The 20 Best Peaky Blinders Moments

These days, it'd be quite hard to mistake Margate for purgatory – it's got that Turner gallery and everything. But it's where Tom Hardy's Alfie Solomons is living his half-life when Tommy Shelby pops in to say hello having shot him in the face. (According to director Anthony Byrne, Solomons just "refused to die".) The Tommy-Alfie head-to-heads are always fun, but the most recent is such an unexpected gear shift in the middle of an otherwise helter-skelter series finale – a little Beckett play dropped into a blockbuster.

Despite all the super-stylised stuff Peaky Blinders does so well, there are moments when the collisions of alt rock and post-Great War anxiety combine to make something properly moving. Having jacked in a round of golf, Tommy finds himself assailed again by bombs and bullets only he can hear and feel, and ends up gin-crazed and insensible, frightening his son. Yes, Radiohead are the obvious choice for some atmospheric alienation, but do you know what? Sometimes the obvious choice is the right choice.

The name 'Shelby' can open pretty much any door at all in Birmingham, and that includes the curtain across the confession booth. A drunk Polly tries to settle her conscience over the murder of Campbell, and in the process gives away the Blinders' plot to kill Father Hughes. In later series, Peaky Blinders started to ask what happens when bad people do bad things for good reasons; this moment is about the moral heart of the show being hamstrung by having too many hang-ups for the world she inhabits. It might be the outstanding showpiece of Helen McCrory's talents too.

The season when Peaky properly sauntered into the culture at large was also its most gonzo yet. Nothing summed that up better than the protracted gun battle between Tommy and Luca Changretta and his men. Trapped in a corner of a housing block, it looks like Tommy's done for – until he unveils a literal cannon and goes full Rambo. And Adrien Brody grimacing in slow motion as he empties a tommy gun? Come on. No other show could carry that off.

The five pillars of Peaky: doomy guitars; chain smoking; "By order of the Peaky" etc etc; fast and loose historical underpinnings; and Reservoir Dogs strutting at half-speed. It might have become just a touch overfamiliar now, but the first instance makes Birmingham and the Peakys look monumental. As the whole gang storms down to the Garrison, jets of flame blast from furnaces and Dan Auerbach booms. Welcome to hell, this scene says. You're going to like hanging out with the locals.

So: does Tommy really want to go through with it? The question has hung over viewers since that final moment, stumbling from his country pile back into the mud and the fog, the visions from his past taunting him for failing to stop Mosley. (There were initially plans to include a crucifix too somewhere in that jumble of images, but Byrne decided it might be a bit much.) The fact that Steven Knight even attempted such a transparently teasing 'gotcha!' moment of an ending – just as Peaky Blinders found its biggest audience ever – is admirable in itself.

Heavyweight clashes like a head-to-head between Alfie and Luca Changretta can overpromise and underdeliver, but both Brody and Hardy are at their absolute best here. Alfie growls and sways like a Rottweiler sizing up its opponent; Luca chuckles and does the whole get-a-load-of-this-guy thing while missing the game Alfie's playing. It's about as close as Peaky's ever got to the underworld powerplays of Martin Scorsese, which it clearly loves, but with a twist of its own grubby magic.

Here was a marker of how far Peaky had come. The weird little BBC Two show with a name nobody really understood had enraptured David Bowie to the point that, just before he died, Bowie sent his business manager round to Steven Knight's house to offer him some cuts from the unreleased Blackstar album. It pointed to the way that the show would start engaging with the world outside of itself too: after this little nod to its most celebrated fan, there'd be even more slow-mo, even more swearing, and even more swagger.

Just as it looks like the Peaky Blinders and Billy Kimber's Birmingham Boys are about to turn Small Heath into a small crater, a prematurely mourning Ada pulls the ultimate trump card by wheeling her pram into no man's land between them and asking, "Who'll wear black for you?" It doesn't quite work, obviously, because Peakys are gonna Peaky. But it's a great showcase of Ada's fearlessness and clear-eyed view of her brothers' business. Plus, you get some absolutely peerless would-you-bleedin'-Adam-and-Eve-it expressions from Charlie Creed-Miles as Kimber too.

As post-murder kiss-offs go, "Don't fuck with the Peaky Blinders," is up there with Commando's classic, "Let off some steam, Bennett!" Aunt Polly's retribution against Major Campbell, at this point played with a reptilian coldness by Sam Neill, still stands as the single most satisfying comeuppance in the whole series. Helen McCrory's pivot from weeping terror, to vindicated bloodlust, to frozen disbelief, is magnificent too. It's possible someone could have overheard that gunshot in a crowded marquee, but that's by the by.

