In the premiere episode of The Penguin, Oswald Cobb meets Victor Aguilar under unusual circumstances: Oz catches Victor and his friends trying to steal the rims off of his car. Victor is the only one who doesn’t manage to escape. Oz has Victor give him his driver’s license, and then he orders the failed thief to help carry Alberto Falcone’s body out of the Iceberg Lounge and into the trunk of Oz’s car, making Victor complicit in the murder that begins a war with Sofia Falcone. “You and me, we’re in this together now,” Oz tells Victor. “Which means I own you.”
By the end of the opener, Victor saves Oz from being killed by Sofia. Over the next six episodes, he goes on to take care of Oz’s mother, Francis; save Oz from being executed by the Maronis; and even kill someone he’d grown up with in order to protect Oz and Francis. In the season finale, Victor saves Oz’s life yet again while helping Oz complete his yearslong quest to become the kingpin of crime in Gotham’s underworld. And Oz repays Victor by choking him to death.
On Sunday, The Penguin wrapped up a terrific season of television with a devastating conclusion that sees Oz win, while just about everyone else around him loses. Francis Cobb’s worst nightmare has become her reality, Sofia Gigante is back in Arkham State Hospital, and Vic—Oz’s most loyal soldier—is dead.
While most superhero stories and comic book adaptations that center on villains usually end with the bad guys demonstrating that even they have some good in them and are capable of becoming heroes themselves, The Penguin takes a different route in its exploration of its titular baddie. The season finale, “A Great or Little Thing,” depicts Oswald Cobb as a true villain, through and through.
The episode begins by returning to the past and retracing the events surrounding the deaths of Jack and Benny Cobb. Last week’s installment showed what happened to Oz’s brothers and how Oz lied to his mother about their whereabouts so there was no chance for them to be saved from drowning in the underground overflow tunnel. It also showed young Oswald and Francis enjoying a magical evening soon after at the jazz club Monroe’s, where Oz promised his mother that he would provide her with a better life one day. But the finale reveals the aftermath of Oz’s fratricide from Francis’s perspective, rather than Oz’s warped point of view, shedding light on just how much she knew about her wicked son and what he did to his own family.
As Sofia and Julian Rush discover through Julian’s unique therapeutic methods that help subjects relive their memories, it didn’t take long for Francis to figure out Oz’s role in his brothers’ drownings. Soon after Jack’s and Benny’s deaths, Francis found a flashlight in Oz’s coat, and she heard from the police that the boys had somehow been locked in the tunnel. She knew then that Oz, who had claimed that Jack and Benny had simply gone to the movies that night, was solely responsible. When Rex Calabrese showed up at their apartment to check on Francis, she explained all of this to him and expressed her sense of helplessness: “I got the devil in my house, Rex. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
And so Rex and Francis devised a plan to kill Oz on the same night that Francis would take her son to Monroe’s. While Francis ultimately couldn’t go through with it, this development—along with the revelation about the way she viewed Oswald from the very beginning—completely shifts our understanding of Francis as a character. Throughout the season, Francis displayed her toughness despite suffering from a terrible sickness, Lewy body dementia, that would cause her to frequently lose track of when and where she was and what she was seeing. She was Oz’s fiercest supporter, pushing him toward greatness even when he would falter. But in reality, she always hated Oz and never forgave him for what he did to her other sons.
When Sofia reunites Francis and Oz at Monroe’s in the present, the so-called Hangman forces her captives to face some hard truths that have been left unspoken for decades. Sofia cleverly pits the two Cobbs against each other by prompting Oz to confess what he did to his brothers as a child, knowing that Francis already figured out the truth long ago and that Oz would still try to do whatever he could to lie his way out of the situation, as he always does. Even as Sofia threatens to cut off Francis’s pinky, Oz claims innocence, and so Francis finally admits that she’s always known what her son did.
“I had enough to give, Oswald,” Francis says. “I had enough to give all three of you. You didn’t have to leave ’em down there. You didn’t have to take ’em from me. They were my babies. My world. Your brothers.”
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Deirdre O’Connell, who plays Francis, delivers a remarkable performance in the finale as her character becomes a more complicated, tragic figure. Having already lost two of her children, she had to make an impossible decision about what to do with the young Oz. And Sofia helps Francis recognize how complicit she was in fostering the monster that the fratricidal Oswald had become, and perhaps always was.
“You’re a disappointment,” Francis tells Oz. “You’re a waste of space. I wake up every goddamn day sick that I’m your mother. She’s right. She’s fuckin’ right. I shoulda let Rex kill ya when I had the chance.”
Francis proceeds to break an empty glass bottle, but rather than attack their captors, she stabs Oz in the stomach with the bottle’s jagged remnants. She begins to hallucinate, seeing visions of a young Oz pleading for help—along with Jack and Benny standing in front of her—before suffering from a major stroke that provides Oz with his opportunity to escape with her amid all the chaos.
