Peaky Blinders was back with a bang on Sunday night as the hit BBC period drama returned for its sixth and final season.
Critics and viewers alike responded positively to the show’s return, with the episode dedicated to the memory of Helen McCrory, who played Polly Gray, following her death from breast cancer last year.
Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) was still alive and kicking, having not shot himself in the field viewers last saw him in at the end of series five.
Return: Peaky Blinders was back with a bang on Sunday night as the hit BBC period drama returned for its sixth and final season
The episode also saw the burial of Polly Gray along with an on-screen tribute to Helen reading: ‘Dedicated to the memory of Helen McCrory OBE ‘Polly Gray’.
Viewers reacted positively to the tribute with one fan writing: ‘The passing of Polly Gray couldn’t have been scripted any better, a perfect tribute to the great Helen McCrory.
‘It takes an incredible cast to have the courage to act out those scenes and they did her proud. Brilliant first episode.’
Another viewer said: ‘Today and everyday we remember Helen McCrory, Peaky Blinders isn’t the same without aunt pol’.
Tribute: Critics and viewers alike responded positively to the show’s return, with the episode dedicated to the memory of Helen McCrory, who played Polly Gray, following her death from breast cancer last year
Star: Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) was still alive and kicking, having not shot himself in the field viewers last saw him in at the end of series five
Reviews: The Telegraph ‘s Benji Wilson gave the episode five stars and proclaimed it a ‘masterclass in style and substance’
One fan added: ‘Aunt Polly’s burial hit different. What a scene,’ while another said: ‘Beautiful scene to remember the late Helen McCrory’.
The Telegraph’s Benji Wilson gave the episode five stars and proclaimed it a ‘masterclass in style and substance’.
He wrote: ‘Rest assured that the final series is a worthy testament to this outstanding actress, and the character she created.’
In a separate four-star review for the episode, the publication said the final series of the show will ‘go out with a bang’.
Reaction: Viewers reacted positively to the tribute with one fan writing: ‘The passing of Polly Gray couldn’t have been scripted any better, a perfect tribute to the great Helen McCrory
The Herald gave the episode four out of five stars and said the series could be the show’s best yet.
They wrote: ‘While it has stumbled occasionally (those curiously- accented “Billy Boys” for example) Peaky Blinders has built an army of devoted followers. If this firing on all cylinders opener is a guide, this could be the best series yet.
The Evening Standard gave the episode three stars and said the new series was off to a ‘screaming start’ while adding viewers hoping for ‘wind-down viewing’ should look elsewhere.
Reception: The Evening Standard gave the episode three stars and said the new series was off to a ‘screaming start’ (James Frecheville as Jack Nelson)
They wrote: ‘If the last nine years and 30 episodes have taught us anything, it’s that beginning a new season of Peaky Blinders is like starting a mystery needlepoint project – nothing really makes sense yet and there are a whole lot of loose ends.’
Elsewhere, The Guardian awarded the episode four out of five stars, writing:
‘Our Zelig-like hero has always enjoyed having his fingers in too many pies. Indeed, after failing to kill himself at the end of series five, the clothes horse from nowhere is back where we want him to be: in all kinds of trouble.’
Peaky Blinders airs on Sunday at 9pm on BBC One.
A Blinding farewell: Peaky gang doff their caps to lost star Helen McCrory, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS in a five-star review of the opening to hit show’s sendoff season
By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail
Peaky Blinders, Series 6, Ep. 1
BBC1, last night
Rating: 
A man walks into a bar in the roughest, toughest town in the world and orders a glass of water.
This sounds like the set-up for a joke – but it’s the beginning of the end for Peaky Blinders (BBC1).
Writer Steven Knight’s incomparably stylish, surreally gory gangster drama returned for its final series without even pausing for the opening credits or their ominous theme tune, Nick Cave’s thunderous Red Right Hand.
A fragmented blur of images from the previous season strobed across the screen, as though central character Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy) was watching his life flash before his eyes.
