You're on earth. There's no cure for that.

GUYS I CNAR BREATHE IM DJEGNSNNZNF

Like she's the whisper they give each other. She got out. She married a rich man who wasn't ugly and she traveled and had a child and wore gorgeous dresses.

Immortal Man is in the 1940s. That's at least 11 years from season 5, and 15 years from when Thomas Shelby (and presumably the rest of them) move out of Small Heath to bigger cities.

10-15 years is a perfect gap for young women to know who she is but miss the bad stuff. Small Heath treats him like a legend by the movie. They know him, the older generation remembers him, but most memories are fond at this point.

Girls who grew up in Small Heath knew of Lizzie Stark but didn't know everything. Their mothers aren't likely to give their children details and I highly doubt the town knew or kept track of every woman Tommy cheated on her with.

All a 10 year old would see is a woman that he mother called a whore who then started working for a company and then married the company's founder. By 15, they'd see the pretty dresses in the newspaper when Lizzie is holding Ruby for the charities and political rallies. By the time the girls are 25, I doubt most of the women that Lizzie knew would still be whoring to comment on it.

So every time I have watched PB I have liked it more each time, and when season 5 first dropped on Netlfix, I had been a pretty casual watcher of the previous seasons. Then I watched season 5 I was like "Holy fuck this show is fucking good why have I never appreciated it enough". Well there was a LOT I liked about season 5, but one of the things I liked was that blank toned blank faced fight in 5x02 when Tommy and Lizzie are just sniping at each other and Lizzie is just deadpan “You have calls. You don’t want to eat. [You’re shutting me out.]” And Tommy’s like “Yep. Yep. Yep.” I love how it’s shot too where we almost never see Lizzie’s face the whole time. Just her smoking coolly. While the camera just keeps zooming in on Tommy trying so hard to look like he does not care. Then we don’t see Tommy’s face anymore and we see Lizzie's face trying so hard to look like she does not care. But they both clearly do care. And then they say the meanest things they can think to say to each other. I was like omg. This is the greatest representation of two people resigned to having iced each other out ever. Like they are both trying so hard to pretend they don't care. "I don't need you. I wouldn't even notice if you were gone tomorrow." They are going back to their roots, as two people whose trauma response is to go "I do not care. I do not feel it." But it's too late because they have long been exposed in front of each other and they both know that. So it is going to hurt no matter how much they both want to pretend it doesn't.

Since the beginning of the show, Tommy has been this guy whose own family is scared of him a little bit because they think he doesn't feel things enough. And him being that way is a trauma response. And I look at Lizzie through the show, and how stalwart she is, and how she will just seem to blow stuff off that has clearly pissed her off or hurt her (and sometimes deflect criticism that would hurt another person like it's nothing and she truly does not give a fuck) and I see some of the same coping strategies that Tommy has (and I think it's obvious that for her too it is trauma-related). Like obviously we see both of them get upset around people but it's rare it only happens when they are at their most hurt (and usually it's anger that gets exposed because that always feels safest). So you take two people whose tendency when something is hurting them is to go "I'm not going to care about this. I can simply choose to stop caring about this. I will not let anybody see me crack." And then you make them care about each other, in part because this trauma response is understood between them wordlessly and there is an incredible comfort in that, but also in part because that understanding actually lead them to trust each other enough to be vulnerable with each other in ways they aren't with other people. Like. "Oh. Actually Tommy—this person who avoids at all costs anyone seeing him hurting—came to Lizzie with his heart shattering apart and asked her to hold it together, and she did" and "Oh. So she (eventually) told him all the worst things that have ever happened to her and he's the only one who knows how it actually makes her feel." They did this because they trusted each other implicitly to not only keep it between them, but understand and react in a very particular way.

Like if you're a person who has grown up repressing your emotions for whatever Reasons™️ you look at them and go

"They became Death, destroyers of worlds."