A top hat and tails, with an umbrella nearby. Ladies, gentlemen, and friends beyond the binary, I give you the new King of Gotham City, as you know and love him: The Penguin!
So to all of my concerns last week that the show was providing him with a perfect origin story for his trademark finery but not the actual finery, allow me to give a hearty “ha ha ha.” (Or in the Penguin’s case, is it “waugh waugh waugh”?) Writer-creator Lauren LeFranc delivered and gave us the supervillain we remember.
And for a moment, she gives us the superhero we want. Well, his signal, anyway.
There’s even a reference to Catwoman, aka Selina Kyle, who writes to her half-sister (via their late, unlamented father Carmine Falcone) in Arkham. (The letter is delivered by her professional simp Dr. Julian Rush, who apparently never quit his day job.)
Moreover, there are plenty of very Batman-comic plot points and visuals. When Sofia and Julian stage a reunion between their captives Oz and Frances Cobb, they do so in the ruins of the jazz club where, it turns out, France had planned to have Oz killed by local gangster Rex Calabrese (Louis Cancelmi) before changing her mind. It was Rex who advised her that a born killer and liar like Oz, whose guilt in the deaths of his brothers she’s secretly well aware of, can be used to get to the top. Forcing your nemesis to confront a pivotal, traumatic childhood memory is classic Bat-stuff, baby. They even dress Sofia up like Sally Bowles from Cabaret during the scene just as a bonus.
So is the ultimate fate of Frances. When Oz refuses to admit guilt even when Sofia threatens to chop off Frances’s finger, she finally really lets her son have it — including a stab to the gut with a broken bottle. But she has a stroke, and Oz breaks free, grabs her, and escapes. Too late: The stroke is severe enough to leave her in a permanent vegetative state. She gets her penthouse view alright, but from a hospital bed Oz has installed in his apartment. “I know,” he says as she sheds a tear that indicates she’s aware of more than it seems. “It’s everything you always wanted.” Not sure that’s why she’s crying, Oz. Anyway, superhero comics love a villain with a loved one they could never save, though in Gotham that’s generally more Mr. Freeze’s territory than the Penguin’s.
But all of Gotham is now the Penguin’s territory. Through his right-hand man victor, he makes an alliance with the number-two guys in every Gotham gang, all of whom turn on their overlords and join Oz’s organization. He captures Sofia, but instead of killing her outright, he frames her for basically every crime committed by any organized crime outfit in Gotham for the past year, and she winds up right back in Arkham, as he surely knew she would. (That’s why he could afford to let her live, knowing what she knows about him: Who’s gonna believe her?) And he lets a crooked councilman take the lion’s share of the credit for “cleaning up” the city in general and Crown Point in particular, ensuring that he now has political protection, not just gangster protection.
As for Victor? Come on, you knew where this was going from the first episode — it’s just a shame Victor himself didn’t as well. The moment he lets his guard down and tells Oz he’s like family to him, Oz chokes him to death, refusing to allow himself to have any close ties like that again. But this is a guy who figures out a reason to fuck over everyone who ever makes a deal with him, no matter what the occasion or excuse. Only a naive kid like Victor would watch the Penguin kill off one ally and competitor after another and think “Not me though, I’m too important to him.”
Despite its extra runtime, this episode mostly flies by thanks to the direction of Jennifer Getzinger. In addition to her capable handling of all the cat-and-mouse business, she almost entirely avoids the ghastly orange color palette of the earlier episodes, which allows the performances of key cast members Deirdre O’Connell and (beneath all those prosthetics) Colin Farrell in particular to actually shine through. You need unsparing grey light on Oz’s face when he’s confronted with his crimes, something that shows his every scar and flaw and combover. And you need to be able to fully register Frances’s horror at the monster she helped create, or at the very least allowed to live on.
Now, when you catch Matt Reeves’s next Batman movie, are you gonna need to know any of this? I doubt it’ll be set up that way. At the end of The Batman, my assumption was the Penguin would be the mob boss in charge of the city for the Dark Knight to take down in the next movie, and that appears to be the case exactly. You didn’t need a show to connect the dots, strictly speaking.
But the best way to look at The Penguin isn’t as a bridge between movies, but as a shaggy-dog joke. The Penguin does all this, kills all these people, leaves almost every enemy and ally he has in the world dead, so he can run Gotham City…until they switch on the Bat-signal. If that final shot had been accompanied by an actual rimshot, I think I’d have enjoyed it more, not less. Think you can get away with, pal? The joke’s on you.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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