Broad spoilers for Peaky Blinders: Season 6 follow.
The construction of Peaky Blinders has always seemed a bit seat-of-the-pants. Most notably, even creator Stephen Knight thought it needed dialling back a bit when they started going on jewel heists for Russian aristocrats. So when the Shelbys start to crash, it’s not so much a carefully constructed clockwork affair as it is like a train, all separate carriages smashing painfully into one another, no real plan behind it, just letting the pieces drop where they may.
Admittedly, this randomness isn’t entirely the writers’ fault. Sometimes real life gets in the way. Peaky Blinders, it must be said, has dealt with the untimely death of Helen McCrory about as well as a still-in-progress show possibly could, although when that hit the news, the spoiler was dropped there and then. Perversely, the fact they’ve had to bolt it on to the climax of the last season has actually buoyed the narrative a bit, making more than one plotline hit home that much more.
There is, of course, an in-universe send-off that’s clearly meant for the real person as much as for any narrative reasons – which is all done quite tastefully, until they go mad with power and start superimposing McCrory’s eyes over the scene. This is as subjective as anything, but it’s going a bit too far after they’d already skilfully side-stepped the issue of actually showing the character’s face by cutting to a portrait.
What definitely is in the writers’ corner, though, is the frequent petty factual faults. Having people smoking in Parliament (a smoke-free building since 1694) is perhaps forgivable, but carefully timing a bomb to get someone who’s not arriving on a clear schedule is too jarring to let slide. In the latter case, the tension will at least carry you through the scene, but it’s the kind of thing you will find yourself wondering grimly about afterwards.
Having made gleefully promiscuous use of more than a few real historical figures, most obviously Winston Churchill and Oswald Moseley, it’s strange that this final run’s new baddy is the fictional ‘Jack Nelson’. And stranger still that having made him an Irish-American bootlegger with serious political connections, they didn’t just right come out and call him ‘Joseph Patrick Kennedy’. Peaky Blinders has always favoured big meaty villains, but Jack ends up surprisingly ethereal, like he’s meant more to represent the spectral threat of fascism, which we don’t really need another of with Moseley right there.
But really, this final outing isn’t in need of another hefty baddy – not with Tommy himself on the scene. And this season is so clearly about Tommy’s decline and fall, be that through flaws or fate or Tommy himself being the same lizardish bastard man he always has been.
A bit too much of it, though, seems to be fate, which feels distinctly empty. In Blinders past, so much of the family’s trials and tribulations were because they were fighting genuinely fearsome enemies, who were awful people but at least good at their job. Here, Moseley and Mitford seem mainly to be cruising through life because they have the badge of real history stuck to their lapels. And even though the show was shoehorning Churchill in from very early on, despite repeated references they haven’t got anyone in to ham it up as a certain Austrian corporal.
(Particularly galling alongside that point is the fact they brought in the very talented Stephen Graham for a fairly minor role.)
You could be forgiven for thinking that Peaky Blinders has become one of those exercises in pointedly not giving the audience what they want (much like The Sopranos, in whose mould it was built from the start). Look at Arthur, everyone likes him best when he’s bellowing about the Peaky fookin’ Blinders and demonstrating poor impulse control – so this run renders him a weeping, half-comatose junkie, retreading more than one previous plotline and mainly being acted upon rather than acting himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nsT9uQPIrk
More broadly, the obvious knee-jerk desire would be to see Tommy and the gang doing in actual historical villain Moseley, and yet it’s this very plum that the narrative has been denying us. Instead, a huge amount of this final season is devoted to personal tragedies, nothing so simple as ‘there’s a rival gang, let’s harm them’.
This could have been properly poignant if the show hadn’t made the decision to start layering them up like delayed buses. A heartbreak, a serious illness, a problem with the skag, eventually these sources of sorrow hit a point of diminishing returns and you begin to wonder if you’re watching Coronation Street: Birmingham. It’s never a good sign when you’re relieved an ancillary character has died so the plodding plotline of their illness can finally be over.
And ‘delayed’ is the word, since the first episode of this sixth season casually drops in a time skip – not a mere ‘two weeks go by and they’re out of hospital’, but one of years, which brings us neatly to the end of Prohibition but also feels too artificial to be at all necessary. Are we to believe this very angry razor gang simply span their wheels for several years? Yes, apparently, and exactly where or how those wheels were spinning is a question Peaky Blinders demonstrates only the most tenuous interest in exploring.
Likewise, many of this run’s scenes of ultra-stylised violence – such a feature of the show, and pretty well all hour-long crime dramas of this sort – are joyless affairs of an overwhelmingly more powerful party (usually Tommy) dispassionately mowing down nameless extras. They’re on much firmer ground with scenes of over-the-abyss tension, where something might happen but doesn’t. These are still fanciful excuses to have Cillian Murphy be powerful and sexy, but then that’s always been a hallmark of the show too.
These flabbier areas are the downside of a tendency that runs throughout Peaky Blinders, the desire to milk everything for all it’s worth. And sometimes this really works, like an excellent one-take two-hander between Tommy and Arthur that becomes more impressive the longer it goes on, or Tom Hardy’s regular scene-stealing appearances as Alfie Solomons – but sometimes it doesn’t, with this instinct towards self-indulgence managing to bump the final episode of the season up to eighty full minutes which, in all honesty, they didn’t need all of.
(But, spoiler alert, is setting up one thing loud and clear.)
And this overindulgence is usually remedied by the fact there is a payoff of some sort down the line. Which there still is, here, but it’s all crammed rather artlessly into the final episode, and again we are faced with the kind of bus-bunching, train-crashing ethos I’ve pointed to earlier. Blinders past have also built up to something at the end of the season, but this wasn’t at the expense of the five hours beforehand. As it is, this outing ends up feeling weirdly inorganic, built around a string of preordained plot points which, by now, it doesn’t really matter how well they hang together.
The decline and fall of the Shelby family could have been something special – if it had been a matter of chickens coming home to roost, which it seems they were going for when Tommy bitterly compares himself to the fascist cameos he’s forced to play host to. Instead it’s a slew of basically random slings and arrows, which never quite presents Tommy the same perspective that the character himself seems to be helplessly fumbling after at this point.
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