Depending on how Series 6 pans out, this might just be the most important moment in the whole span of the series. Annabelle Wallis' Grace was the emotional pivot of the first two series, as well as being the outsider who learned about the extent of the Shelbys' operations and familial dysfunction at the same rate we did. Her death came out of nowhere, and Dickon Hinchcliffe's groaning, seasick score underlined how much her loss upended Tommy's world. He's not really been right since, bless him.

Paul Anderson does screaming, raging and belting seven bells out of someone while his hair flops all over his face extremely well. That much is obvious. But when Arthur Shelby Sr waltzed back into his boys' lives, it was Arthur who wanted to believe his fantasies about a family casino. "I waited for you", he sniffs woundedly during that confrontation with his dad at the station, and your heart melts. Had Arthur Jr just been that wild, rabid dog all along, he'd have been a lot harder to love. Underneath the fury, we saw a lost little boy.

Poor old John boy. Just as he and Esme had settled into their comfortable life in the country, he goes and gets mown down in a hail of bullets to rank alongside Boromir's Fellowship Of The Ring pincushioning and Sergeant Elias copping it in Platoon. From here on in the series, something shifted; after three series in which the Shelbys were usually a couple of steps ahead of their enemies, they were suddenly truly vulnerable.

According to David Caffrey, it was Murphy and Hardy's idea for Alfie and Tommy to both shoot each other in what was supposed to be their final farewell. After goading Tommy – and, in telling him to "get on with it, and stop acting like a little girl", channelling a little of Ralph Fiennes' Harry in In Bruges – Alfie takes his apparent end with the grace you'd expect. The framing is interesting too: that wide shot of Alfie and Tommy sprawled on Margate beach nods to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, recasting Kent as the American plains.

You see him first from behind, his giant, bear-like shoulders slumping forward as he prowls around his – ahem – bakery. Alfie Solomons arrived in the Peaky-verse, in Cillian Murphy's recollection, "fully formed": hat, voice, mannerisms and all. His chummily threatening introduction sums up his charms too. Tommy samples some whisky, and declares it "not bad". "Not bad?" Alfie asks. "Not bad?" Murphy, Helen McCrory and Sam Neill were already great casting coups; Tom Hardy felt like a different level of star altogether.

As much as the glasses-punching crescendo of Tommy and Polly's contre-temps with the racist nuns of St Hilda's orphanage is one of the high points of late Peaky, the energy of the scene comes straight through McCrory's simmering fury. Reading the nuns' sins back to them before holding one at hairpin-point, she's the fire to Tommy's ice: "If I come for you – and I still might yet – I will wear high heels so you can hear my approach on the cobblestones. You listen for my footsteps." McCrory is much missed.

An agitated Tommy Shelby is quite something to witness. But what expectant groom doesn't get a few pre-match nerves? You probably worried about timing the vol-au-vents right. Tommy slaps his groomsmen about a bit and warns them off gambling, doing coke, sucking petrol out of the bridal party's cars and, most of all, "no fucking fighting". And then, right at the end, some clueless waiter bumps Tommy and gets launched across the kitchen floor for his troubles. It's a lovely ensemble moment, and proof that despite all the smouldering and rucking, Peaky Blinders does have a sense of humour.

Between Arthur Shelby faking his death and Tommy becoming a Member of Parliament, you've probably got used to the narrative jackknifes that Peaky Blinders likes to sell you. This, though, was the first properly outrageous rug-pull that the series managed to stick. Tommy's captured by Major Campbell's Red Right Hand and taken to a lonely field. He's on his knees, staring into his own grave, ready to die – and then two gunshots and literally about five seconds later, he's been enlisted to become Winston Churchill's personal 007. It's complete madness. And yet it works.

As an intensely coked-up Arthur and his boys tear the capital to shreds, taking over one of Sabini's London nightclubs, this might be the exact moment when the phrase, "By order of the Peaky Blinders" started to seep into the broader culture. Screamed by Arthur at the terrified patrons who don't know what's hit them, this is where the phrase stops being an unofficial sheriff's badge around Birmingham and becomes a credo – a blank cheque, a password, a family heirloom, a rallying cry, and a meme.

Pieced together to look like one continuous shot (that was at director Otto Bathurst's insistence: it cost £10,000 on its own, near enough the cinematography team's entire special equipments budget for the series), the first sequence of the very first episode set up everything Peaky Blinders was and would become. On a gathering storm comes a tall handsome man, riding like The Man With No Name through the ripped backsides of soot-blacked Birmingham. Some shows need time to bed down; Peaky Blinders knew exactly what it was from the moment it kicked the saloon doors in.