Disclaimer: Contains major spoilers for Season 6 of Peaky Blinders
“It means you f*** people. F*** people over. Don’t give a f***. It means you covet and steal and burn all principles for the sake of self-interest. Well, I’m changing,” Thomas Shelby says, almost tenderly, when asked to define “moral turpitude.” Then the smirk: it would make a fine name for a racehorse. That’s Tommy in miniature: unflinching, self-mythologising and lethally ambitious. In his own words, “an extreme example of what a working man can achieve,” and what he’s willing to burn to get there.
Across six seasons, Steven Knight’s backstreet bookies ascended to country estates and cabinet whispers, each rise purchased with the loss of family and then a bombastic and blood-slicked reckoning. The formula has been addictive, yes. With the film finale looming in 2026, the question isn’t whether the Blinders can turn up the volume again, but whether they can find a truer cadence. Perhaps they must now search for closure, rather than escalation.
Season 6’s six brisk, surgically salvaged episodes follow Tommy Shelby—MP, OBE, still played with cold fire by Cillian Murphy—dodging and digging through his demons in a last bid for freedom. Aunt Polly is gone, fascism is on the march, Boston money and gunmen are in his ledger, and grief has made the house a mausoleum. The season wears its tribute openly, but you can feel the strain: Helen McCrory’s untimely passing leaves a palpable hole the writing can’t quite conceal, despite Knight’s adjustments. Elsewhere, Jack Nelson (James Frecheville), the sporadically deployed American heavy, never lands; a surprise son from a decades-old affair wanders in from nowhere; Lady Diana Mitford (Amber Anderson), wife of the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin), blackmails Tommy into sex—a queasy detour that feels stranger than it is illuminating.
The usual suspects remain in motion. Michael (Finn Cole), arrogant and out of his depth, plots a coup. Arthur (Paul Anderson) is a hollowed-out opium addict. Ada Thorne (Sophie Rundle) continues to be the show’s quiet spine, and Lizzie (a sharp Natasha O’Keeffe) carries the thankless weight of being the only Shelby spouse still choosing to stay. Alfie Solomons (Tom Hardy) materializes on cue, back in business with the East Boston Jews, and as gloriously unhelpful as ever: “Tommy, if you are about to express profound emotion, you might be better served expressing it to someone who gives a f***.”
Cracks show through the frenzy, and the writing exposes the paradox the series both feeds on and drowns in. The Peaky road to “peace” is relentlessly violent: one more cruel act, one more slice of conscience traded for profit, one more betrayal in the hope of washing away older sins. Does the show condemn the bloodletting or polish it into myth? Steven Knight has a taste for pulp and provocation (Serenity is proof), yet his scripts can be tender too (Eastern Promises). Read generously, he isn’t glamorising greed and revenge so much as insisting they offer no exit, no rest, no closure. You feel for the Shelby men who are war-scarred, trying to be whole, but yet move under a weather of nightmares, addiction, betrayal, and guilt. Redemption exists: why wouldn’t it? It just doesn’t seem to live anywhere around Birmingham for now.
The rise of fascism recasts the Shelbys as antiheroes in a world wedged between wars, where good and bad blur by design. The Blinders aren’t the nicest guys in town, but neither are the arbiters of order or those ratified by society. The judges, the politicians, the police, the ideologues on left and right are all equally dirty. Methods curdle everywhere. Dark, raw, and sometimes grimly funny, the show now frames its gang as the lesser evil in a fight against something larger and annihilating. For all the swagger and spilled testosterone, it is the women who keep the long arcs palatable and the men, barely, human.
There is “progress,” of a sort. Tommy has put down the bottle and widened the drug business to Canada. The teetotaler turned cold-blooded strategist looks in control, yet his new proclamations of invincibility ring hollow. “The only person who could ever kill Tommy Shelby is Tommy Shelby,” and “I have no limitations” jars against his older, tighter code of getting things done and keeping quiet. It is hard to forget he barely slipped the noose of a priest’s plot a couple of seasons ago, and is only alive because of a thwarted suicide attempt in Season 5’s chilling finale. He’s just lost his daughter to what he believes is a gypsy curse.
The show’s excess can feel like a young Hendrix discovering what an electric guitar can do. But the craft is exquisite: colour grades that bottle the coal-fog of Birmingham, a soundtrack that shifts from dirge to swagger, costumes and props that do half the storytelling. Murphy’s gravelly purr, far from his natural register, keeps calling us back. The narrative is raw, sometimes overwhelming, yet compulsively watchable. Visually and sonically, Peaky Blinders still dazzles.
Over the years, the show’s starry ensemble, memorable dialogue, and taut writing have often disarmed my inner skeptic. The disappointment, such as it is, comes from the half-mended gaps left by Aunt Polly’s absence and a closing that feels like a pause rather than an ending. In the final episode of Season 6, Tommy spares a life he would once have taken and murmurs, “Armistice. Peace at last,” before riding off on a white horse. Elegiac, yes, but provisional. Three years on, we know (thank god!) that was not the farewell. Steven Knight will take one more run at closure in the feature film due in early 2026. With luck, he will land an ending worthy of the legend. After that, perhaps the Blinders can finally have a shot at rest, sunshine and quiet reflection.
Yuvraj Nathani is Founding Editor at ALMA Magazine. Raised in a small town in northern India, he moved into global media and advertising before launching ALMA in 2020 — born from a desire to create a world-class, independent literary and arts platform from South Asia. Outside the editor’s desk, he’s a jazz piano tinkerer, a fiction reader across continents, and a believer in stories that travel lighter than borders. For more, follow him here.