The sound of his dying first wife’s last laboured breaths echoed deafeningly in his ears and, ankle-deep in mud like the battlefields of Flanders where Tommy lost his sanity, he screamed and raised a revolver to his brains.
That’s where we left him last time, in 2019. This time, he pulled the trigger. The gun was empty – his brother Arthur (Paul Anderson), who loves him, took the bullets.
His second wife Lizzie, who despises him, stormed through the mud in her satin pyjamas to throw the bullets at his head and call him a coward.
For any viewer coming newly to the show, this blizzard of heavily stylised images might have seemed incomprehensible.
Don’t worry. Everyone feels like that when they first encounter Peaky Blinders. When the drama debuted on BBC2 in 2013, it appeared to be an incongruous mix of heavy rock soundtrack, historical fantasy, comic book villains and balletic violence in slow motion, with a double handful of the supernatural.
Writer Steven Knight’s incomparably stylish, surreally gory gangster drama returned for its final series without even pausing for the opening credits or their ominous theme tune, Nick Cave’s thunderous Red Right Hand
It is still all those things but, after half a dozen episodes, the clashing elements combine in a hypnotic collage – like one of those eye-watering kaleidoscopic paintings that coalesce into a three-dimensional portrait, if you gaze at them long enough.
Telly snobs will tell you they’ve been hooked from the start but the truth is that the first two series drew small audiences. It was not until the show aired on Netflix that it found its fanbase.
Today it is so popular that, after this concluding season, a movie is planned. Tragically, that will go ahead without the central figure of Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly. The 52-year-old mother-of-two who was married to actor Damian Lewis died last year following a secret battle with cancer.
Her absence might have prompted the decision to dispense with music and titles. Instead, we watched Tommy slit open a body bag, sent by IRA mobsters who murdered Polly for reasons unexplained. Tommy’s grief seemed unfeigned. He knelt and sobbed over her.
Murphy has said: ‘Helen was my closest colleague on Peaky, and one of the finest actors I’ve ever worked opposite. Any material, any scene… she made it special. She could do power and vulnerability, one after the other.’
In a long funeral sequence, Polly’s wooden caravan was torched with her body and all her possessions inside, in tribute to the family’s gypsy roots. At the end of the hour, a caption dedicated the episode to McCrory’s memory. Once again, there was no music – this time, only birdsong.
With Polly dead and Arthur a hopeless opium addict, all the emphasis now falls on Tommy. Previously, he was not only a whisky smuggler and an arms dealer but a rising MP.
Telly snobs will tell you they’ve been hooked from the start but the truth is that the first two series drew small audiences. It was not until the show aired on Netflix that it found its fanbase
His political career appears to have been abandoned but his feud with cousin Michael (Finn Cole), Polly’s son, has not. Tommy arranged for Michael to be jailed on drugs charges and then made a start on the slow seduction of his wife, the doll-like American moll Gina (Anya Taylor-Joy).
She’s straight from the pages of a story by the chroniclers of the Jazz Age, John O’Hara or Damon Runyon.
Tommy himself is more Gary Cooper in a cowboy role written by a miserable French philosopher. When he stalked into that Canadian bar and announced his name, ‘Je m’appelle Thomas Shelby,’ this might have been High Noon reimagined by Jean-Paul Sartre. A brief discussion on the meaning of life followed with the locals, a bunch of depressive existentialists. ‘Since I foreswore alcohol, I’ve become a calmer and more peaceful person,’ Tommy explained, before drawing a knife and a gun.
In the ensuing melee, a man’s face was slashed and a pigeon shot dead. Everyone was trying to make teetotaller Tommy rescind his pledge. Gina sniggered as she waved a balloon glass of brandy under his nose. A Boston thug filled a tumbler with battery acid hooch and ordered him to down it. Tommy refused. ‘I now realise that whisky is just fuel for the loud engines inside your head,’ he said, before quoting William Blake.
For now, he’s on the horse-drawn wagon. How long before he tumbles off is anyone’s guess. But when he does, there’ll be all hell to pay.
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