Tommy Shelby isn’t the kind of man who trusts easily, and he definitely isn’t the kind who forgets betrayal. So on the surface, it feels almost irrational that he keeps walking back into rooms with Alfie Solomons again and again after being double-crossed. But the logic sits exactly there, not in emotion, more in cold calculation… the kind that defines everything Tommy does. Alfie is useful in a way very few people are.

Some shows are born great. Some achieve greatness. Peaky Blinders did something rarer: it arrived fully formed, ascended to an almost unreachable peak, held there just long enough to feel mythic, and then descended with the slow, sad inevitability of a man who has survived too many bullets and started to believe his own legend. The arc of Peaky Blinders is, in its own way, a perfect parable about what happens when a story stops being about something and starts being about its own continuation.

There’s a particular kind of betrayal that only beloved franchises can pull off. It’s not the betrayal of a bad sequel, which at least has the decency to feel like an accident. This is something more premeditated—the kind where everyone involved clearly watched the original, absorbed its surfaces, and then systematically hollowed out everything underneath. Immortal Man does not fail despite its ambitions. It fails through them. Congratulations are almost in order.