#I haven’t watched a nun (my nun) kill herself. idk

[meat-loving-meat]

To be completely fair to John Gaius. The intense, searing hatred I personally hold for the richest on this planet is kind of unparalleled. They are the ones who hold my head under the water of poverty. They are the ones pouring gasoline on the fire of climate change (climate change that will affect only the least fortunate on this planet, not them). They are the ones who wake up every day and choose to make these problems worse. They could so easily save us and they never, ever will.

If the world-saving project I had devoted my entire being to had its funding pulled in favor of something else, something that will not work and transparently exists as an escape hatch for the mega rich, I don’t think there is a word for the kind of rage I would feel.

[deadendtracks]

listen i need your thought on the scene with the nuns pls it‘s for science

aaaah ok there’s probably several possibilities. but i’ll talk about my first impression of the scene. I think whatever your interpretation or however this ends up going in canon, this was clearly very, very personal to him. I don’t know if the nun will be back (I kinda suspect yes) but I think we’ll find out something more later about this.

It’s actually instructive if you watch the clip with the sound muted: His body language and general demeanor are really, really off for Tommy Shelby. Sure, Tommy’s spiraling, and we’ve seen him clearly having difficulty, but there are some significant, specific things going on here we haven’t seen before. 

At first he can’t meet the nun’s eyes. He keeps his own eyes lowered, and he repeats this a few times during the scene, averting his eyes. Sometimes he does a similar gesture, where he doesn’t make eye contact with people (actually he does this fairly often, Tommy’s not big on eye contact unless he’s making a point) but when it’s with an enemy or someone he’s there to threaten, it has a different quality. This didn’t strike me as merely barely concealed rage (though he’s definitely enraged) or as just an attempt to control himself by not looking at someone he hates (though he definitely hates her). 

Compare this scene to Tommy’s scenes with Father Hughes in season 3, especially their first meeting, where he also refuses eye contact. That scene rang to me of repulsion and hatred. This is completely different. Instead it looks to me like ingrained fear. Like he expects to take a beating if he is insubordinate enough to make eye contact with the nun.

Notice that when he’s not making eye contact, it’s while the nun is chastising him and Polly for smoking and swearing, correcting their behavior, which if they were one of their child charges, would have obviously come with a beating, given the reports. 

Compare Polly’s reactions to all of this with Tommy’s.

Watching the very very different ways Polly and Tommy carry themselves in this scene is important, I think. Polly’s angry but she’s confident in her own power. These women do not intimidate her in the slightest. 

Tommy swings between a bowed head sort of deference and a wild kind of anger that struck me very much like the kind of anger you see in a child who has been mistreated standing up to a bully or abuser. He insists he’s not afraid of her. I mean, when have we ever seen him say that kind of thing? When has he felt the need?

He straightens up and is on more solid ground and is able to make eye contact when Polly brings out the file, and after she has mentioned the abuse of children. When it comes to speaking about the concrete matter at hand and the file they have, he makes solid eye contact, is a bit more like the Tommy we’re used to. When he mentions the Peaky Blinders, he’s incredibly furious and present. Because they represent a force that can counter these abusers, they represent strength and self defense to him.

When he starts talking about the sins of the Peaky Blinders versus the sins of child abusing nuns, Polly gives him a look. And then the gesture of blowing cocaine in the nun’s face is just… honestly a bit weird, and I love it, but again it’s not really his usual style. It calls back of course to the opening of the series. I’m still pondering what his intention was, but I have some ideas. It’s a strangely childish move.

After he mentions the girl who killed herself he momentarily bows his head again, almost like he ran out of courage for a moment, while also being completely consumed by rage at them. It’s a very, very personal rage. Sure, Tommy cares about the children of Small Heath (I actually think that unlike his politics, this is genuine, there was a lot in his speech at the opening of the first school in s3 that rang quite personal to me) but idk, this was deeply personal to him in a way that shouted to me about first-hand experience and trauma.

He bows his head and breaks eye contact and when the nun continues to defend herself, totally loses it. The smashing of her glasses wasn’t a calculated move to intimidate her, it was him losing control out of rage.

“Please don’t imagine that I am… afraid… of your prayers or your crosses.” 

The way Cillian Murphy chooses to pause and emphasize afraid? Is screaming that Tommy is in fact pretty viscerally afraid of them in a way he, as an adult gangster with quite a lot of power, is having a hard time dealing with. Because it looked to me like that fear was a down-deep kind of thing, something beaten into him. 

Then after he withdraws the funding, he clearly can’t get out of that room fast enough, though Polly lingers to threaten the nun further and gets pleasure out of it. 

So yeah, my speculation based on this is we may find out that Tommy and possibly one or more of his siblings ended up in a facility run by abusive nuns when they were children. Possibly taken away from their parents due to his mother’s mental illness or father’s abandonment or some combination, or due to them being seen as “bad” children who needed reformed, say, if they committed some petty crime. 

Like I said, there are other possibilities, but the body language was so unlike Tommy’s usual that I feel like even if the show doesn’t go there, the subtext was really really clearly hinting at it.