Peaky Blinders: Season 4 – Episode 5 ‘The Duel’ REVIEW

We left off last week with Tommy well and truly in the lurch – driving off alone and unawares, with the mafia on his tail. A recurrent theme in this modern wave of powerful white male villain protagonists is that the audience gets so invested in them, they eventually forget that hey, this guy’s a maniac, he’s killed many, many people, and is going to get his comeuppance. Witness how angry people got at the now-infamous cut-to-black ending of The Sopranos, for example.

But today is not that day for Tommy, as you may realise when he leads Changretta’s boys right into the heart of Small Heath, and as you will definitely realise when he opens up on them with one of the whacking great Lewis guns the Blinders stole all the way back in season 1. It rapidly becomes a game of cat and mouse in the housing blocks around Artillery Square – only it’s the Tom and Jerry version, where there’s five cats with strong American accents, and the mouse goes around shooting them at point blank range.

Tommy picks off Changretta’s boys one by one – resulting in the darkly comic moment of Changretta, a man who last week threatened someone who was unarmed and in hospital, getting all moralistic about Tommy shooting an injured man. This again harks at the mafia’s entirely fictional ‘men of honour’ image I’ve talked about in weeks past – as does Changretta then challenging Tommy to a straight duel. Unfortunately, all the pistols-at-dawn setup of closeups of their twitching eyes and so on goes to waste when the police turn up unexpectedly, break it up, and tell Tommy to just bloody watch it.

Back home, Tommy reveals to the gang – and the audience – how this was all a big trap all along and how he and Polly planned it together to lure out Changretta. Arthur, clearly still not over his desire to get Changretta himself, almost immediately starts hitting the coke with both nostrils. And then as Tommy is reassuring everyone that he got three of them, little Tommy wanders in – looking all cherubic – and asks his dad exactly what he got three of. Cillian Murphy is at the height of his evil, charismatic powers when he plays it off as getting three shillings from a two-shilling horse.

Seeing Tommy at work as father doesn’t exactly reassure Lizzie about her pregnancy, particularly since – as she notes – he was very obviously fantasising about his old girlfriend during the deed. But while Tommy doesn’t make an honest woman of her and get little Tommy a surrogate mother, he does agree to support the child.

Changretta’s bungled ambush isn’t the only time this week when plans come together without Tommy telling the people who should really have known. When the army finally turn up on the streets of Birmingham, they immediately arrest Ada – and, adding insult to injury, strip-search her and then bring up her dead husband over the course of trying to get her to work against the local communists. As it turns out, the officer making the offer is one of Tommy’s old buddies – he handwaves away the initial arrest by saying it had to look convincing, but this doesn’t explain why he didn’t let Ada know ahead of time.

Adding further insult, if there’s any room left to do so, Tommy has a plan of his own to deal with the red menace – having struck out with May last week, his plan is now to wine and dine Jessie so well that she’ll get all her communist pals to chill out a bit. Or, as Ada more pungently puts it, stop the revolution with his cock. Being evil and charismatic, his seduction works like a charm, although for an incredibly wealthy man who owns many factories and country houses, he still shows a lot of sympathy for the communist cause – which ultimately comes down to, as he mentions, being unable to escape his social class no matter how many country houses he has.

It should be noted that Jessie Eden was a real historical figure, as were the Peaky Blinders, at least up to a point. There was indeed a gang in Birmingham in the 1920s called the Peaky Blinders who wore razors in their caps, though whether they became involved in government intrigue at the highest level is less clear. My point is that the show is already playing fast and loose with history, so a British communist uprising – either supported or resisted by the Blinders – is a slight but real possibility. In all likelihood it won’t happen, but it’d make marvellous television.

Since Polly’s double-crossed Changretta, obviously Michael isn’t safe in the hospital, so they’ve sent him off to stay with Aberama Gold’s clan for a bit, and get in touch with his negligible gypsy heritage. Obviously this seems like a setup for Aberama to turn Michael over to Changretta, and betray everyone in the way Aidan Gillen’s characters are wont to do – but then Polly turns their drive back into a hot date, with the absolute minimum of holding him at knifepoint. And anyway, if he really wants to start spinning intrigues and intricacies, he’s up against some pretty stiff competition.

Speaking of which, Changretta approaches Alfie Solomons to betray Tommy in exchange for running Alfie’s rum over to America. The bitterest irony – or sweetest irony, depending how you like your drinks – is that Changretta would much prefer to get his hands on a steady supply of gin. Alfie, as ever, remains utterly compelling while wittering on about nothing in particular – today it’s his deep sympathy with the blind. They manage to hammer out a deal despite Alfie loudly racially abusing Changretta – and, more significantly, repeatedly mentioning what good friends he and Tommy are and charging extra to betray him for exactly that reason. Changretta could well be looking down the barrel of the classic double-double-cross.

The venue for any crossing, double, double-double, or otherwise, is pegged as the big fight between Bonnie Gold and Goliath. And in Goliath’s case, ‘big fight’ is the very phrase – I’m still sceptical that he and Bonnie can be anywhere near the same weight class. Nevertheless, with the Blinders taking bets and TV not having been invented yet, it’s the hottest place to be that night in Birmingham. Aberama tells Bonnie exactly when Tommy would like him to win, it all seems so calm and tranquil (for a boxing match) – and then, in the last seconds, with us barely having come down off last week’s cliffhanger, Alfie’s sinister behatted silhouette roves into view.