The Penguin Always Had to End Like This

Photo: HBO

Spoilers follow for the The Penguin finale “A Great or Little Thing,� which premiered on HBO on November 10. 

As soon as Vic Aguilar told his boss Oz Cobb he considered the lumbering crime don his family, the orphaned teen was doomed. “You still think there’s good and bad, right and wrong? There ain’t. There’s just this: survival,� Oz told the young man early in their partnership, and that scolding was a warning — both to Vic and to us. As a series sequel to Matt Reeves’s The Batman, The Penguin’s intentions were clear: Build out Gotham and shade in Oz so that if he appears in the film sequel, The Batman: Part II, Colin Farrell’s ancillary villain would be fully realized. But the extent to which The Penguin obliterated Oz’s soul to get him ready for more screen time? Even if we should have expected it, man, did it hurt.

The Penguin has been clear about Oz’s cruelty from the start. In childhood, he killed his two brothers by locking them in an abandoned underground trolley station and leaving them to drown. In adulthood, he fails to care for his mentally ill mother, Francis, and lies to her about what happened to her sons, practically abandoning his last living relative to ascend to the top of Gotham’s crime ladder. Think of how he describes the warring mobs he’s spent years working for or doubling-crossing: “All these fucks are related … Sixty years ago, two Sicilian brothers jizzed all over the toe of that boot.� Oz treats both literal and figurative families as either responsibilities to be resented or props to be arranged for his benefit; The Penguin ends with Oz, his goal finally in sight, re-creating those cycles of violence and outdoing his own brutality. He kills Vic to avoid future liability and tighten his circle of confidants to his lover, Eve — whom he dresses up like his mother and calls “Ma� — and his actual mother, who lies paralyzed in another room of their penthouse. Like that Bat Signal shining in the sky, Oz’s villain turn is, of course, mandated by the demands of franchise expansion. That doesn’t limit its tragedy, though, or how thoroughly it punctures the image of Oz the season built to this point.

For seven of its eight episodes, The Penguin paid homage to the antihero era of prestige TV. Oz had the comic book character’s limp, top hat, and fondness for the color purple (or, as he insists to Sofia Gigante, plum), but he also had Tony Soprano’s demanding mother and desire for a normal home life; Walter White’s ruthless, many-steps-ahead scheming; and Jax Teller’s heavy-weighs-the-crown existential burden. Aligning Oz with the TV icons we spent so long rooting for was a clever adaptation choice from showrunner Lauren LeFranc; The Penguin becomes indebted more to the crime-drama genre broadly than the Batman myth specifically and diverts whatever lingering sympathy we have for those characters toward Oz. Because underneath all his youse-guys bluster and loyalty-always-loyalty speechifying, Oz is a bad guy who works for one person — himself — and it’s a fantastic trick of performance from Farrell to make him so likable in his brutish warmth and so charming with those throaty chuckles, approving pats on Vic’s shoulder, and sarcastic asides.

Even before Oz chokes Vic to death and dumps his body, steals the money from his wallet, and discards his ID in Gotham River, The Penguin tests how much depravity its audience can take when it’s packaged in populism. In the first few minutes of the premiere, Oz murders Falcone-family heir Alberto for laughing at his story about Rex Calabrese, the neighborhood gangster Oz idolized for his openheartedness. (A point of poetic irony here: Oz doesn’t know that his mother asked Rex to kill Oz after she realized her son had murdered his brothers or that Rex was willing to do it.) Eliminating Alberto is ultimately a self-serving move for Oz, but it comes from a place of defensiveness and respect — Oz won’t let Alberto besmirch the memory of a man who provided his community with medical care, rent money, and groceries. A man like that, Oz believes, is above reproach, and he models himself after Rex, convinced that his immoral actions are in service of a larger community.

As Oz’s body count rose this season, so too did his insistence on positioning himself as an egalitarian icon. He listens to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.� (“Barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’ / They just use your mind and they never give you credit / It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.�) He insists to Vic, “Guys like us, we gotta stick together,� as they reminisce about their old working-class neighborhood. Instead of railing against the Wayne family as the cause of Gotham’s economic woes, as the Riddler did in The Batman, Oz pegs the mob bosses as the culprits and wins over rival gangs by arguing for more equitable organized crime. In “Gold Summit,� he promises his grunts “food on the table and clothes on your backs� and intimidates a councilman into turning the power back on in Gotham’s lower-income neighborhoods. Farrell growling “It ain’t right� and “The real power comes if we got each other’s backs� is so convincing you almost think Oz means it.

Until you remember all the stuff Oz has gotten up to this season that contradicts his promises of protection — betraying or killing his business partners (Sofia, Nadia Maroni and her son Taj) and the underlings of rival crime families he’s supposedly working to elevate. When he told Vic, “I make myself small, they feel better about themselves, and I get to go back to work,� it seemed like a flash of true honesty: Everything about Oz is a performance, whether he’s diminishing himself so the capos feel superior or preaching class equality to get lower-level gangsters to pledge their allegiance to his side. He’s a chameleon, and The Penguin maintains the tension between what Oz says he believes and how he actually acts until its calamitous end.

Poor, lonely Vic, whose parents and little sister died in Gotham City’s flooding; whose last conversation with his father was a fight; who bought so easily into Oz’s “How’s anyone supposed to know your worth unless you tell them?� shtick that he immediately asked for a raise (and was fine with being turned down); who declined an opportunity to leave Gotham with the girlfriend he might love because he was swayed by Oz’s talk of being partners. With soft eyes and hesitant physicality, Rhenzy Feliz plays Vic as so wounded and young you understand why he’d be drawn to Oz’s boastfulness. But Oz had let the orphaned teen get too close, and his murder of the gasping, pleading, and totally shocked Vic throws the young man’s innocence into sharp relief. He was too naïve to know that Oz’s criticisms of the American Dream were self-interested, rather than genuinely revolutionary, and so impressionable that when Oz told him, “You and me now, kid, ’til the end,� he believed it.

And so did we, when what we should have internalized instead was Oz’s “They don’t give out awards for dying in the projects.� That’s exactly the fate awaiting Vic in “A Great or Little Thing,� the moment Oz fully breaks bad and The Penguin winks at us, acknowledging how easily the language of self-actualization can be used toward other people’s destruction. The Penguin doesn’t quite rise to the quality of the series it’s referencing, and it’s ultimately more of an entertaining pastiche than a genre-defining work like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or even dudes-rock classic Sons of Anarchy. But with three heartbreaking murders under his belt, the city under his thumb, and The Batman: Part II looming, Oz Cobb is standing tall at the end of The Penguin, redefining the character and readying him for a return to whatever future version of Gotham beckons him back home.