after rewatch: tommy and duke *definitely* had four really fucked up years of being in a reasonable orbit with each other. Duke knowing about Tommy’s opium addiction, being weirdly disgusted by it while also immediately going for sex and opium after killing Virgil (?); to the point he sort of hides the packet when Auntie Ada surprises him, only to pull it out for the purpose of lashing out and hurting her by linking opium use to him, her, his father. The fact Duke calls her auntie, not aunt, not Ada. Duke’s resentment that Tommy left him to go into retreat. Tommy being just disgusted by Duke generally and mostly by how duke operates - when he jumps him in the pigpen he starts lashing with the *social* crimes of the Peaky Blinders under duke’s direction, and never once raises the *personal* crime of killing Ada notwithstanding knowing/suspecting - it’s Duke who makes that horror real, he starts shrieking he didn’t do it, in defence. And just how VIOLENT Tommy is with Duke, by God, how disgusted he is: the makeup crew did not bruise Duke up nearly enough after that. There should’ve been broken ribs and an eye fully swollen shut at the minimum, a swollen nose, solid black bruising across his belly’s and Beckett sitting there in that room staring at the sight of a thoroughly beaten up firstborn son and making more idle commentary about fatherhood and disappointment. They should have made the ugly son three times uglier :) :) :)
I am also genuinely really liking Duke as a character. Everyone seems annoyed by him but man the impact of fucked up parents on children is close to my heart, and duke, Charlie, Ruby, Karl - the way they were backgrounded and rendered symbolic and neutered in the series, mirrors, motifs, distorted reflections not children but rather just a way to say a thing - to have that generation be given humanity and see just how fucked up it now is - in such unique ways - gives me great pleasure. The way Barry plays Duke is astonishing on close watch, particularly his BREATHING - the sheer uncontrollable anxiety and emotion in that kid, every scene just watch his damned *breathing*, is a definite marriage of Tommy and Arthur’s worst. And how fucked up he’s gonna be, oh man, soooo fucked up, so fucked up:
he thought he was going to be His Own Man because he did the opposite of what the coin told him to do. After being told what to do by Tommy (take over the Blinders) and doing it, running off Finn, killing a man; being told what to do by Beckett and doing it, killing a man; told what to do by Kaulo (kill your father), told by the flip of a coin to go through with it, but insisting that no, no, he would do the good thing, he wouldn’t do that - only to do what he was told again, killing his father at the very moment he thought they were finally bonding, having done something good together, doing, again, what he was told
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