Peaky Blinders review – 5×03 “Strategy”

“Religion rises to the forefront as the Peaky Blinders descends ever further into darker territory.”
The Peaky Blinders has always been a dark show. Its whole premise is about ruthless criminals slashing at each other in crippled Britain barely beginning to recover from the disastrous effects of the First World War. This series though really looks like it’s building to something terrible with all this darkness though.
Opening with Polly and Tommy confronting a group of nuns for their mistreatment of the children in their care- something we’ll go back to later- this episode features a lot of religious elements. Arthur struggles with his desire to be a good man, versus his titanic temper and desperate need to get his wife back. Linda struggles with the judgement she believes her almighty god will give her, and Tommy seems to be struggling with the onset of a god complex.
After visiting the nuns, Tommy, Michael, and Arthur meet up with Mosley to press him about the attack on the Gold’s. This is a nice little sequence, from the way Tommy introduces Mosley as the devil to the slow-motion POV shot of Mosley striding into Tommy’s office. It also does a good job of increasing up his threat level. Up until now, he’s mostly just been another oily, corrupt politician, but this episode does good work for promoting him to possible series final villain, even if Tommy’s apparent fear of him feels a little unearned.

Mosley insists that he didn’t have anything to do with the attack on the caravan and offers Tommy a place in his planned British Union of Fascists. Later, Tommy and co pay a visit to Ada’s house where Ben, Tommy’s British intelligence contact, has been playing chess with Karl.
Now, before we go any further, this is probably a good time to bring up an issue I have with the character of Ben. I don’t mind the fact that Peaky Blinders have found space to include another BME character in its largely white cast. TV as an industry, despite its progressive reputation is still very largely white bread. However, what I do have an issue with is the way that the show likes to pretend that people in 1929 shared our 21st century values. After all, just ten years before this episode was set, the country experienced race riots in multiple cities that led to the death of numerous black people and convinced the government to intensify its repatriation scheme.
We’ve seen this with Tommy and the rest of the Blinders throughout the shows run. They may be vicious gangsters but they’re not racist. They may be murders, but Tommy shook that gay man’s hand, so at least he’s not homophobic. That would be wrong. We saw that at the start of this episode, where part of the reason for Polly and Tommy’s disgust with the nuns was the fact that their racial abuse had led to the suicide of a young black girl. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not secretly hankering for Tommy to drop the N-word mid-episode, and yes, as gypsy’s facing their own share of prejudice you can argue that the Blinders would be a lot more sympathetic to minorities than the rest of the country, but I do sometimes think that it’s a way of letting ourselves off the hook if we just whitewash this countries long history of hate for the sake of a good TV show. Maybe I’m just overthinking. Drop a comment to let me know what you think.

Anyway, so Tommy agrees to become an informant on Mosley for the crown, in a development that I’m quite looking forward too. Elsewhere, Polly frees Aberama Gold from his hospital bed, leading to him high tailing it to Scotland to get revenge on the Billy Boys for the death of his son. Michael continues to eat shit from Tommy and the rest of the gang in a move that seems to be pushing him to turn on the group. Ada attends Gina’s hospital appointment, partly to keep an eye on her, partly as moral support. Tommy and Lizzie come to a new arrangement, as Arthur resorts to desperate measures to get his wife back after she left at the end of lasts week’s episode.
It’s here the episode hit’s an iceberg. This show has always had a delicate balancing act to walk letting the Blinders be ruthless criminals, while also keeping them sympathetic. They’ve managed it in the past by making their enemies that much worse, or through Cillian’s Murphys ice-cold charisma as Tommy Shelby. But here, as Tommy snarls that a marriage with a Shelby man is a life-long contract and Arthur brutally murder’s one of Linda’s fellow Quakers, it’s gets very hard to root for them as the brothers come uncomfortably close the same behaviours as domestic abusers.
A husband tracking down and murdering someone his wife is close to out of jealously is exceptionally dark territory, after all. Arthurs break-down and half-sobbed insistence afterwards that he is a god-fearing man with evil hands only compounds the sense that this series is building up to something with all this bleakness. Tommy as well seems to be heading for his own break-down, albeit in slow-motion. The other week he told his son he wasn’t God. Yet. This week he tells Lizzie that everything belongs to him. Through this series, he has alternated between suicidal depression, paranoia, and a burgeoning God complex. I can only imagine it’s all going to catch up with him soon.

Arthur’s assault on the Quaker wasn’t this episodes only moment of spectacular violence. Aberama pours boiling hot tar over one of the Billy Boy’s and then Arthur and Gold made a daring escape at the end of the episode, but not before rigging Aberama’s caravan up to explode as the Billy boys arrive. Surveying the carnage, Jimmy MaCavern can only remark that if Tommy Shelby want war, it’s war he’ll get.
Overall, this was another fantastic episode in a series that is doing a brilliant job of smashing even the highest expectations of it. We got a nice mix of character moments and plot action and a strong sense that this series is building to something big.
Verdict-5/5
- Lizzie forces Tommy to agree to a number of conditions in order to stay married to her. It’s a shame that she probably is Tommy’s true match, and that he just doesn’t realise it.
- Some great examples of position this week, where Tommy Shelby will start a speech by telling everyone things they already know. Luckily, he’s so gosh-darn-cool that we can forgive this slightly lazy writing.
- Gina reveals her plan to take Michael and their unborn baby to New York. I’m not sure if that’s her real plan so far though.
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