Tear Jerker / Peaky Blinders

• Polly's speech to Ada in 1.02, is just heartbreaking:
  Polly: The longer you leave it, the worse it gets. Believe me, I know. I was sixteen, and I didn't dare tell anyone. In the end, I did it myself… I did it to myself, and I almost died. He didn't come back. They don't, why should they? You know the words. You're a "whore", your baby's a "bastard". But there's no word for the man who doesn't come back. One day, on your wedding day, you'll have a good man on your arm and you'll say, "Polly, thank you. For common sense." …the woman's in Cardiff. We'll take the train tomorrow. Go to the castle afterwards for a treat.
• Tommy's reply to Grace's claim that she'd break his heart?
  Tommy: …already broken.
• Arthur breaking down in the church, angry and depressed and frustrated that he's being frozen out from the family. He doesn't know about Ada marrying Freddie or the stolen guns from the BSA.
• The scene where Danny reports in to Tommy as if Tommy's still his commanding officer, calling himself "Private Whiz-Bang" and Tommy "Sergeant Major". Danny is already tragic enough, with his PTSD attacks, but even he notices the way Tommy's growing detached from everything but business, and how he's become an opium addict. When confronted with this, Tommy reveals the real reason he's been using opium—to drown out the war flashbacks of the time they tunneled into a German safehouse, and how if he doesn't, he starts hearing tunneling in his bedroom wall.
  • Also during this scene when Danny says his sons would never have to go through the shit that they went through, when they are probably going to end up serving in WWII and going through exactly the same mess.
  • The next morning the sun has once again beaten the shovels, and Tommy breaks down crying.
• Tommy grabbing Finn to shield him from the pipe bomb's explosion in 1.04—the pipe bomb he threw directly at a dozen other people to get it away from his brother before it went off.
• Tommy pulling a gun on the intruder in his bedroom in 1.04—who turns out to be John, trying to partake in Tommy's opium to numb his pain after learning that Lizzie failed Tommy's "test."
• Freddie being arrested just as he's held his son for the first time, and Polly attacking Tommy, believing he's broken his word to the family.
• Arthur losing all faith in his father, seeing him for the two-bit con artist he is, and being humiliated by Senior, beaten down and conned out of 500 pounds. He goes to the boxing gym he and his father had previously bonded in, drunk and screaming for someone to fight him, and when he's left alone by the disgusted patrons, attempts to hang himself. Set to Tom Waits' "Time", which is heartbreaking all on its own.
• Polly does it again in the finale, telling Ada about the children that were taken from her twenty years ago.
  Polly: They took my children from me. They never told me where they took them. They did it because they could, and because I was weak. They will never take your baby from you, and do you want to know why? Because Tommy won't let them. Tommy won't let them walk all over us.
• Tommy believing Grace is upset and talking about leaving him because she thinks he's not respectable enough and won't have a good life with him. She's heartbroken because she's fallen in love with him and knows her betrayal is likely to result in his death.
• Tommy's order to Curly as they prepare to fight the Kimbers:
  Tommy: (voice cracking) If any Shelby man dies here today, bury us side by side.
• "To Danny Whizzbang. May we all die twice."
• In 2.01, Polly visits a medium to ask if her daughter is dead. She had a dream that a girl was screaming her name and saying she'd "crossed over". We don't hear what the medium says—and indeed, Esme later warns Polly that the woman is a fraud—but Polly breaks down in the middle of the street, screaming and crying for her dead child.
• Tommy staggering into the boatyard after discharging himself from the hospital three weeks early, barely upright with fever and broken bones.
  • Tommy comparing himself to a wounded horse, and Charlie remarking "if you were a horse, they'd shoot you".
• Tommy telling Polly that her daughter died in Australia, never being able to settle and having tried multiple times to return to England.
  Polly: So my little Anna crossed half the world to be with me in my dreams? That's one part of her they couldn't take away.
• Polly pulling a gun on Tommy when he refuses to tell her where Michael is. The fact that she pulled the gun, he says, is proof that she'd lose her temper and scare the kid away.
