Peaky Blinders makes its final season a punishment

polygon.com:

Ada Thorne, née Shelby, arrives late to a family meeting. There was an explosion, blocking off a road, but surely a coincidence, obviously nothing to do with her crime-laden family or any of their myriad associates … right? Her brothers look away, and Ada sighs, “It would be nice if just one thing could happen in Birmingham that wasn’t our fault.”

Such is the exhausted plight of the titular Peaky Blinders in Peaky Blinders. Steven Knight’s BBC/Netflix series about a Birmingham gang turned reluctant high society ended this Friday with a bombastic six-episode run to conclude its sixth and supposedly final season. Knight has teased not only a follow-up film as the show’s “seventh season,” but also at least one or two spinoff series based on adventures of minor members of the Shelby family. So is it all over? Only as over as it ever is for the Shelby family, which is to say that if Knight decides they have one last job, they’ll have one last job.

As such, the show’s sixth season feels both conclusive and not, like a program hedging its bets from episode to episode. At its helm still stands the long-suffering Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), the leader of the family, hellbent on one last grasp to solidify the family’s power in both Birmingham and London (and Europe, for that matter, with the Second World War creeping closer and closer). He’s flanked as ever by his wayward older brother, Arthur (Paul Anderson — a different one) and baby sister, the aforementioned Ada (Sophie Rundle), his ever-beleaguered wife, Lizzie (Natasha O’Keeffe), and Aunt Polly (the gone-too-soon Helen McCrory). His bratty cousin Michael (Finn Cole), Polly’s son, hovers on the horizon, eager to grab whatever power he can.

Of course, that’s leaving out a