Oswald Cobb has manipulated countless people on his way to becoming one of the most powerful figures in Gotham’s criminal underworld. But beneath all of his lies and deceptions, Oz always plants kernels of truth to sell his stories to even his most cynical listeners.
The very first story that Oz tells in The Penguin comes in the opening minutes of the pilot, as he tells Alberto Falcone about Rex Calabrese, an old-school gangster who was something of a local hero when Oz was a kid. He claims that Calabrese was a man of the people who would help others in times of need, for which he was honored with a neighborhood parade when he died. Oz sounds so reverent as he recounts how Rex was celebrated that it’s clear to even the blundering Alberto that it’s Oz’s dream to be remembered in a similar way. And when Alberto makes fun of him for it, Oz shoots him, setting the events of the remainder of the series in motion.
In the penultimate episode of the season, “Top Hat,” The Penguin travels back in time to explore Oz’s childhood, when he was just a kid living with his two brothers—Jack and Benny—and his mother, Francis, in an apartment on the East Side of Gotham. Allusions to Jack’s and Benny’s deaths had been sprinkled throughout the season, but the opening of this week’s episode finally reveals what happened to them.
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Ahead of next Sunday’s season finale, “Top Hat” gets to the core of what drives Oz and Sofia Gigante as characters and what has led them to become the villains they are—vying for power in the city but also wanting more. Oz and Sofia are finally set to go head-to-head as the season comes to an end, and The Penguin reestablishes who they are, connecting their pasts to the present.
In the episode-opening flashback, we can see some of the finer details of Oz’s childhood that he’s mentioned in his many anecdotes spread across the season. They include a glimpse of Rex Calabrese and his crew in action as they toss a man out of his deli and onto the sidewalk. (If Rex was truly a man of the people, he had a funny way of showing it.) More importantly, The Penguin provides some insight into Oz’s relationship with his brothers and his mom.
Back in the fifth episode, Oz took Victor Aguilar to an abandoned underground trolley station and told him about how he used to mess around with his brothers there. As Oz and Vic walked together, Oz lingered in front of an overflow tunnel before continuing the tour of what would soon become the new base of their drug operations. In “Top Hat,” Oz, Jack, and Benny play a game of flashlight tag in the same abandoned station. Jack and Benny hide from Oz at the bottom of the overflow tunnel, which Oz can’t reach due to his bad leg. And so in an impulsive act of frustration, Oz shuts the door to the tunnel, locking them inside, and then returns home to his mom.
When a terrible storm hits the city that night, Jack and Benny drown in the tunnel, just as Vic’s family all drowned in the flood that ravaged Gotham in the present day. Although young Oz is well aware of what he’s done and has every opportunity to try to save his brothers, he lies to his mom about Jack and Benny’s whereabouts, choosing instead to enjoy a home viewing of Top Hat, the 1935 musical starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, while curled up snugly at Francis’s side.
As executive producer Matt Reeves explains in the episode’s “Inside Gotham” segment, the truth about what happened to Jack and Benny—and the role that Oz played in their deaths—contradicts the tragic narrative Oz has been spinning all season. “Part of this drive for who he is stems [from] a trauma that he’s always explained came from the loss of his brothers,” Reeves says. “But then you come to understand that this was a story of his own creation, and really his desire to have his mother all for himself.”
“Top Hat,” whose title doubles as a reference to the Penguin’s preferred choice of headwear in the comics, shows Oz’s lifelong devotion to his mother as he fights to get her back from Sofia and Salvatore Maroni in the present. But it also displays the side of him that desperately wants to be respected and remembered, just as Rex Calabrese was in his neighborhood. After Sal and his goons force Oz to bring them to his base in the underground trolley station, Oz is able to escape Sal’s clutches with the help of his crew, and he soon finds himself in a hand-to-hand brawl with Sal. Just as Maroni is getting the better of Oz, he suffers a heart attack and collapses.
While you’d think that Oz would be relieved by his enemy’s demise, he’s disappointed and distraught about the sudden turn of events. He wanted to be the cause of his rival’s death; instead, Sal is done in by a broken heart. “Oh, hell no,” Oz says as he grabs Maroni in his final moments. “No, no, no, no. Sal, Sal look at me. Look at me! I beat you, Sal. You hear me? I beat you. I win.”
