When is a show’s finale not its finale?
Peaky Blinders‘ penultimate episode has the dramatic neatness of a conclusion, cemented by the ominous sensation of finality as Tommy Shelby dramatically commutes through a graveyard (he’s always walking, even though he owns one of the few motorcars around), and yet we haven’t reached the end quite yet.
After interrogation scenes with the gleefully uncooperative journalist, who was caught last time cooking something suspicious, his presence in photos led the team to raid an illicit dining club.
So – rape as entertainment. Well, it’s a debate to be had, isn’t it?
When ITV denied the press access to a preview of last night’s episode, we assumed it was for some trivial reason: a CGI backdrop of London that had yet to be painted in, while Edith bumped into Virginia Woolf in the foreground. That sort of thing.
Opening with a pounding forest action scene, this second episode of Atlantis exists primarily to introduce a further addition to the cast; Jemima Rooper makes her first impression with a slow turn to camera and a terrific scream.
‘Effects of External Conditions’ is all about the chase. Orphan Black wastes no time in getting the police on the trail of the mysterious clone introduced towards the end of the last episode. Meanwhile, Sarah continues to use her connections with Alison and Cosima to assist her deceit as they both help her out in different ways.
It’s almost as if the abrasive industrial landscape of Birmingham scours away the principles of all who set foot in its dark and vice-riddled back streets. The same can be said of Birmingham back in 1919 too (we kid, we kid!), because as Peaky Blinders reaches its fourth episode, people are willing to compromise almost every principle in order to get what they want.
Following the pattern that grisly discoveries occur when the Whitehapel gang are socialising, this final tale began amid a “Zombie Apocalypse” team building exercise.
Not that we were initially aware, joining them fleeing from the undead hordes with Buchan and Miles worryingly immersed in the game. It was a smart move, serving to highlight this fractured team’s plight. If such an event does not truly exist for corporate jollies, it really ought to!
Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, when the world turns at Downton, it turns only in the direction of the past.
The first beat of the tale was a surprising one with the introduction to Jason (Jack Donnelly) taking place in the present day. Establishing our hero as a rootless young man in search of his father, we soon descended in a mini-sub and found ourselves drawn in the world of Atlantis. And it is a world, rather than the past, we are led to believe.
The third episode of Orphan Black puts Sarah’s motivations under the spotlight while revealing some elements of the show’s larger mysteries. When the body of Katja that Sarah previously buried (rather shoddily, she soon learns) turns up and Sarah-as-Beth is put on the case, things begin to get much more complicated for her, especially as she’s just been told she’s a clone.