Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man

Tommy Shelby's Retreat and a World on the Brink

The action of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man begins in 1938, with Europe lurching toward war and Thomas Michael Shelby living in self-imposed isolation in the Scottish Highlands. Following the events that left him at death's door at the end of the television series — diagnosed with tuberculosis and having faked his own death to escape his enemies — Tommy has spent the last several years in a bleak existence stripped of ambition, consumed by opium, the ghosts of those he lost, and the weight of a guilt he has carried since the trenches of the First World War. His name is still feared in the Birmingham underworld and the corridors of power at Westminster, but he himself has become a shadow of who he once was: the head of the Peaky Blinders, former Labour MP, negotiator with fascists and communists alike, the man who survived everything.

In this retreat, Tommy receives few visitors. His only regular company is Erasmus "Raz" Cole, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and former contact of British intelligence, who acts as a liaison between Tommy and the outside world. It is Raz who brings Tommy the news that shatters his apparent peace: Charles Shelby, the son Tommy had with his first wife Elizabeth "Lizzie" Stark, has disappeared from Oxford, where he was studying, and the last people he was seen with are known members of an English fascist cell with direct ties to the German SS.

Charles Shelby and the Nazi Plot

Charles, now nineteen years old, grew up in a fractured relationship with his father. Following Lizzie's death from illness and Tommy's subsequent emotional abandonment, the young man was raised largely by the extended Shelby family, in particular his aunt Ada Thorne — Tommy's sister and the most politically aware member of the clan — who instilled in him anti-fascist values and a deep distrust of violence. However, Charles, resentful of his father and seduced by a romantic and distorted vision of order and strength, has been recruited by Oswald "Oz" Jarvis, an English aristocrat with ideological ambitions and connections in the darkest circles of the British fascist movement. Jarvis does not act alone: he answers directly to Reinhard Gärtner, an SS officer sent to England with the mission of identifying and instrumentalising figures with social influence — and the Shelby name, with all its parliamentary history and criminal network, represents an asset of incalculable value to the Nazis.

The film's central plot is revealed gradually: Gärtner and Jarvis plan to use Charles as bait to draw Tommy in and force him to collaborate with a spy network aimed at sabotaging the British military response to a potential German invasion, by handing over classified information about port infrastructure and supply routes. Charles is not initially aware of the true scale of what is being asked of him; he has been manipulated into believing he is part of an intellectual movement for national renewal, not a foreign intelligence operation.

When Tommy receives the full picture from Raz, he immediately understands that the danger is not merely familial but also national. His return to Birmingham is not only that of a father searching for his son: it is also that of the man who, once again, finds himself compelled to cross the line between personal survival and collective responsibility. The central conflict is established from this moment with all its moral ambiguity: Tommy must infiltrate the fascist network, recover Charles, and dismantle the plot — but to do so he will have to resort to the methods and alliances that place him once more in the same darkness he tried to leave behind.