A Definitive End for Tommy Shelby
Maybe it was always too much to hope that Tommy Shelby was ever going to make it out of The Immortal Man alive. If his obsession with “In the Bleak Midwinter” has taught us anything, it’s that even he believed he was always only ever on borrowed time. And in this film, the clock finally runs out, and Tommy breathes his last. But his death is probably not one any of us expected.
Tommy ultimately succeeds in his revenge quest, thwarting a Nazi plot, killing the man who murdered his sister, and just generally saving the day. (Or, at least, the war effort.) He even faces down the trenches that have haunted him for most of his life, heading into the abandoned tunnels under Liverpool’s docks in the same claykicker-style outfit he would have worn in the war to take out the Nazis’ counterfeit stash. But he is badly wounded in the process, and ends up begging Duke for mercy, insisting that his son kill him quickly rather than allow him to suffer from his wounds.
“You’d do it for a horse,” Tommy tells him, which is surely in no way traumatizing for a kid who’s already suffering from some serious daddy issues. But Duke steps up and grants his father’s wish, shooting him in the chest, holding him as he dies, and essentially cementing his new position as both the leader of the Peaky Blinders and the Gypsy king known as the “Rom Baro”. It’s a surprisingly moving moment, given that the two men were wrestling in literal pig shit earlier in the film.
Longtime fans may wonder how this squares with Aunt Polly’s frequent prediction that it would never be a bullet that ended Tommy Shelby’s life, but, then again, this movie also pretty much ignored Tommy faking his own death at the end of Season 6, so there are certainly bigger fish to fry when it comes to potential plot holes. (And, again, it’s hard to imagine any true ending to this story that didn’t include his death in some form or other, so it’s poetic, if nothing else.)
The Secret Behind Arthur’s Death
One of the earliest revelations in The Immortal Man is that Tommy’s older brother is dead, having passed away at some point in the six-year gap between the movie and the TV series. This news probably isn’t all that shocking, given that it’s almost a miracle the troubled eldest Shelby survived this long, given his struggles with drink and a variety of mental health issues. That someone killed him isn’t all that shocking. But his death seems to have unmoored Tommy, who spends hours of his self-imposed isolation talking to Arthur’s grave.
The reason for this becomes clear about halfway through the film, when we learn that Arthur’s death wasn’t a suicide, as the story initially implies, but a murder, and his death ultimately came at Tommy’s hands. Your mileage will likely vary when it comes to whether you think Tommy could ever truly lose control enough to harm the brother that meant so much to him, simply for what sounds like getting on his nerves. But no matter the reason it happened, it’s clear that Tommy deeply regrets what he’s done, so much so that he can barely talk about it (and only manages to confess to another family member’s dead body).