• Arthur's breakdown in 2.02 makes his suicide attempt in 1.05 look like child's play. He blacks out during sparring practice and beats a boy to death, in front of his 15 year old brother, no less. Later, when confronted by Tommy, he talks about the way everything's wrong, tilted in his head, how depressed and suicidal he is, how he can't trust himself anymore. Tommy screams at him to wake up and fix himself, because he won't continue to lie for Arthur or treat him like a child. Arthur breaks down, screaming and sobbing.
• 2.05 is a lengthy series of Kick the Dog moments for Polly: It starts with the police coming in and arresting Michael for arson (which his cousins actually committed, but Campbell's stitching him up for. This is now the second time Polly has been made to endure her child being taken from her, and she breaks, screaming and begging for the police to let him go. When the family meets to discuss Arthur and Michael's arrest, Tommy shouts her down and refuses to even consider doing anything to get Michael out before he deals with the business fallout. Desperate, Polly goes to Campbell, who baits her with a shot at salvation—he has Michael's release form ready for his signature, but he wants something in return. That something turns out to be for Polly to fuck him, and for her to cry and beg for him to please let her son go. Polly tries to put on a brave face at first, but when she's about to give Campbell exactly what he wants, he loses his cool and takes her by force. But she isn't done being kicked around, oh no. When Michael is released the next morning, face all cut up from the interrogation, he tells his mother that the "screws" told him just how she secured his release, and seemed to think it was funny. "Who knows," he says bluntly to her. "Maybe it is."
  • Becomes a lot Harsher in Hindsight with the season 3 reveal that Michael himself was raped by a person in authority—in his case, a priest—as a very young child.
• Tommy's inability to keep his promise to Lizzie in 2.06, resulting in what's either a near-rape or an actual rape by Field Marshal Russell, and how frightened Lizzie is. Later, when she's got bruises on her face and is chain-smoking alone, John and Arthur are their insensitive selves, not realizing what's just happened.
• Tommy sobbing as he stumbles away from his very-near execution in 2.06.
• Arthur's best man speech at Tommy's wedding is heartfelt but stumbling and awkward and eventually Tommy cuts him off. Afterwards, he tells Linda, "I think I messed it up," and she has to reassure him that it was okay.
• The Italian assassin shooting Grace at the fundraising dinner. Panic breaks out, John, Arthur and Finn go *apeshit* on the assassin, while Polly is terrified and Tommy is absolutely losing it, cradling his dying wife and shouting for an ambulance.
• "I heard the blackbirds sing." Five words, and Arthur's saved Tommy from descending into torture and madness.
• Tommy's heartbreakingly matter-of-fact conversation with his son about Grace's death.
  • He takes down Grace's pictures in his office, but leaves them up in the house, because he promised Charlie he'd leave things as they were.
• In 3.04, Tommy telling his brothers that their father is dead. It's just another item on the meeting agenda.
  • It's implied that Tommy brought them hunting in honor of the one and only positive memory the boys have of their father, who apparently calmed down and sobered up enough just long enough to have one good weekend with his sons.
  • The business is concluded with a terse "all right, that's done. Fuck him."
• Lizzie in 3.04, admitting she's still sleeping with Tommy (years after he promised her all the prostitution and "arrangements" would end), particularly the stunned look on Polly's face when Lizzie sarcastically amends her statement: "well, not sleeping - it's hard to sleep bent over a desk."
  • They're still sleeping together when Tommy wants to. Not when Lizzie wants to.
• Tommy fighting through the aftermath of his cracked skull to keep his meeting with the Russian consul. He's barely able to stand upright, can hardly speak, vomiting, sweating, clearly in agony—and he soldiers through it anyway. Because if the plan goes forward as is, his family will be killed, and this is his one chance to stop it.
  • By the time he gives in and asks Ada to take him to the hospital, he's hemorrhaging and can't see.
    Tommy: Except for you, Dad. I can see you.
• Polly's flashbacks to her rape while having sex with Reuben.
• In 3.05, Polly figuring out why Michael asked Tommy to kill Father Hughes.
  • Tommy repeatedly assuring Polly that she's better off not knowing what happened. He's right.
