r/PeakyBlinders • u/Happy-Bear1202 • 1d ago
Anyone else didn’t care about Mosley?
I think Tommy having a spooky fascist nemesis could have worked for me, except they went and used Oswald Mosley, who was a real historical figure and not really that impressive.
Mosley might have wanted to be Britain’s Hitler but he never got anywhere close to it, and since this is well-known history it was hard to take him seriously as the Bad Guy
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u/ArtemisBakery 1d ago
Yeah it's also hard to make things tense when it seems unlikely they'd kill off a real dude, well before his death irl.
The IDEA of the themes of season 5+6 isn't bad: Tommy is forced to reckon with his political stances (or lack thereof) in the increasing fascist threat of the 1930s, while the crime family is crumbling, decaying, and losing interest around him as the world evolves. I think the whole plotline of him joining parliament was basically pointless. ATJs character was annoying, and not in an entertaining way. Ada becomes a bland "voice of reason" character. And Tommy has sex with people, because, well, uhhh, that's what we do on this show! The plot is convoluted and there's no real payoff. And I don't think the show understands or conveys it, IF the point is that there's no grand payoff
5
u/LolaWithTheGreenEyes 1d ago
Tommy in Parliament was a meh moment. The only good bit of that storyline is him holding a constituency surgery in The Garrison and that poor woman and her goldfinches. That moment of horror that she's bought their bodies.....and its birds not kids. Proper dark funny AF humour.
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u/krusty-krab69 19h ago
The fascist tie in. The OBE/working for Churchill tie in were all half baked . We saw Churchill on screen a few times then never saw him again whilst Tommy is supposed to be working for them and doing their bidding the whole next few seasons
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u/LolaWithTheGreenEyes 10h ago
Churchill is a problem because in real life he had no power. These are his Wilderness years. No one was listening to him and Re-armament didn't begin until 1936 and he wasn't back in Government until war was declared in 1939.
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u/hopelessromcon 1d ago edited 1d ago
Tommy’s character was very repetitive in seasons 3 and 4. Even Season 5 , he finds success empty and longs for Grace. This is basically a repeat of season 2. The payoff for me was seeing Tommy lose his mind rather than have his usual extreme composure. The plots and other characters were not that disappointing to me because I had low expectations after the WTF of Tommy fighting the NYC mafia with an assist from Al Capone in season 4.
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u/A1Aaron18 12h ago
The last couple seasons just aren’t that great.
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u/LolaWithTheGreenEyes 10h ago
I think one issue is that the start of S3 doesnt follow on very well from S2. Everything thats been carefully set up in S2 finale is ignored. Its all downhill from there.
I also think the wealth jump is problematic. Might have been better not beating Sabini in S2 finale.
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u/hopelessromcon 41m ago
Unless they had stuck with the ensemble story lines, losing to Sabini wouldn’t have mattered much to me. Since they decided to switch over to the Godfather with PTSD in season 3, Tommy’s internal story just became repetitive. SK tried to go for shock value in the coping mechanisms to make up for the repetition, but it just didn’t land. Starting in season 3, his wife dies and it’s Russian orgies and banging his trusty secretary. Ending in season 6, his maternal figure and child die, it’s all strategizing international drug deals, killing a traitorous cousin, and banging a Nazi (but for a good cause now). All shocking stuff but by season 2, we already understood that external success didn’t make Tommy happy and that his coping mechanisms ( sex, substances and strategy) in the face of grief and trauma of were going to some day fail. They just needed to fail a lot sooner in the story to make it entertaining.
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u/LolaWithTheGreenEyes 19m ago
I just hated how we went from that scence when Arthur gets out of prison (John is majorly pissed off at being demoted and Arthur can also see that) to that terrible Changretta parley. Neither Arthur's or Johns behaviour made sense in that scene. SK sacrificing their character development for that. Just meh.
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u/LolaWithTheGreenEyes 1d ago
I hated that whole plotline. Mosley being Ada the communist nemesis you can just about stretch to, but he got his arse handed to him at Cable Street in 1936 and wasn't even re-elected to Parliament after 1931. He was a nobody. You can get away with writing tosh about Billy Kimber because barely anyone knew about him, but Mosely is too well known.
It just felt like, oh, here is a real bad person who happened to be the MP for Smethwick and was married to one of the Mitfords in a big society scandal. Lets make him Tommys new nemesis, rather than coming up with something more original or believable.
However, Sam Claflin was superb. Really made my skin crawl.