#which is interesting given the effort put into making the Shelby family’s characterisation believable

[divinekangaroo]

S1 teeters on overly dense but relatively entertaining, and despite the density of action/fact also feels quite shallow? Potentially the standardised plot/romantic expectation?

S2 by contrast feels like it doesn’t know what it is, but is way more entertaining.

Sabini (Noah Taylor) is utterly not my cup of tea and his Aussie-Italian accent should be cut from his mouth brutally because it’s awful; but S2 also sets up sooooo many good arcs for later on, and also contains a lot of truly hilarious moments (the glass of gin lolllll; a racehorse is a good investment lolllll, almost everything Tommy says to Campbell including calling him up about Grace’s booty call my God). I also wonder about Alfie and this fannish perception of his perceptiveness; from what I can remember of later series, and now this in S2, Alfie is nearly almost always losing total control of his business, and it’s Tommy that manages to somehow manoeuvre this self-destructive wildcard of a gangster into positions where they can mutually profit.

I feel, better than S1, S2 also shows the boundaries that Tommy consciously crosses and disrespects to get what he wants. The final ep pre-execution scene and his screaming at the sky was so honest, and even though he repeats these themes in later series as his motivation, in S2 I really believe it. He is fucking angry. S1 often felt like it was trying to sell him as a mostly good, petty criminal style man making the most of an opportunity gone complex and wrong; S2 clearly paints him as consciously choosing to abuse, albeit not entirely without sympathy/empathy, just not enough to change his path. And that scene in London where the brothers smash up a club, just the three of them, then go out after on the street absolutely high and bonded on the violence, uh the best. Let’s not forget that side of them, too.

I adore the thematic structure of that S2 final episode where Tommy fails all three of his women (four if you count Polly and that he had to let her sort it out herself).

I adore the emotional swings and roundabouts he has with Arthur’s suicide attempts, which also feels very, very real.

I felt that the sex scenes with May seem to have the camera focus on her orgasm/s, when pretty much every other sex scene in the series, the camera’s very focused on Tommy, and what that means in framing their brief and odd relationship.

I like Michael’s honest hunger for the life and the power.

I also find interesting that end of S1 had Danny (Flashback-Partner #1) die, and the start of S2 had Freddie (Flashback-Partner #2) die, and that all of S2 then has Tommy leveraging the good things war gave him — connections, colleagues, reputation, weaponry skills and tactical skills. He also says to Arthur that comment about ‘closing the door on the war’, which yes, starts to roar open again for Tommy in later series, but right now in S2 the war is almost put to bed for Tommy; part of that being S1 Grace let him see he could sleep/live without it for a bit, but I also think it has something to do with Freddie and Danny now both being deceased. The constant reminder of Danny’s volatility and Tommy’s sense of responsibility to him; the constant moral and ethical battle he had with Freddie about their mutual moral trauma, and Freddie’s constant quasi-suicidal language around Tommy (but putting the onus back on Tommy to execute him) suddenly gone.

In S1, what I carried away more of was character and symbolism rather than plot or theme. Polly hits Tommy around the head a lot, including once nearly with a poker; he allows it. In S2, he’s not allowing it any more. Tommy’s nearly monk-like at the start and there’s lots of symbolic monk references (eg, Monaghan means monk, red dust in Buddhism); in the whole of Episode 1 he doesn’t manage to get a single drink in; yet he’s human and vulnerable and drunk by S6. His white horse (his opportunity for balance against the black horse) and having to kill it himself because he did something not moral to win the horse, sacrificing his potential for balancing light and dark. The whole Monaghan Boy scam and how it’s structured to represent exactly how Tommy plays himself in scams (Tommy takes a hit/pays out so more people buy in; Tommy takes a bigger hit/pays out more so even more people buy in; then turn the tables and cash in when everyone’s gone all in).

Also I quantified the S1 guns in current day pounds:

Tommy’s original scam of four stolen motorbikes - about 50-60k in current day pounds

The value of the guns he finds - about 2.1 million current day pounds

Can totally picture him sitting in the yard staring at his unexpected loot just sweating bricks trying to work out how to turn it into actual money.