From their tense impassioned meetings in dimly lit churches to Tommy finding time to fit in a taunting phone call with the good Major ahead of his dalliance with Grace, I spent large parts of the episode muttering, “Come on boys, just get a room.” The rivalry between Tommy and Campbell is approaching homoerotic overload. That said, the reunion between Michael and Polly was well handled, both in his failure to understand the generosity of her sacrifice and her failure to realise that no boy is going to want to hear his mother referred to as a whore. The scene would have made just as much sense had Polly agreed to joyless sex for her son’s freedom without Campbell having to force the issue. Yes, we know he has issues with women and power and control but I still felt that it would have been more likely for him to torment Polly with the suggestion of sex rather than demand follow-through.Īs for the end of the scene, I reiterate my comments from the first week: I do wish screenwriters would stop using rape as their go-to plotline for female characters. The scene itself was well acted as was Polly’s misery afterwards but I was never convinced, because while I believed in Polly’s willingness to sacrifice herself for Michael, Campbell’s actions seemed more of a plot device than organic character development. I simply didn’t believe that Campbell would demand sex from Polly in exchange for Michael’s release. However, it’s a fine line between enjoyably over-the-top villainy and sheer pantomime, and that line was well and truly crossed this week. While I understand some posters’ issues with the way Campbell is written, I generally enjoy Sam Neill’s performance, purely for the gusto he brings to the role.
The bad guysĪll of which brings me to the most problematic part of this episode: the scene between Major Campbell and Polly. In particular, Grace isn’t the moral angel guiding Tommy towards the light and, for me at least, Peaky Blinders is all the better for making that clear. Whichever way Tommy’s dice falls – and if I were him, I’d probably pick Lizzie, a life of well-organised paperwork and the peace to plot against my enemies – I found it refreshing that neither Grace nor May was as straightforward as they appeared. If Grace is all calm under pressure, the deeply damaged May Carleton revealed herself to be something almost as interesting: a consummate gambler whose willingness to throw her reputation under a bus (“You’ve told me about her like a gentleman, now kindly behave like a gangster again”) may just win her the (loaded) hand. Thus Tommy aimed for nonchalant boredom as a way of stripping the conversation down to the bone and finding out Grace’s true desires, but our lady of the haunting ballads continued to be his equal in scheming, waiting until she got what she really wanted (the sacred Shelby sperm) before telling him that she was actually in England to visit fertility specialists as she and her banker tried for a baby. I’ve always preferred her when she drops the winsome colleen act and the meeting between her and Tommy was entertaining for the layers within layers and intrigue over just who was gaming who. I thoroughly enjoyed the return of Grace, now sans gun but with added polish. How does the phrase go, Tommy? When the going gets tough, the tough go flirting? Naturally he dealt with this downturn in his fortunes by complicating his love life still further, taking time out to escort Grace on a date before apparently deciding not to break it off with May after all. Cue mayhem), our Tommy found his fledgling empire in disarray, the Black Country/Brum alliance in tatters after the untimely death of Billy Kitchen and the rest of the Shelby family threatening to fall apart amid the attendant turmoil. After a brilliantly executed opening scene in which Campbell unfurled his tentacles of power, Sabini and the now gruesomely scared Mario took back control of the Eden Club, and Alfie Solomons demonstrated his rather novel take on Seder to a jovially unaware Arthur (“We’ve decided to name the goat?” “What have you named him?” “Tommy Shelby”.
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Tommy Shelby is hardly the first person to come a cropper after over-extending himself, but as tonight’s half enthralling, half infuriating episode demonstrated, he might be the only one to literally shovel shit while thinking of how to get back at his enemies.
Don’t read on if you haven’t seen episode four.Ĭlick here to read Sarah Hughes’s episode four blogpost
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SPOILER ALERT: This blog is for those who are watching series two of Peaky Blinders.
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