WARNING: This article contains spoilers from Peaky Blinders season four, episode one.
Episode one – The Noose – set the action in 1925 and started off with the incarcerated Peaky Blinders facing the gallows.
The BBC drama saw the Shelby family caught unawares as Michael Gray (played by Finn Cole) was dragged kicking and screaming by two prison guards to meet their fate.
John Shelby (Joe Cole) followed after him as he was taken to the same room as his cousins and were set to hang together in a joint execution – a deft foreshadowing of the end of the episode but we’ll get to that.
Aunt Polly (Helen McCrory) appeared disturbed as she muttered to herself in a corner of her cell before she, too, led to a separate scaffold inside the prison to be killed.
Luckily, the whole thing was called off at the last moment after Tommy Shelby managed to blackmail the people in power and get a knighthood in the process.
Throughout the horrific opening sequence, kingpin Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) was nowhere to be seen.
However, our anti-hero finally made it onto the screen as a solitary figure drinking a whisky sour alone in a hotel bar.
It emerged he’d cut off contact with his family after they were released from prison and each of them now lived their separate lives.
Despite Lizzie Stark’s (Natasha O’Keeffe) attempts to convince Tommy that his son Charlie needed to spend time with his cousins at Christmas, it all seemed to fall on deaf ears.
It was only with the reappearance of Ada Shelby (Sophie Rundle) from Boston that things changed and Tommy decided to have to whole family around for Christmas.
In the world of Peaky Blinders though, this was far from simple.
The Noose introduced union leader Jessie Eden, who is based on the historical figure, and she clashed with Tommy with equal pay for female wire cutters.
Played by Happy Valley actress Charlie Murphy, Jessie proved she was whip smart as she revealed that she knew all about Tommy’s enterprises, even the ones he owned under different names.
Jessie is set to be one of Tommy’s love interests this year but will also knock heads with him over workers conditions.
Her put down when asked why she was in the gents’ on the second floor was a thing of sheer scripting brilliance.
The big villain of series (played by Adrien Brody) rocked up at the Liverpool docks with a jaunt in his step and his cap at a tilt.
He announced that he’d come all the way from New York and was in Blighty “for pleasure”, which is not good news for the Peaky Blinders.
To make matters worse, he sent them all a black hand in the post to announce that he was coming for them. It probably wasn’t quite the Christmas they were expecting.
Tommy was quickly alerted to the oncoming storm of the Sicilian Mafia but it looked like it was too late for some of the other members of the Birmingham gang.
Following the black hand Christmas cards, Tommy realised he had to act first and rallied his family around.
While Ada, Polly, Arthur Shelby (Paul Anderson) and Linda (Kate Phillips) made it safely to Tommy’s sanctuary, not all of the family did.
Despite his best attempts to save his family, Michael and John fell victim to Luca after he unleashed hell on Christmas Day.
In a scene that could have been straight out of The Godfather, men brandishing machine guns burst out of an innocuous stack of hay bales and obliterated the two gang members.
Peaky Blinders is not know for killing off some of its bigger characters and the plot twist came as something of a curveball.
The killing is set to have repercussions with Tommy not resting until Luca and his ilk are history.
Peaky Blinders airs on BBC One on Wednesdays at 9pm.
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