Why Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man Kills Off A Main Character Off-Screen [Exclusive]

In the bleak midwinter ... this article contains spoilers for "Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man."

For the most part, there are no happy endings in the world of "Peaky Blinders." Part of that is due to the nature of the job, of course. In early 1900s Birmingham, you can't exactly look forward to a long and prosperous life while frequently engaging in turf wars, skirmishes with the IRA, and even taking on fascists in Parliament. On the other hand, it's simply not in the nature of most of these characters. For someone like Cillian Murphy's PTSD-ridden Tommy Shelby, a man who was literally in the trenches experiencing the worst horrors that World War I had to offer, happiness was never in the cards.

The same goes for Tommy's compatriots, some of whom end up paying the ultimate price during the satisfying epilogue that is "The Immortal Man." The surprise killing of Tommy's sister Ada (Sophie Rundle) will go down as one of the spin-off movie's biggest twists, but a later reveal goes even further than that. We find out early on that Tommy's other surviving sibling, Paul Anderson's Arthur Shelby, had passed away two years prior to the events of the film. What we don't fully grasp, however, is what exactly went down in those hazy memories that we occasionally flash back to throughout the story. Once Tommy finally fills in the blanks for us, though, the truth is almost worse than anything we could've imagined.

The shocker that Tommy is responsible for murdering Arthur with his own bare hands in a drunken rage doesn't go down easily, nor should it. But as "Peaky Blinders" creator and credited "Immortal Man" writer Steven Knight told /Film in an interview, it was wholly necessary to put Tommy down a very dark path.

As we catch up with Tommy Shelby and everything we missed in the last six years since the ending of "Peaky Blinders" season 6, "The Immortal Man" portrays him as a man who's truly lost everything. His wife Lizzie (Natasha O'Keeffe) took their son and left him during the final season of the show, his darling daughter Ruby (who died of tuberculosis) visits him in haunting visions, and the only ally who remains by his side is the lovable Johnny Dogs (Packy Lee). The man who once ruled Small Heath, Birmingham, with an iron fist now sits at a desk and morosely clacks away at a typewriter, penning a memoir of his exploits.

And then comes the latest indignity: the reveal of what actually happened between Tommy and his older brother Arthur. Prodded by the mysterious Romani medium Kaulo (Rebecca Ferguson), Tommy admits that he's been lying about how Arthur died. As it turns out, he finally had enough and snapped during a drunken argument in a car.

This controversial choice is bound to leave fans feeling a type of way, to put it mildly. Despite the many, many mistakes he made over the course of the show, Arthur has always been a fan-favorite throughout "Peaky Blinders." Suffering from PTSD, mental health issues, and addictions of seemingly every kind, the elder Shelby only barely managed to escape the BBC series unscathed. The two Shelby brothers may have had a turbulent relationship, but at least they were in it together. All that goes up in smoke once we discover the truth, irrevocably changing our view of Tommy in the process.

This, to no surprise, was precisely the point. As devastating as this development undoubtedly will be to everyone who's been rooting for the Shelby brothers and a satisfying resolution to their relationship in "The Immortal Man," Steven Knight knew it had to be done. Speaking with /Film, Knight laid out his reasoning for why he decided to come up with the most reprehensible act that our main protagonist could possibly commit. As he put it:

"[Tommy Shelby] needs to have done some — he's done some pretty bad things, so it's going to take a lot for him to be so guilt-ridden that he would withdraw from the world [in 'The Immortal Man']. And all through his life, I think of him as being a good man doing bad things for a good reason, and the good reason has always been his family. Now, for him to have done what he did, for him to have killed his own brother, is huge. It's the thing that has made him the person he is when we first join the film. So, it's a question of giving him something that big that he then has to redeem himself through doing the good thing at the end."

This, in turn, helps explain why Tommy needed to go out in a blaze of glory during the climax of the film as well. Perhaps there are some things that a person simply can't come back from and live to tell the tale. Tommy Shelby's death plays out much like his life: tragic, bittersweet, and stubborn to the end.

"Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man" is now streaming on Netflix.