Even after Sal loses consciousness, Oz continues to yell at his corpse: “You were supposed to destroy me, Sal! You know, show me what a big man you are, what a fucking big man you are! Huh? Well, I got you. I fucking got you!”
Repeating the same line that he once yelled at Batman when he thought he’d killed the Caped Crusader, the Penguin talks himself into accepting Sal’s defeat. With the exception of his dear mother, nothing is as important to Oz as getting the respect he thinks he deserves, especially when it comes to people who look down on him, like Sal Maroni. After firing off more than half a dozen shots into Sal’s limp body, Oz finally grabs Sal’s ring and puts it on his own hand, wearing it as a trophy as Carmine Falcone did before him.
Sofia Gigante’s revelatory backstory already came in the show’s fantastic fourth episode, “Cent’anni,” but “Top Hat” finds Sofia confronting who she’s become and what she really wants now that she’s out of Arkham Asylum. Through a conversation with her captive, Francis, Sofia begins to understand that no matter how much she tries to reject her father’s legacy or family name, she’s still playing the same game—fighting for power and control of Gotham’s lucrative drug trade—that he played and locked her up in Arkham for. This realization is solidified by her visit with her cousin Gia, whom she orphaned when she killed her parents and the rest of the Falcone family.
At the Brookside Children’s Home, Sofia finds Gia living in a room reminiscent of her cell at Arkham. (As director Kevin Bray explains in “Inside Gotham,” that parallel between the two locations was very much intentional: “As a set, we rebuilt Arkham to be that space.”) Spotting the self-inflicted cuts on Gia’s wrist, Sofia finally sees that she’s doomed another young girl to the same harrowing fate that she faced; Gia has become the next victim in the cycle. Sofia is shaken by the whole experience, and she later explains to Julian Rush how she feels trapped all over again.
“Before my father put me away, he wanted me to take over the family,” Sofia tells him. “He put me in an institution. And the second I got out, I walked right into another one.”
Instead of proceeding farther down the path her father laid for her, Sofia decides that there are only two things that she wants: to be free and to make Oz pay for what he’s done to her. And so she fools Oz into meeting her in his underground hideout to exchange Francis for his entire supply of Bliss—and to walk into her trap.
“You think you know what I want,” Sofia tells Oz over the phone. “That it’s the same for you and me. Of course you do. Because this game was made for men like you, like my father. Same winners, same losers. It’s why everyone expected me to die in Arkham. No one even considered that I might learn something there. How to play new games.”
Sofia makes Oz believe that she’s delivering Francis’s body to him in the trunk of a car, just as Oz delivered Alberto’s corpse to her in the season premiere. Instead, it’s a body bag full of explosives. While all of the drugs and everyone else in the room get blown away, Oz manages to reach the overflow tunnel just in time to survive the blast. The same sewer that he drowned his brothers in becomes a safe haven that saves his life.
Before the episode ends, The Penguin returns to Oz’s past to pay off another story that he told Sofia in Episode 2, as they stood outside Alberto’s memorial service. At the time, Oz explained to his rival how his mother wouldn’t leave her room for weeks after her sons died, until one night, she got all dressed up and told Oswald, “We’re going out.” They went to an East Side jazz club called Monroe’s to dance all night, and after that, she went back to being herself.
Even though Oz may have lied to Sofia about his mother being dead, “Top Hat” shows that the rest of his story was true, almost beat for beat. The love that Oz has for his mother is just about the only thing we can believe to be true about him, and his promise to Francis to give her a better life is still what drives his intense ambitions. Sofia has come to understand that about him, and she hasn’t forgotten Oz’s story, either. And so she’s brought Francis back to Monroe’s to await Oz’s imminent arrival.
With the finale right around the corner, “Top Hat” achieves its primary purpose of fleshing out Oz’s origin story before the season—and potentially the series—comes to an end. But it also serves as the connective tissue that binds the stories that Oz has been telling himself and everyone else all season. Together, they reveal who Oswald Cobb really is, contradictions and all. And by simultaneously exploring the evolution of Sofia Gigante and her resolve to finally break free from her father’s legacy, The Penguin has set the table for a gripping conclusion.
