It’s been a brutal and complex couple of months as we’ve followed Oswald Cobb as he’s killed, connived and plotted in order to finally grab himself a bigger piece of the pie when it comes to the vast amounts of crime that exists in Gotham City, but now it’s time to see if the Penguin can finally seal the deal – both the man and the show. Up until now, this supremely gritty spin off to Matt Reeves’ The Batman has been one of the most consistent shows on TV, delivering a layered, complicated and unpredictable crime epic that’s been fleshing out the moving parts Gotham’s criminal underworld in ways we’ve never seen before, but now it’s time to wrap things up and see who walks away with the metaphorical keys to the kingdom.
However, don’t expect a cameo fest where already established characters such as Batman, Catwoman, The Joker or even Jim Gordon suddenly showing up at the last minute – but thankfully, the final standoff between Oz and Sofia Gigante is so enthralling, you won’t actually care.
It seems that Sofia Gigante finally holds all the cards. Not only has she kidnapped Francis Cobb in order to pick her dementia addled memory to discover all she can about her nemesis’ past, but she now also has Oz himself after blowing up his underground drugs lab, causing untold damage to the already battered Crown Point. Her aim is to finally get Francis to confront her son about the deaths of his brothers that occured when they drowned in a sewer overflow pipe as children because, thanks to a truly disturbing flashback last episode, we now know that he was utterly responsible for. However, despite the fact that everyone knows what he did, Oz simply won’t attone or even admit his sins and as a result, Francis suffers a massive stroke which gives him the distraction he needs to escape, shoot his way out and get his mother to a hospital.
However, in the wake of the bombing, Oz and his overachieving underling, Vic, they find that the alliances they’d forged with the other gangs has now all but evaporated, but if we’ve learnt anything from our time with Oz, it’s that he’s at his most dangerous when his back is against the wall. If you take away his bullets, drugs and henchmen, he still has his most potent weapon still at his disposal – his words. But while Oz, chooses to take a diffrent route to win, Sofia also seems determined to break the rules established by her late, sadistic father.
Essentially offering up the entirety of the Gigante/Falcone/Maroni empire to the gang that can finally deliver her Oz once and for all, she truly believes she can finish up her business once and for all and leave Gotham to the men who would eagerly carve it up. But as Oz and Sofia’s final gambits take form, only one can be left standing – who will it be and what further atrocities will they commit to cement their power?
So, we’ve already established that Matt Reeves’ The Batman, with its stark, David Fincher style leanings, is pretty much as dark as the world of Vatman has gotten on screen, but the final episode of The Penguin takes thing so dark, it starts to encroach on the type of cold blooded criminal happenings usually seen in the likes of The Godfather, Goodfellas or The Sopranos. Now, while we’ve certainly seen Oz and company pull some heinous shit before (this whole shebang was kickstarted by Oz shooting Sofia’s brother in a fit of rage), but the show has saved some of the mote harrowing moments for the endgame as these guys really pull out the stops to get what they want.
One of the most important themes that the show has delivered is how exactly we’re supposed to be looking at Oz himself as thanks to some cracking writing and arguably a career best performance from the still practically invisible Colin Farrell, there’s still a sense that he’s a charismatic anti-hero who we should be admiring. However A Great Or Little Thing practically bends over backwards to punish us for ever wanting Oz to fully assume his comic book mantle, top hat and all and it all starts with the way he ultimately treats his mother when the chips are down. As the toxic truth finally spills over we not only see that Oz is actually willing to let Sofia snip off one of Francis’ fingers in order to cling to the truth he’s spent decades protecting, but Francis counters back with the fact that not only did she know all along, she deliberated with local mobster, Rex Calabrese, about whether she should have her son killed. It’s as poisonous and vitriolic as a dinner scene in an A24 movie, it sets the tone movie forward and while Oz changes tactics and goes a more “legal” route when trying to finally take Sofia down, the way he closes out the series finally gives us a Batman villain who, in his own way, us just as messed up as The Riddler or the Joker. The big one his his decision to murder Vic, his only true friend, in order to make himself utterly untouchable which, after eight whole episodes of bonding, is nothing sort of unconscionable – but on top of this, the final moments see him celebrating his “victory” while he dances with Eve as she’s dressed as his mother as he instructs her to voice the platitudes he longed to hear from his own mother as she lies in bed in a completely vegetative state.
It’s as dark a winning lap as it sounds and while we think that the entire season was all about him earning the power to be a major Batman player, it was all about locking off his villain credentials that makes far more than a gimpy crimeboss.
The other star of the show has been Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Gigante and you could argue that she got the more traditional anti-hero/villain as she had a more tragic backstory (framed by her father for murder and locked away in Arkham) and her wardrobe and her demeanor has become more flamboyant and confident as she’s progressed through the ranks, but the episode reveals that her greatest weakness is her desire to force the people who have wronged her to face their sins. While Oz would casually just executed someone he didn’t need around (just ask poor Vic), Sofia needs her pound of flesh and the show smartly seems to be comparing her slightly more elaborate, almost more “comic booky” brand of villainy (mass gassings, bombings, unnecessarily elaborate torture) with Oz’s more realistic, blue collar type of brutality. Still, after being utterly outmaneuvered by her foe at the final hurdle as he essentially manipulates the events of the series to recast his opposition as some deranged super-terrorist – which technically she is – we find Sofia finally taken off the board and sent back to Arkham to once again rot as someone else’s scapegoat. It’s cruel and triggering, but it’s the perfect ending to a near perfect crime show.
So no Batman – aside from the bat-signal lighting up the sky in the final shot – but as a set up to a second movie, The Penguin has not only given us an antagonist who has upped his game immensely from where he was in the first film, but we even get a Catwoman tease as Sofia gets a letter in her dingy cell from her half-sister, Selina Kyle.
Some will no doubt grumble that their Batman show didn’t have Batman in it, but it’s a sacrifice that was well worth it as we get an unforgettable display of bad people doing extraordinary bad things.
Emperor Penguin.
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