The Possibility Of A War:Peaky Blinders S6.

"You're still looking for trouble big enough to kill you" - Ada (to Tommy)

"There will be a war and one of you will die. But which one I cannot tell" - Polly

The sixth and final (?) series of Peaky Blinders (BBC1/iPlayer, written by Steven Knight, directed by Anthony Byrne, and aired between February and April this year) has hanging over it, almost permanently, the threat of war. Not just, as ever, the war between the Shelby family and their ever growing list of enemies but both within the Shelby family itself and, more widely, across the entire world.

The first half hour of the first episode, and long sections of other episodes too, are played out almost entirely in the shadows. It's the 1930s. It's a dark time in Europe (though, when the action moves to, for instance Boston in Massachusetts, it is noticeable that we enter a (slightly) more positive technicolour world. Though still one seeped in violence and drenched in blood.

Following events at the end of series five, Tommy is still alive but Polly, Aberama, and Barney are not (Polly had to be written out because, tragically, Helen McCrory who played her died of breast cancer in April 2021 aged just 52). Polly's voice remains and her presence is still felt by both Tommy (Cillian Murphy) and the rival to his throne, Polly's son Michael (Finn Cole).

There is also a scene where Polly's body is cremated in a gypsy caravan which must have been particularly emotional for the cast and crew to film. Back in the land of fiction, Michael has sworn revenge on Tommy believing him to be responsible for Polly's death. It seems that this will be the dominant storyline in the series but anyone who's got this far into Peaky Blinders knows there will be a lot more to it than that.

Peaky Blinders excels at introducing multiple narrative threads and then tying them all up handsomely, dramatically, and usually violently in the final episode of the series. So for the final episode ever they've got a big ask. It's one they manage. Just.

An Olympiad after the events of series five, Tommy, who has forsaken alcohol and taken up an interest in the poetry of William Blake (as well as quoting from the bible while still being a non-believer), fetches up in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence on the American side of the North Atlantic. Newfoundland is, at this time, a French territory and the prohibition there is not being enforced particularly enthusiastically.

Tommy, of course, is there on business. But while there he sees to it that Michael is put in prison in Boston. Gina (Anya Taylor-Joy) is, initially, most displeased at this turn of events but she soon finds other ways of occupying herself. Also, while in Boston, Tommy makes contact with local mobster Jack Nelson (James Frecheville).

Nelson wishes to make contact with the leaders of the rising fascist movement and Tommy asks Laura McKee aka Captain Swing (Charlene McKenna), an IRA commander, to help make that happen. McKee having already claimed that she had saved Oswald Mosley's (Sam Claflin) life. Something she believes has put her in position to make structural changes within the organisations she's involved with.

Mosley, now more popular than ever in Britain, has married Lady Diana Mitford (Amber Anderson). The daughter of an aristocrat, Mitford is, if anything, even more awful than Mosley. The fact she is an incorrigible snob who asks her staff to make notes on the labels in her guest's coats is the least of her faults. She talks about "our friend in Berlin" and speaks passionately about "the great cleansing" she believes, and hopes, is soon to come.

When Nelson calls her "just skin, bone, and arrogance" he's being kind. Tommy, in order to help Winston Churchill (Neil Maskell) defeat the fascist menace within, poses as a centrist politician interested in compromise but to convince the likes of Mosley he's on their side he finds himself having to perform Nazi salutes and even sleep with Mitford. It is, she claims haughtily, the aristocratic way of shaking hands.

Tommy's wife Lizzie (Natasha O'Keeffe) is, unsurprisingly, less than impressed at this turn of events. Especially when their own family is facing such tough times. Their seven year old daughter Ruby (Orla McDonagh) has fallen sick with consumption and the medical world is at a loss as to what to do for her. Despite everything that has happened, belief in gypsy curses still exerts a very very strong effect on Tommy and in hope of curing Ruby he seeks out his former sister-in-law Esme (Aimee Ffion-Edwards) but in doing so he uncovers more than he'd bargained on.

With Tommy flitting between North America, his stricken daughter's bedside, and champagne fuelled dinners with fascists and Arthur (Paul Anderson) now so incapacitated by 'junk' he's barely able to fulfil his duties (his wife Linda (Kate Philips) has left him and though she still cares for him there is no chance at all of any physical or romantic life for the two of them anymore), it is left to Ada (Sophie Rundle) and long time Shelby associate Isiah (Daryl McCormack) to take control of the everyday business.

Isiah, with a broken and despairing Arthur in tow - Max Wall's let himself go, is despatched to Liverpool docks to deal with Hayden Stagg (Stephen Graham, he was always gonna turn up at some point) who has been helping himself to buckets full of Shelby opium. As with most things Arthur gets involved with, it doesn't go according to plan.

But it's not just Arthur whose problems are mounting. Tommy's are too. Despite this, much of this ostensibly final series deals with Tommy Shelby trying to come to terms with his life, the decisions he's made, the things he's done, the people whose lives he has affected, the people whose lives he has ended. Will his empire of dust crumble into the sand? Will he stand among the colossal wrecks of his once mighty kingdom like Ozymandias? Has he lived a life that has, beyond everything, been dominated by his own vanity?

Or will there be one final chapter in the Tommy Shelby story? You'd be a fool to bet against that. With the soundtrack as Peaky Blindersesque as ever (Idles, Joy Division, Anna Calvi, Nick Cave, Thom Yorke, Patti Smith, The Smile, Sinead O'Connor, and, er, Count Basie) and great supporting performances from Harry Kirton as hapless younger Shelby brother Finn, Emmett J.Scanlan as football fixing, referee torturing Billy Grade, and Conrad Khan as the mysterious Duke, Peaky Blinders' sixth season is as much a rollercoaster ride as the five that preceded it.

Though, perhaps - as some may have hoped, not more of one. It's fun to hear Cillian Murphy, an Irishman, saying the word 'Shanghai' in a Brummie accent and it's great that Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods makes a cameo appearance in the very final episode but Peaky Blinders is at its most powerful when it takes on the intensely personal (when Ruby is sick you can't help siding with Tommy and Lizzie - even though Tommy, specifically, has done countless horrendous things) and when it goes deep into the political realm.

The gathering clouds of fascism, the forming of a new order, is absolutely terrifying to look back on and, in an age when Donald Trump is the bookies favourite to become the next US president, when Jair Bolsonaro is ordering his supporters to overthrow democracy and install him as a dictator in Brazil, and when the UK's most likely next Prime Minister Liz Truss looks set to push an already hard right Tory party ever further towards that extreme, it is frighteningly pertinent too. Peaky Blinders may be set nearly one hundred years ago. But, sometimes, it doesn't feel like it.