Warning: Contains spoilers for Peaky Blinders season 6, episode 1.
A clever detail in Peaky Blinders season 6 foreshadows how and when Arthur Shelby will die in the same way that John Shelby’s death was foreshadowed. Peaky Blinders season 6 will set up a final movie to conclude the main storyline for the TV series. While there are hints at spin-off TV series, they will likely focus on characters other than the three central brothers that were originally introduced.
Peaky Blinders season 6, episode 1, “Black Day,” opens with the reveal that Aberama Gold (Aidan Gillen), Barney Thompson (Cosmo Jarvis), and Polly Gray (Helen McCrory) were all killed by the IRA. After a funeral, there is a time jump forwards four years to 1933, where Arthur Shelby (Paul Anderson) is shown to have succumbed further to his previous drug habit. Seemingly now barely functional, he fails to appear for the children as Santa Claus, lying in a stupor on the stairs as Tommy’s son, Charles (Billy Jenkins) uses a toy Tommy gun and mimes shooting him and Arthur, playing along, pretends to die as he is shot twice, and while he pretends to have a gun, does not mime firing back.
While this might seem like a light-hearted silly moment, or a sad portrayal of Arthur falling from grace once again, previous Peaky Blinder scenes mean that it is a much darker foreshadowing. In Peaky Blinders season 2, episode 3, Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), Arthur Shelby, and John Shelby (Joe Cole) are interviewing able-bodied men to be used in one of their schemes. The Digbeth Kid (James Eeles), also known as Harold Hancocks, shows them a holster, and Arthur and John pull their guns before Harold reveals it is a fake gun made of wood. Tommy Shelby examines it and mimes shooting at Arthur and says “bang” and Arthur ducks down while miming shooting back at Tommy. When Tommy does the same thing to John, John pretends to die, throwing his head back and exhaling his smoke. This prefaces the events of Peaky Blinders season 4, episode 1, “The Noose,” in which John is gunned down by a hail of bullets and Tommy is blamed for instigating the war that led to John’s death. The fact that Arthur is once again shot at with a wooden gun, but this time mimes dying instead of firing back suggests that he will die in a hail of bullets, and the sneaky use of Tommy’s son and a mock Tommy gun again suggests that Thomas Shelby might be blamed for his brother’s death.
As John Shelby’s death was foreshadowed almost 2 seasons before it came to pass, it is entirely possible that Arthur Shelby’s death will not come in Peaky Blinders season 6, but be put off until the Peaky Blinders movie. It is unlikely that he will be the focal subject of any spin-off series that could lead to his eventual death outside of the main series as his story has always been tied to other characters as Polly Gray helped to keep him in line and he lived in the shadow of his younger brother, Tommy. While Ada Shelby (Sophie Rundle) might be able to reign him in as Polly once did, Arthur is still extremely self-destructive and the character has been living on borrowed time since his fake-out death at the hands of Luca Changretta’s men.
Peaky Blinders has always been keen on symbolism and foreshadowing future events. As well as teasing John’s death in season 2 and now hinting at Arthur’s impending demise, the show has been laying the tracks for how Tommy might die outside of a gunfight in the future. He has had a persistent cough since Peaky Blinders season 5, and while he has given up drinking in season 6, he still smokes heavily and Lizzie Shelby (Natasha O’Keefe) notes that his voice sounds strange, suggesting that he might be ill. With the current foreshadowing, it seems likely that all three of the Shelby brothers will have greeted death by the end of the Peaky Blinders movie.
Peaky Blinders releases new episodes Sunday on BBC.