Sure, I guess there’s plenty of riches to be gained from living a life in organised crime, but if any of the films and TV shows I’ve ever seen are to be believed, it seems like a complete and utter nightmare when it comes to keeping all the dodgy deals and backstabbing in order. However, if the sheer mass of lethal duplicity seems insurmountable in such shows and movies as The Sopranos or The Godfather, imagine how fucked things are in the crime capital of made up cities: Gotham City. It’s here that we rejoin Oz Cobb, the self proclaimed heir-apparant to the head of all of the criminal underworld who has finally decided to make his big push and finally cheat, lie, murder and con his way up the ladder while trying to avoid a hollow point lobotomy as he goes.
While the first episode lowered Colin Farrell’s Oz into a maelstrom of chaos of his own making, the second now takes the time to show just exactly how many moving parts there are to his ever shifting plan. Brace yourself Gothamites, things are about to get super dense.
While crumpled mob goon Oz Cobb isn’t about to be voted most eligible bachelor in Gotham any time soon, you can’t say that he hasn’t been an influence on the city he claims to love. In fact, after pumping Alberto Falcone full of bullets in a fit of rage, you could claim that the Penguin has become the most influential man in town – not that he’d want anyone to know it yet.
However, as his mission to waddle his way to the top continues, his actions to destabilise not one, but two crime families at the same time is starting to pay off. While the prison dwelling head of the opposing Maroni family was more than happy to gloat about Alberto’s death by wearing the ring that Cobb scavenged off his body, the doing so has now essentially framed him for ordering his death, thus kicking off a mob war that no one is particularly ready to fight. Further more, suspicion continues to rise after Penguin arranges for the shipment of drugs he’s responsible for to get jacked out from under his bulbous nose.
While tensions rise between the families, there’s also some issues broiling within the ranks as the disturbed, PTSD suffering Sofia Falcone rankles at the fact that the new head of the family, her uncle Lucia, isn’t in a rush to investigate Alberto’s murder further and his sister starts to suspect an insider did the deed. Of course, that insider is standing beside her but, ever the opportunist, Oz offers to help put her at the head of the family where she belongs.
Of course, the path to the top of the mountain is never a straight one and after Sofia starts going out on her own to get some answers, Oz has to employ that quick thinking of his to try and figure out who to frame and how to do it if he’s ever to keep his feathers out of a rapidly growing fire.
With its second episode, The Penguin rolls up its sleeves and wades into yet more gangster fuckery as the effects of his secret plan to take Gotham for himself start to pick up speed and as a result, we get another hour of complicated wheelings and dealings that shove our characters a little further along as we shuffle toward Cobb’s endgame. It’s hardly mold breaking stuff as mob-based double dealings go, but the episode does take pains to take every single character that our lead is moving like chess pieces and give them sufficient time in the spotlight to highlight all those moving parts in motion. As a result, we get a taunt – but hardly seismic – splurge of crime based television that sees our lumpy protagonist/antagonist attempt to circumvent any bullshit that tumbles down the pipe, but while The Penguin could be in danger of growing repetitive on only its second episode, the fascination of watching Oz lie and plot like an automatic fib launcher proves to keep things moving nice and smoothly.
After an opening scene where he essentially locks Clancy Brown’s Maroni into fighting a mob war he doesn’t want to fight thanks to his own hubris, the tone is further set when Oz’s superiors demand that he ride in the exact truck that he’s set up to be heisted by the Maroni family rather than hang back, which means we get the first in a long list of desperate improvising as Cobb struggles to try and stay one step ahead of everybody. We already knew that despite his desire to be a benevolent, beloved mob boss, the Penguin would probably murder a bus full of nuns if it meant either improving his life of saving his skin and we see this in action once again as he murders his own without a second thought simply because it’ll make his latest fabrication all the more plausible.
From there he goes to work destabilising everything, focusing on being the ear that the ever more unstable Sofia can rely on as the rage for her murdered brother builds and builds. In fact, while Sodia hasn’t been on an entirely even keel to start with (they don’t send you to Arkham for just anything, you know), the PTSD coming from seeing Antonio’s body stuffed in a trunk has caused her to suffer horrible nightmares that sees her self harming in her sleep. However, while her unpredictable nature means that she’s going off book with some of her more spontaneous decisions (more on that later), her behavior at her brother’s funeral suggests that a deep loathing and distrust may see her finally get even for decades of being pushed aside and make a play for the throne herself.
Elsewhere we get to spend a little more time with Oz’s mother who, in a single, throwaway line (“If my son’s a nothing, what am I?”) manages to reveal how her parenting has sculpted the disfigured gangster into the conniving monster he is today. We also get a little more time with Victor and I have to admit, I’m getting dark feelings that me may be seeing the origin of another Batman villian right under our very nose. While Oz constantly puts pressure on the street punk, repeatedly threatening his life when things go wrong, his timid, stuttering nature when he chats to one of Cobb’s hired whores might hint that he could end up begin twisted into this universe’s version of Victor Zsasz, a prolific serial killer.
On top of all this potential foreshadowing, we get a couple of nice nods to Batman lore too. The comic No Man’s Land is referenced in relation to the flood the Riddler caused at the end of The Batman and it’s good to see those weird manacle things again that inmates of Arkham have to wear when Sofia suffers her nightmares – but I have to say, it’s getting a little odd that even in a non-Batman Batman show, no one in the crime community is even namedropping the vigilante dude who beats thugs into the concrete while dressed as a nocturnal rodent.
Anyway, with Sofia making a bold play and having a drug-addled underling grab one of Maroni’s injured guys from the drug heist, the episode ends on a tense note as we see just exactly how well Oz can operate in a pinch as he manages to waddle through an entire funeral while murdering witnesses and framing companions as he goes. However, while watching the Penguin do his thing, I can’t help but wonder if the show has anything more to give other than Cobb narrowly dodging death every week in order to keep his masterplan rolling.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s addictive stuff and an all but invisible Colin Farrell will always be worth the price of admission, but it might worth The Penguin to pull out a few, new tricks as the season rolls on.
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