(Credits: Netflix / YouTube Still)

For years, fans assumed Tommy Shelby’s self-imposed exile was an unbreakable sentence. And Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man on Netflix proves that it took him nothing less than a global crusade against fascism to resurrect the gangster within.

But at the start of The Immortal Man, viewers find Tommy in that very self-imposed imprisonment where they left off four years ago; so much so that even the call to combat has little intrigue for the World War I veteran. “I’ve got a war of me own,” he tells Ada, “inside of me head.”

While Tommy has survived quite a few battles across the six seasons of Peaky Blinders, nothing compares to the one that he has been fighting against himself. But what we know is that Tommy does come out of his exile, and the catalyst behind the impossible is Duke, his son. When Duke unceremoniously gets himself embroiled in a scheme by the British Union of Fascists to win the war for Germany, Tommy suits up and finally mounts the horse.

Yet, with a shortage of allies, to be up against the formidable forces of Nazi agent Beckett, things aren’t going to be any easier for the Shelbys. So, for those curious about what happens to Tommy, let’s find out.

What happens to Tommy in The Immortal Man?

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man comes with its fair share of explosive revelations. It begins with several captives working on counterfeit money in Frankfurt’s Sachsenhausen concentration camp – part of the real Operation Bernhard, an attempt by the Nazis to crash the British economy with an influx of counterfeit banknotes.

Although the notes were detected in reality, the scheme, which resulted in the bombing of factories in Birmingham, sets the stage for the introduction of Duke Shelby and his new generation of Peaky Blinders, who steal munitions from these bombed-out factories in the movie. Under Duke’s guidance, the new Peakys now have a different moral code, somewhat influenced by the lack of a guiding light in his own life, in the aftermath of his mother, Zelda’s, death, and estrangement from Tommy.

But this fuel of despair soon makes him a target for Beckett, the fascist in charge of the counterfeit money operation. Not long after, Duke becomes Beckett’s distribution partner for the counterfeit money, recklessly eliminating whoever stands as an obstacle, until the target becomes Ada, his own aunt. Although Duke fails to follow through, ultimately, Beckett shoots Ada.

For Tommy, Ada’s death is the last straw, which further reveals that he was the one who killed Arthur in a fit of rage and drunkenness. This results in Tommy’s final plot to take down Beckett by planting explosives in Beckett’s shipments with canalboats full of bombs, as the former kingpin of the Birmingham mobster infiltrates his warehouse via an abandoned Tunnel.

In the final confrontation, Tommy takes two bullets to the gut and fires back at Beckett, killing him in the process. And in a moment written for the books, Tommy insists that Duke put him down like an animal, referencing one of Cillian Murphy’s favourite motifs from the series, “One of my favourite lines in the TV show was always that line, ‘I am a horse.’”

So, cradled in his son’s arms, he says, “You’d do it for a horse,” and Duke shoots him. And just like that, Tommy’s death becomes the passing of the torch as well as the passing of the Shelby curse.