As we get dangerously near to The Penguin’s finale, all the players are poised to play their part in order to see who finally gets to lay claim to Gotham – however, there’s one person who’s been conspicuously absent while both Oz Cobb and Sofia Gigante tear strips off of each other and that’s the Dark Knight himself, Batman. While we all knew going in to this eight episode series that Bruce Wayne’s thug pummeling vigilante wouldn’t be one of the players, some wondered how Robert Patterson’s caped hero would let so much death and chaos slip by on his watch, but there’s also an argument to be made that after the Riddler’s terrorist flood, he’s been far too busy to bother with mobster killing each other off.
As excuses go, it actually kind of worked (well, I accepted it anyway), but now that we’re starting to approach The Penguin’s endgame, it’s getting tougher to buy his noticable absence…
Thankfully, aside from this growing issue, the rest of the show manages to keep things cooking.
The the tit for tat assaults that both Oz and Sofia have been inflicting upon one another had to take their toll as some point, but on the precipice of its breaking point, we’re granted a flashback to show us exactly what kind of world would create someone so desperate and twisted as The Penguin.
As a child, the lame, overweight Oz is resentful of his older and younger brothers – Jackie and Ben – for many reasons, but the main one is that he simply doesn’t like sharing his mother’s love with anyone – especially family. One day, after heading out to do a chore with his brothers, they come across local mobster Rex Calabrese, the man who would go on to influence exactly the sort of man that Oz hopes to become, but after making their drop, the boys decide to play a game in a local sewer tunnel despite the fact that the weather is turning decidedly stormy and after a falling out, a pissed of Oz makes a fateful choice that will define him forever.
Meanwhile, in the present, Oz finds that Sofia has discovered where he was hiding his beloved mother, Francis, and has kidnapped her to enact some measure of payback for all the shit that Cobb has done. However, before the Penguin can waddle into action, Maroni shows up to deliver a long overdue ass kicking and escorts a beaten Oz to his underground lair where he announces that all of the manufacture and supply of the hit new drug, Bliss, now belongs to him.
Meanwhile, Sofia’s thirst for vengeance takes a hit twofold when she first realises Francis has dementia and then she finds that the young Gia (the only relative she spared from the Falcone gas attack) is traumatised by the event and wants to cooperate with the police. Realising that she’s still playing by her father’s rules and hurting innocents in the crossfire, she vows to change the game entirely with explosive results – which is probably a good thing considering that Oz somehow manages to turn the tables on Maroni and weasel out of yet another near-death experience.
OK, so we’re going to bring up the Batman issue again later, but please don’t think for a second that one, pointy-eared, plot issue means that The Penguin has jumped the tracks, because it really hasn’t. In fact, thanks to an extremely telling flashback sequence, there’s an argument to be made that the show is as interesting as ever, especially since the game of chicken between who is the more tragic, “acceptable”, anti hero of Oz and Sofia just took a damming turn.
I’m going to be honest, but it was fairly obvious that Oz had something to the accidental deaths of Jackie and Ben, but the fact that he locked them in a flooding sewer tunnel after a game went wrong nicely leaves more questions than answers. It’s never explicitly shown whether Oz knew exactly what would happen, or he simply just didn’t realise the extent of his deed thanks to his mother-worship, but the fact remains that Oz was a opportunistic psychopath then and he’s still one now and no amount of physical disability or matriarchal love can change that. In fact, we see that he’s completely willing to rip his mother’s life up at the roots if it means he gets to be the only one snuggling up to her watching old Gene Kelly movies. The thing is, the show has never hidden this from us – remember, Oz has done more vicious things during the season than any number of people this season, but thanks to Colin Farrell’s desperate, sweaty charisma, we’ve kind off accepted it until now and even through we are fully aware of his misdeeds, it still feels like a victory when he bests Clancy Brown’s Moroni thanks to a well timed heart attack when it should feel that this is the worst thing that could happen for Gotham.
Elsewhere, Sofia seems to be on a similar road – opting to not kill Francis in order to learn more about her foe and having her resolve shaken by Gia, she sees that innocent women are still bearing the brunt of the fallout, but even so, her idea to resolve this deadlock may be as dangerously short sighted as the Riddler’s terrorist attack. In her defense, her therapist-turned-squeeze, Dr. Rush, is the one who convinces her to keep looking to put the hurt of Cobb, but even I have to admit that sending a bomb down into Oz’s underground lair is a massive example of overkill.
Not only does the blast put an end to Cobb’s Bliss operation, but the resulting damage causes a noticeable section of the already battered Crown Point to fall into the crater and it’s here that I’m afraid I have to get back to the Batman conundrum. In the universe that Matt Reeves laid out in The Batman, Bruce Wayne only seems to be in his first year of his life as an insomniac, droopy fringed vigilante so his resources naturally wouldn’t be as omnipotent as they are in the comics, however, while I’m willing to accept that the recent spate of deaths in the mob community wouldn’t be as high a priority as a mayoral assassination, a riddle flinging serial killer or even a random mugging on a station platform, a sizable detonation in an area of Gotham that’s already been brought to its knees due to a flood has to ping up on his radar sooner or later.
So in its penultimate episode, The Penguin now finds itself on something of a narrative tightrope – leave Batman out and focus solely on the winner take all scrap between Oz and Sofia, or somehow drop Batman in and have him interject. If I’m being honest, I believe the show will go with the former, but I hope this decision doesn’t suddenly have people turning on the show needlessly because they’re “Bat-hurt” that their favorite hero didn’t bother to show up. The whole point of a show about the Penguin is that it’s supposed to be about the Penguin and having the Caped Crusader suddenly pop up to wrap everything up would betray the superlative work that Farrell, Cristin Milioti and everyone else on both sides of the camera have done each and every episode.
Show if you must. Hint if you can. But the battle between Oz and Sofia needs to be fought and won unfair and unsquare. Let the Bat clean up the resulting guano in the sequel.
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