get back together with May, then discovers she’s pregnant – so Polly advises her to switch from whisky to stout. Poor Finn, worried he would have botched the abortive ambush, is gifted a new house. By this, I mean the house of the woman who tried to set up Arthur, and the floor is still awash with broken crockery. Oblivious to Finn’s discomfort, Arthur merrily suggests he turns it into a classic Blinders-style sex and gambling den.

And, of course, Michael seems to be fully on board with Polly’s plan to sacrifice Tommy to save the rest of them. He has one last chance to warn Tommy – but doesn’t – before we see Tommy driving away from the hospital and a vanful of shady characters following him.

It was at about this time in the previous series that Tommy suffered a genuinely horrific beatdown from Father Hughes’s ex-colonial goon squad. Still working on the theory he’s going to hit a particularly low ebb before bringing it out, we can be fairly safe in thinking that Changretta won’t succeed in killing him, but that’s about as much we can be sure of – any sort of non-lethal injury is very much on the table. However, what’s far more important – and is now definitely on the table – is that at some point they have a scene where Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Aidan Gillen and Adrien Brody are all in a room together, acting at one another. Avengers, assemble.