Peaky Blinders: Duke Shelby, Tuberculoma, and Tommys Past Returning

Tuberculoma

Duke isn’t the only surprise Tommy receives in ‘Sapphire’. Following the X-Rays he was forced to take at the sanatorium where Ruby was treated and died, Tommy also gets a diagnosis. His lungs are clear of tuberculosis, but he has developed a tuberculoma. It’s rapidly expanding and inoperable, says his doctor, who estimates that Tommy only has between a year and 18 months to live.

The tuberculoma is a rapidly expanding mass on Tommy’s brain stem, caused by the same bacterial infection that killed Ruby. It spreads through families, says the doctor, and can be transmitted by a simple kiss. Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection can result in different outcomes depending on whether the tuberculosis is ‘active’ and infectious (like Ruby’s) or latent and non-infectious, in which case it can exist in the body without developing into TB, sometimes for years.

Greta Jurossi

Ruby’s death isn’t the first time Tommy Shelby has been exposed to TB, or “consumption” as it was formerly known. In season four, episode three ‘Blackbird’, we learned through Jessie Eden that before France, Tommy was in love with an Italian girl named Greta Jurossi. Jessie’s a friend of Greta’s sister Kitty, and gives Tommy a souvenir photograph of him with Greta at Blackpool beach one summer before the War. Greta became ill, and a devoted Tommy sat by her bedside for three months. Aged 19, Greta died of consumption, the same disease that killed Tommy’s daughter, and which is now killing him.

In season four, after Tommy is reminded of Greta, he makes plans to expand the Shelby Foundation charitably children’s homes and hospitals. When Lizzie asks him why, he tells her “Because I promised someone I’d change the world.” That someone must have been Greta, the young Communist who was Tommy’s first love.

With Duke’s out-of-the-blue arrival, and the return of TB into Tommy’s life, there’s a sense of his past cycling back in time for his death. Not known for our standing as a medical journal, Den of Geek obviously can’t comment on the likelihood of Tommy’s tuberculoma having been caused by a bacterial infection contracted from Greta and having remained latent since before WWI, but there’s something poetic about the idea that Tommy Shelby has long contained the seed of his own destruction. He’s certainly been having the hallucination symptoms of the tuberculoma since before Ruby became ill, either by cruel chance or by a cruel gypsy curse, depending on how you choose to see it.

‘Sapphire’ leaves Tommy having to pay a metaphorical “bill” he wasn’t expecting, having to deal with a son he certainly wasn’t expecting, and still trying to carry out his youthful promise to Greta that he would change the world. It’s been a long, dark tunnel for Tommy Shelby, and at his darkest point, he’s starting to see the light at the end.

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