8 Essential Peaky Blinders Episodes to Watch Before The Immortal Man Movie

Peaky Blinders is the most popular Netflix series to ferociously capture audience attention and keep it, uninterrupted, for six whole seasons. It's one of my favorite shows, even if I do have to watch it with subtitles on. The hit series ended its run in 2022, leaving an aching void in the hearts of viewers everywhere. To our surprise, that chasm filled with joy when creator Stephen Knight and Netflix announced that a sequel feature film is on the way.

Ahead of The Immortal Man 's highly anticipated release , here are eight essential Peaky Blinders episodes for you to watch or revisit.

This article contains major character and/or plot details. Spoilers ahead!

Season One, Episode One

This gritty crime drama 's premiere episode is crucial in that it introduces our protagonist, Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy). As a former soldier, Tommy is the leader of the Birmingham-based Peaky Blinders gang in London.

Upon returning from war, he immediately finds himself at odds with his troubled older brother, Arthur Jr. (Paul Anderson), and his trusted aunt, Polly (the late Helen McCrory), after stumbling across a shipment of guns and hiding them. Evil arrives when Chief Inspector Chester Campbell (Sam Neill) comes to town, under the direction of Winston Churchill ( Wicked 's Andy Nyman), and is tasked with retrieving the guns stolen by the Shelbys. Unbeknownst to Tommy, though, Campbell has a secret weapon, and she is irresistible.

Season one, episode one, ends with Tommy covered in blood—the first of many times—and sets up the tone of the entire series.

Season One, Episode Five

A decade after walking out on his daughter and four sons, Arthur Shelby Sr. (Tommy Flanagan, of Sons of Anarchy fame) returns to Birmingham to sit on the Shelby throne as the true patriarch.

While Tommy wants nothing to do with him, Sr. is a con man and is able to convince him to give him money for a business plan in America. The second Tommy does, though, Sr. disappears, and the betrayal drives Arthur Jr. to attempt suicide. Thank the stars, the rope he tries to hang himself with snaps just in time.

Meanwhile, Campbell's undercover agent Grace ( The Tudors ' Annabelle Wallis) has earned the Shelby's trust and is slowly falling in love with Tommy. In hopes of having Campbell leave them alone, she gives him the location of the guns, along with her resignation. When his counter of a marriage proposal is rejected, he sets out to take down Tommy and is only further motivated after he witnesses Tommy and Grace's consummation.

Season Two, Episode Six

At this point, it's important to note that the first two seasons of Peaky Blinders build straight up to the season two finale, which is one of the best episodes of the entire series.

With his possible death looming, Tommy seeks to settle his debts on Derby Day and strikes an important deal with a vicious Jewish gang leader named Alfie Solomons, played by Tom Hardy. In doing so, Arthur is freed from prison, but things don't go as planned at the derby. As a result, Lizzie (Natasha O'Keeffe, of Misfits) is attacked.

Elsewhere, Polly's son Michael ( Animal Kingdom 's Finn Cole) has joined the family business, and Polly gets her revenge on Campbell when she takes out the show's biggest villain. Grace unexpectedly re-enters the picture just as Tommy worries about his own life, revealing she's carrying his child. As Tommy is literally standing in what is planned to be his grave, resigned to death, he is saved and given a message heard loud and clear—expect a call from Winston Churchill.

Season Three, Episode Two

Set two years after the season two finale, Tommy and Grace are now married and raising their son Charles together, but the happiness is short-lived.

A new rivalry is ignited between the Shelbys and the Italian crime family, the Changrettas, which began when the Shelbys disapproved of Lizzie's relationship with antagonist Angel Changretta (Pedro Caxade, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword ). The Blinders subsequently burned down his restaurant before violently beating him.

As payback, Angel's father, Vicente (Kenneth Colley from Misfits ), hires a hit man to kill Tommy at the Shelby Charity Foundation Dinner, but he misses and kills Grace instead.

Season Three, Episode Six

Still grieving and trying to recover from the loss of his wife, Tommy's world is shaken when Charles is kidnapped. In exchange for his return, Father Hughes ( MobLand 's Paddy Considine) demands that Tommy blow up a Soviet train and disrupt relations between the United Kingdom and the USSR.

Against his mother's wishes, Michael is sent to retrieve Charles and kill Hughes, who we find out assaulted Michael as a child. Word of Michael's success doesn't reach Tommy in time, though, so he goes through with the train explosion and also manages to steal valuable jewels.

When he returns home and reveals to his family that he's made a deal, and they'll all be arrested for the train incident, he urges them to trust him—he has a plan. The police then arrive and take the Shelby clan away, leaving Tommy as the sole survivor on the outside.

Season Four, Episode One

As Arthur, Michael, Polly, and John (Joe Cole, of Gangs of London ) stand on the verge of being hanged for their crimes—nooses literally around their necks, Tommy proves they were the victim of a grand conspiracy, and they are saved in the nick of time.

One year later, the Shelbys have spread out but are reunited by the emergence of the Sicilian mafia and, specifically, Luca Changretta, played by Oscar winner Adrien Brody . He vows to kill them as revenge for the murder of his brother and father, and he wastes no time in executing his threat.

In the blink of an eye, Michael is shot, and John is killed, and for the first time, a Shelby brother is removed from the board, adding to Tommy's inherent need for vengeance.

Season Five, Episode Six

Season five's season finale opens with Tommy meeting Winston Churchill, who is now played by Neil Maskell ( Hijack ). Tommy is questioned about his relationship with fascist leader Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin, The Count of Monte Cristo ), whose circle he's been infiltrating. Tommy plans to carry out an assassination on the dangerous politician.

Meanwhile, as the Shelby family finds themselves fractured, Michael and his wife, Gina (Anya Taylor-Joy), plot their own path for the Peaky Blinders. When Tommy's plan backfires and his own men are killed, he's inexplicably haunted by those events, as well as by the ghostly appearance of Grace. At the end of his psychological rope, he can't take it anymore and lets out a primal scream before putting a gun to his head. The episode then cuts to black, leaving us all hanging by a thread.

Sadly, season five's sixth episode marked the last appearance of Helen McCrory as the beloved Polly. The actor passed suddenly before the sixth and final season.

Season Six, Episode Six

Having been told he's contracted tuberculoma via contact with his recently deceased daughter, Tommy believes he's dying, so he sets out to wrap up loose ends.

After being left by Lizzie and Charles, he makes arrangements for the rest of the family, destroys his own home, and outsmarts Michael, killing his cousin before Michael kills him. As he prepares for the end, Tommy turns to a life of acceptance and solitude, until his daughter's spirit visits him. He realizes that, under the guidance of Mosley, his doctor gave him a false diagnosis, so he confronts the physician at gunpoint.

"I'm guessing that all you people decided that the only person who could ever kill Thomas Shelby is Thomas Shelby himself," the red right hand says in a bone-chilling moment—he does smoke cigarettes like a freight train.

While Tommy opts not to kill him, he does make one thing clear—Tommy Shelby is back.

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While no official order is needed to encourage fans of the epic saga to watch or revisit all this delicious drama and action, it's worth urging you to familiarize or reacquaint yourself ahead of the Peaky Blinders upcoming feature film , The Immortal Man .