In a Peaky Blinders finale which gave hard and fast answers to a lot of lingering questions – though not, alas, what became of the Billy Boys – there was one moment of real mystery in it.
At Tommy's farewell dinner in the woods near his country pile, recently converted into a country pile of rubble, he raised a toast to family and tried to give a bit of a speech which turned into a kind of verbal last will and testament. Linda: look after Arthur. Charles: look after your mum. Ada: look after Parliament.
Then Tommy walked along the table to whisper into his other son Duke's ear. He claps a hand on Duke's shoulder and says quite a lot to him. Duke looks pretty impassive. But what did he say?
All the iPlayer subtitles tell us are that "HE WHISPERS" so we're going to have to do a bit of sleuthing and supposing. Obviously this isn't verbatim, but a couple of things point us toward some conclusions.
Firstly: Duke's got a Peaky Blinders haircut now. Since he shot Billy Grade and chased young Finn back to his completely mute but apparently difficult wife Mary, Duke's gone through a full 180. A couple of episodes when we first met him, he didn't even believe Tommy was his dad. Now he's willing to kill on his behalf. It's quite the switcheroo.
That suggests that Tommy's handing on a mixture of "you're up, kidda" business stuff and straightforward "I'm gonna die, kidda" stuff. Certainly, that's what the direction and editing hints at.
We see young Charles, buttoned up in his grey coat, looking distinctly miffed. He had a rough old time of it in that final episode, finally getting a chance to give his absentee dad a piece of his mind in deciding to stay with Lizzie before being roped back in for a woodland banquet and another reminder that his dad's not very good at talking to him, loving him, or even looking at him for any amount of time.
Now, he can see that his role in the family biz is being wrenched away from him by some upstart who was living in the woods somewhere in rural Warwickshire until about five minutes ago. That whisper is the semi-public admission that Tommy is shaking his blood-stained hands with Duke, and expecting him to carry on his dark deeds.
Which seems a bit mad given how recently Duke turned up and how little time anyone else in the family has spent with him, but then again Tommy's been neglectful of Charles for absolutely ages and his allegiance to anyone and anything which makes him feel more in tune with his Romany roots is a longstanding thing of his.
Then again, it might not matter. Tommy's not dead! Again! We must be up to a good half dozen times that he's cheated death now, but this one was the big one. The slate's clean, and he's got a succession plan in place too.
So really, that whisper is more likely to be a fracture point for Duke and Charles' relationship in the future. They're two sons of Tommy Shelby with different claims to legitimacy, and with Finn lurking in the background – an outcast with no allies but a fair shout to be the next in line to the business – there's a lot for the film and spin-off series to work with.
