The following story contains spoilers for The Penguin season finale, “A Great or Little Thing.”
WHILE THE ERA of live-action comic book supervillain exploration is still among us, we’re seeing more and more the different ways to explore those characters. In Loki, we saw Tom Hiddleston’s iconic Marvel villain become an anti-hero, and, eventually, just a hero. In the Venom films, Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock/Venom is never a villain at all. Agatha All Along manages to flesh out Kathryn Hahn’s sinister witch and give her a bit of emotional depth, but she’s still an anti-hero at best.
What makes HBO’s The Penguin stand out among these (and this year alone we’re still waiting on Sony’s Kraven the Hunter) is that the show has zero interest in audiences rooting for the character at its center. In fact, one could make the case that The Penguin is almost the Breaking Bad of supervillain shows; Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) was no hero when things started off, but by the end he’s unforgivable.
As we’ve watched eight episodes of Oz making his way through Gotham City’s criminal underworld, bringing Victor (Rhenzy Feliz) under his wing and taking on both Sofia Falcone/Gigante (Cristin Milioti) and Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown), it’s clear that Oz is someone thinking several steps ahead, and never afraid to put his life and well being ahead of someone else’s. There’s one person in Oz’s mind—and it’s his own. Well, outside of his mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell), but even she comes second to The Penguin himself.
The final episodes of The Penguin leaves us with no questions as to the content of Oz’s character and his intentions. He comes out on top—for the time being—but that doesn’t mean we don’t have some questions about how everything shook out. And it certainly doesn’t mean that another showdown with Batman (Robert Pattinson) isn’t on the way.
Below, we break down the most important parts of The Penguin’s finale.
Why did Oz/The Penguin Kill Vic?
HBO
Throughout the course of The Penguin, we’ve seen Oz take Vic under his wing, and from their first fast food meal together, the two have become close. Vic, in fact, hasn’t just become close with Oz—he’s become a legitimate killer, taking out a former associate who was causing trouble and then even earlier in the episode firing away on Oz’s behalf during the coup against Sofia’s people.
By the end of the episode, after Oz emerged victorious from his conflict with Sofia and the Maronis, and after his mother was in a vegetative state, he and Vic sat overlooking the river and almost just reminisced. Oz told Vic that he’s seen him at his lowest, and that’s the truth; at the start of the show, Oz was set to be replaced by Alberto Falcone, stuck in an underling role in the criminal world. The series had lots of ups and downs, and Vic was along with Oz for all of it. Oz, in becoming the new crime kingpin of Gotham, could be taking a risk by anyone, even his friend in Vic, knowing the kind of vulernabilities he has in the world.
But Vic made one major mistake, and it ended up costing him his life: he told Oz that he considers him family. And in these last two episodes of The Penguin, we’ve learned exactly what Oz is willing to do to his family—kill them for his own benefit. Episode 7 opened with a flashback that depicted a young Oz leaving his brothers, Jack and Benny, to drown in the very underground tunnels where he and Vic set up their own operation.
When Oz heard this, his decision was made. He did love Vic—but in his mind, love is a weakness. And he just saw first hand with his mother how a weakness can be exploited. So he decided to rip the band-aid off, and take Vic out himself. It’s a horrifying, terrible moment, and one that leaves the audience absolutely no choice but to despise Oz for everything he’s done. Vic was a kid who lost his real family thanks to the Riddler’s attack on Gotham City, and finally felt like he found community with Oz—only to suffer the ultimate betrayal before he even realized what was happening.
The Penguin creator Lauren LeFranc discussed the moment in an interview with Deadline. “It’s not because of anything Victor did wrong,” she said. “I think Oz, in that moment, really chose to kill his own heart and embrace the monster that he is. It is a terrible tragedy, and I’ve always viewed our show as a tragedy.”
Farrell also discussed the heartbreaking moment. “I mean, part of me didn’t want to do it, you know? I knew that the general sentiment was that, by the end, they kind of wanted to, in a way, kill the Oz that we met in the film,” he said in an interview with Collider. “I felt that there was a sense of creative responsibility that leaned towards, ‘We cannot have this man as a likable character.'”
Who is Selina Kyle and why is she looking for Sofia?
HBO
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
By the end of the series, Sofia Falcone/Gigante ends up right back where she started—in Arkham Asylum. But Dr. Rush (Theo Rossi) is a strong ally for her—he believes in her, and, actually kind of loves and is obsessed with her. He brings her a letter from a Selina Kyle, leaving The Penguin off with a major cliffhanger ahead of either The Batman — Part II or some other unannounced project in this universe.
Those with short memories may be wondering—who, exactly, is Selina Kyle? And the quick answer is that Selina Kyle is the real name of Catwoman, specifically in this instance the Catwoman played by Zoë Kravitz in 2022’s The Batman. As you may recall, in that film, Selina was revealed to be the daughter of evil crime lord Carmine Falcone (played there by John Turturro), and to put it lightly… she does not like him. At all.
So, the idea here would be that Selina and Sofia could have quite a bit of common ground—and seeing them share some scenes together is something that sounds really, really enticing. Not to mention the fact that Cristin Milioti and Zoë Kravitz are both excellent actresses who would certainly light things up.
When is Batman going to get involved with all of this?
Warner Bros.
We saw lots and lots of set up in the back half of The Penguin’s first (and perhaps only?) season. Obviously, at the forefront is Oz’s rise to power in Gotham city, both within the formal government and also in the underworld. He managed to pin basically all of the violence throughout the course of the series on Sofia and the Maronis, and in doing so he managed to get himself a seat on the city council. This is a very interesting set up toward something that has happened in the comics and also in Tim Burton’s iconic film Batman Returns: The Penguin running for Mayor of Gotham City.
Gotham’s mayor at the moment, as we saw in The Batman, is Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson), who was a progressive candidate who ran on a platform with anti-corruption as a main focus. She returns for a brief moment in The Penguin, and we learn that she’s got anti-corruption task forces already working and investigating the Falcone family and their associates—that means Oz is already in the crosshairs, but going (at least somewhat) legit could help him to get away with things. Anti-corruption in Gotham City, as we’ve seen in movies like The Dark Knight and Joker: Folie à Deux , also tends to mean the introduction of one pretty vital figure: Harvey Dent.
At the end of the day, with Oz feeling on top of the world, The Penguin finally got its first reference to Batman: the Bat-signal shining in the night sky.
“We’re kind of flicking you at the end to say the story’s not over,” Matt Reeves, who directed and co-wrote The Batman and will also do the same for The Batman — Part II said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly . “The idea that Oz and these characters could be on a collision course at some point with Batman, that’s of course out there. So we wanted to leave you with a sense of that without overshadowing that this is really the completion of the story.”
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