• In 3.06, Tommy suspecting that John, Arthur, or Polly could have sold him out and gotten Charles kidnapped by the Economic League is bad enough. Utterly heartbreaking is Tommy tearing into Polly in particular, convincing her that Reuben's using her for information to sell out the Shelbys, because he's been giving her red wine and she could have told him everything without realizing. Furthermore, Tommy asks her what she thinks a "normal" aristocratic man like Reuben would ever want in someone like her.
  • From the same episode, Polly's shaken reaction when Michael arrives back at Watery Lane with Charles, realizing he's still got blood on his face and a thousand-yard stare just like his cousins. He's killed a man in cold blood, and she couldn't protect him from it.
  • Tommy's reaction when he realized that he doesn't know where Charles is and his absolute panic in searching the house, complete with his breakdown when Arthur finally tells him that someone took him away in a car is Nightmare Fuel at its finest.
  • His breakdown in the phone booth, after finally learning that Charles is safe.
• The group meeting the morning after Charles's kidnapping. Tommy's said some things the previous night which he desperately needs to apologize for, but he never manages to actually say those apologies, and tries to make "amends" by literally throwing money at his guilt.
  • Made even worse by the fact that he's really only biding his time to make sure the police can arrest all of them at once and make good on his deal to sell them out.
• The opening of 4.01, where John, Arthur, Michael, and Polly are lead to the gallows and nearly hanged. Polly's reaction in particular of sobbing and praying in sheer terror is particularly heartwrenching.
  • The final scene, where the Mafia surprises John, Esme, and Michael at John's country home. John is shot dozens of times while all Esme can do is watch in sheer horror. Michael takes four bullets as well, and the scene ends without the audience knowing if they've survived.
• 4.02 just ramps it up, showing the aftermath: John is dead, Esme screaming and clutching his body. Michael took four bullets and is bleeding out on the ground. Polly is frantic at the hospital, screaming at the doctors to save Michael, and Tommy has to drag her away. All set to a stripped-down version of Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat".
  • John's funeral, where his army photo and uniform is displayed, and he is burned in a Romany caravan as he wanted.
  • Arthur's heartbreaking reaction to Tommy allowing Finn a full-fledged seat at the family table:
    Arthur: (clasps Finn by the neck and touches foreheads with him) Little bastard. They're sending us fucking kids, Sergeant Major, to do men's work.
  • Michael and Polly realizing how the two spent shells ended up hitting Michael - they went through John - and Michael saying that John's dead eyes were the last thing he saw before he passed out.
• Michael's adoptive mother visiting him in the hospital after he was shot, coming to tell him that his adoptive father has died and begging him to come back home with her. It rattles him so much that he addresses Polly as "Pol" instead of "Mum" later in the episode, which does not go unnoticed.
  • Comes back to bite him in the second half of the season, when he chooses Polly again by not mentioning to Tommy that she had made a deal to sell him out to the Changrettas in exchange for Michael's safety, probably at least in part out of guilt after seeing his adoptive mother again. Of course Tommy already knew about the deal, and thus knows that Michael also sold him out.
• Arthur mentioning in 4.06, after the vendetta is won, that for the first time since the three oldest Shelby boys went off to war, no one wants to kill them and they can finally have some peace.
  • Gets even more tragic when it turns out that there can never truly be any peace for Tommy.
  • John didn't live long enough to see it.
• The Reveal in the season 4 finale that Tommy is very much a Shell-Shocked Veteran. His work keeps him distracted enough that it keeps the memories at bay, but when he goes on holiday, he is overcome by flashbacks to the point where he almost can't function. Frances, his maid, is so worried about him that she calls Polly, who sees a doctor on Tommy's behalf when she comes to help him. When she says it might be the war or the alcohol affecting him, Tommy immediately says it's the alcohol, unwilling to say how much the war is haunting him so many years later. Polly just looks at him sadly.
  • Tommy so drunk and lost in his own mind that he collapses, breaking the bottle and cutting his hands, winding up covered in blood—and he looks up and sees little Charles quietly watching him.
• Michael is sent to New York before Arthur's funeral and isn't allowed to attend. Turns out it wasn't a real funeral, but he didn't know that.
• Ada and Finn being led to believe that they've lost a brother for the second time in less than a year. The plan worked out, and Arthur gets to come home alive and well, but Tommy doesn't get any criticism for dragging his siblings through that ordeal again.
