Warning: Contains spoilers for Peaky Blinders season 6, episode 1.
In Peaky Blinders season 5 one large mystery was left unaddressed, but Peaky Blinders season 6 episode 1, “Black Day,” finally answers who killed Ben Younger. Peaky Blinders season 6 had to wait 3 years after the release of season 5 in 2019 owing to production delays. As the final season before a Peaky Blinders movie concludes the main story, the season has some clearing up to do.
Peaky Blinders season 6 picks up where season 5 left off, with Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) standing in a field and contemplating suicide after his assassination attempt of Oswald Mosley (Sam Clafin) went drastically wrong. After his suicide attempt is foiled by Arthur Shelby (Paul Anderson) having removed the bullets from his gun, Tommy returns to the house and receives a call from the IRA. They explain that they were responsible for stopping his assassination attempt on Mosley and they deliver the bodies of Barney Thompson (Cosmo Jarvis), Aberama Gold (Aidan Gillen), and Polly Gray (Helen McCrory) to Tommy’s house. The IRA explain to Tommy that they need Oswald Mosley alive and this is why they killed Barney and Aberama and that, as part of their power play they killed Polly to “restructure” his organization.
Colonel Ben Younger (Kingsley Ben-Adir) was introduced in Peaky Blinders season 4 as the head of the army intelligence officers in Birmingham, assigned to monitor Ada Shelby. In season 5, it was revealed that he was in a relationship with Ada, but was killed by a car bomb immediately after Tommy Shelby gave him evidence that tied Oswald Mosley to criminal dealing with instructions to get the information to Special Branch. In Peaky Blinders season 5, Tommy suspects that the mysterious Section D was behind Ben Younger's assassination and that the crime will be passed off as an IRA hit. However, with the Peaky Blinders season 6 revelation that the IRA want Oswald Mosley alive for their own machinations and that they were willing to kill not only Barney and Aberama who were actively involved, but also Polly who was not present, means that they were likely also behind the murder of Ben Younger.
Tommy Shelby assuming that Section D had killed Ben Younger is one of his mistakes that enabled his plan to be foiled at the end of Peaky Blinders season 5. When Tommy becomes obsessed with a plot, it is easy for him to be blinded to other eventualities. This helps to explain how the IRA were able to operate a counter operation without him realizing: Tommy was so focused on Section D that he forgot the IRA still represented a credible threat to his plan.
Each season of Peaky Blinders traditionally starts with a time jump several years into the future, allowing the new season to take place in a new era. Over the course of its run, Peaky Blinders has more than once moved from one season to the next and used that time jump to quickly write out a character or merely forget that they existed. At the beginning of Peaky Blinders season 2, it was revealed that Freddie Thorne (Iddo Goldberg) had died in the intervening years, leaving Ada Shelby as a single mother and in a position for Tommy to try and rope her back into the family business. Again, Ruben Oliver (Alexander Siddig), Polly Gray’s Peaky Blinders season 3 love interest does not return for season 4 with no explanation really given. All of this means that this implication of the IRA’s guilt in Ben Younger’s death will likely be the only explanation provided in Peaky Blinders season 6 and Youngers name will probably not be mentioned on-screen in 1933.
Peaky Blinders releases new episodes Sunday on BBC.