• So much of season five, but especially Tommy hallucinating Grace as kind of an angel of death, encouraging him to commit suicide so that he can be with her again.
• Arthur's reaction to Linda attempting to divorce him and live amongst the Quakers - beating one of them almost to death and destroying his face with his razor cap. Linda finally leaves him, telling him that she won't run off with him and Billy to America, and that he deserves to stay in Birmingham, in his head, in his eternal war, and suffer for his sins.
• Tommy breaking the news to Ada about Ben Younger's death by car bomb. Tommy knows Ada knows the bomb was probably meant for him, and this is now the second man Ada has been involved with that has died. The moment turns bittersweet when Ada confesses she didn't really love Ben, but she'd liked him. He'd been a good man, and her family is responsible for his death.
• Tommy visiting his war buddy Barney at a mental institution, where he's been kept straitjacketed in a padded cell for the past ten years (implied to be the result of his severe post-war trauma. Tommy offers him a Cyanide Pill to escape. And Barney turns it down, on the hope that someday things might change.
• In the Season 5 finale, after damning face-offs with both Michael and Polly, Tommy is unable to reach either of his siblings on the phone, so treks through Small Heath to Charlie's yard, where he asks about how his mother died. Charlie, who has before drawn comparisons between the two, reveals that he was alone in trying to combat her suicidal nature towards the end, when the only serenity she found was watching Tommy ride a pony she had brought him. It's a short, quiet scene, but solidifies theories regarding both Tommy's mentality and Charlie's enduring loyalty. The kicker comes when we learn that Charlie was in love with her.

  Charlie: Broke my fucking heart to pull her from the cut.

• The whole opening of Season 6.
  • Picking up where we left off, Tommy breaks down and attempts suicide, only to find that his gun isn't loaded, and collapses into the mud.
  • Lizzie walks out and tears into him for daring to leave his family without so much as a goodbye, adding that Arthur was scared enough for Tommy to remove the bullets... which she drops next to him.
    Lizzie: If you're still looking for a way out...here are six of them.
  • Tommy calls out to his mother, asking why he wasn't allowed to die yet, and interprets this as a sign that his suffering is not yet over.
  • We then see in his reaction to the unveiling of three bodies delivered to his house. Images of Abarama and Barney flash across the screen, but their corpses are never shown. When he cuts open the third shroud, the camera just stays on his face, displaying utter despair, and the reveal comes by cutting to a portrait of Polly placed in a caravan, and to each family member at her funeral.
• Everything about Ruby's death. What seemed to be a simple flu turns out to be tuberculosis, and she winds up dying within hours of being hospitalized.
  • The normally unflappable Tommy has a complete Freak Out when he finds out about Ruby's deteriorating condition, begging the doctors to be gentle with her when handing her off, and then trying to fight his way to her room, contagiousness be damned. Then he goes off on what seems to be a wild goose chase to find out who cursed Ruby, vowing that she'll get better and he'll make amends for every wrongdoing in his life. To cap it all off, he returns at the exact moment Ruby passes away, and all he can do is just stare at a distraught Lizzie, almost in denial of what she told him.
  • Lizzie also gets one for her trying to remain stoic and rational in the face of the grave diagnosis, only to break down crying in Tommy's arms seconds later. Later on, she puts on a strong face to Ada, only to start faltering when she mentions the somber reactions of those who also had loved ones die from tuberculosis, Ada's included. When she tells Tommy of Ruby's death, she lets him know that she gave her his kiss goodbye and can only keep repeating that she's gone.
• Ruby's funeral is heartbreaking. It's held in Charlie's boat yard due to it being her favorite place, and the entire family is completely devastated. Special mention goes to Lizzie being unable to speak due to how hard she's crying, Tommy being so dead inside that he almost can't give Ruby's eulogy, and Arthur bring so distraught that Jerimiah has to hold him up. And then when the caravan is about to be lit on fire, Lizzie has a complete breakdown and begs for a chance to say goodbye beforehand. To cap it all off, Tommy has Jerimiah be the one to light it, because he always made Ruby laugh.
• Before Tommy's late night meeting with Mosley, he finds Charles awake. He says that he can't sleep due to seeing Ruby's face, and all Tommy can say is to let Ruby hold onto him.