While Sofia somehow fails to establish any contingency plans in the event of another vanishing act from the escape artist, her twisted scheme to torture Oz otherwise works to perfection. In “A Great or Little Thing,” Sofia almost achieves her two most important goals—to be free and to make Oz pay for all of his transgressions against her—but she falls just short of them. She burns down her family home in iconic fashion, chain-smoking her way through the house’s spacious rooms as she takes considerable care in burning her father’s possessions in particular. (For as much as they hate each other, Sofia and Oz certainly share some serious cases of parental issues.) Sofia delivers Oz the most devastating blow of his life in turning his mother against him, and she nearly catches a flight out of Gotham, leaving behind all of her territories—and her father’s legacy—for good. But at the airport, her dream slips away.
Sofia had made a deal with Triad boss Feng Zhao that would have given him the (now-charred) Falcone residence and her remaining territories in exchange for Oz’s capture. But Victor and Zhao’s deputy, Link Tsai, secretly planned a coup, as Link seizes the opportunity to kill Zhao and replace him as the leader of the Triads while helping Vic and Oz take down Sofia in the process. After Oz takes Sofia for one last drive, he lets her believe that he’s going to execute her, only for her to get picked up by the police and be given a trip back to Arkham State Hospital.
Returning to Arkham is a fitting conclusion for Sofia Gigante, who wanted nothing more than her freedom after finally emerging from a 10-year stint at the infamous psychiatric hospital. As much as Sofia is positioned to be the antagonist of The Penguin, she’s a much different breed of villain than Oz. Sure, she may be guilty of many violent crimes over the season’s eight episodes, but by the standards of sadistic mob bosses, Sofia at least has a code. When she tracked down Eve Karlo in Episode 6, Sofia let her live after discovering that she was just another victim of Oz’s schemes and manipulations. She also spared her niece Gia the same fate as her relatives, whom Sofia killed in Episode 4, and was devastated by her visit to Gia at the children’s home as she saw how she’d doomed another young girl to a lonely, difficult life, just as her own father had done to her.
Sofia ultimately loses to Oz because she, of all people, underestimates him and the deputies of Gotham’s most powerful mobs. While the lack of fight on her part ultimately feels a little inconsistent with her character, The Penguin at least ensures that this won’t be the end of Sofia’s story. Near the end of the episode, the series teases a potential future for Sofia that would find her crossing paths with her half sister, Selina Kyle, who was played by Zoë Kravitz in The Batman. Julian Rush, who’s returned to his old job at Arkham to keep an eye on his former subject, delivers a letter to Sofia from Selina that causes a smile to slowly spread across Sofia’s face. Cristin Milioti was extraordinary as a complicated antagonist who was every bit as terrifying as she was tragic and sympathetic, and The Penguin would not have worked without her serving as Oz’s foil. Here’s hoping Sofia Gigante will have the opportunity to redeem herself soon enough, whether it’s in The Batman Part II or a story of her own.
Although Sofia seems primed to have a place in Matt Reeves’s growing Batverse, the same can’t be said for Victor Aguilar. Colin Farrell’s Oz and Milioti’s Sofia may be the stars of the show, but the evolution of Rhenzy Feliz’s character is crucial to the emotional payoff at the end of the season. Unlike just about everyone else in the series, Victor was actually a good person, who turned to a life of crime only after his family was killed in the great Gotham flood and he was left with no other options. His slow corruption by Oz is as much a reflection of the Penguin as it is of the current state of Gotham, yet Victor still manages to maintain his good nature even as he goes as far as killing someone.
Victor’s death felt like an inevitability for much of the season, especially with Oz threatening his life several times in the first few episodes alone. His eventual demise is all the more heartbreaking because it comes at the very end of Oz’s rise to power, after their enemies had all been defeated and there was nothing left to do but celebrate. In one of the last scenes of the finale, Oz and Victor sit by a river and share a drink as they talk about the loss of their loved ones and express their gratitude for each other. As narcissistic and self-absorbed as Oz is, he still recognizes how much of a difference Victor made for him.
“You’ve been there, by my side every fucking step,” Oz says wistfully. “But listen, kid. … I can’t bring you with me this time.”
“What do you mean?” Victor asks.
“I mean that’s the thing about family,” Oz continues, as he starts to choke Victor in his arms. “It’s your strength, it drives you. But fuck if it don’t make you weak too. And I can’t have that no more.”
After Oz kills Victor, he grabs Victor’s wallet off of his body, pilfers his cash, and takes one last look at Victor’s driver’s license before tossing it away and leaving Victor’s body behind, unburied. Oz once told Victor that their names would live forever, but the last sight of Victor Aguilar’s name is on his ID as it sinks to the bottom of the river, drowning just as his family did.
Over the course of the season, Oz became a father figure to Victor, and their relationship was one of the few things that humanized such a deplorable figure. But Victor’s murder serves as the final step in Oz’s transformation into Gotham’s new criminal kingpin. Even after everything Victor did for Oz, and how prominent a part of Oz’s family the younger man became, Cobb kills him dispassionately, driven by only his selfish desire to prevent any enemies from potentially using Victor against him in the future.
In the final scene of the season, Oz returns to his new high-rise apartment wearing a tuxedo and holding a top hat in his hand, as his outfit finally matches the Batman villain’s traditional look in the comics, TV shows, and beyond. (His new home is in a somewhat decrepit hotel, fittingly called La Couronne, which translates to “the crown” in French.) He checks in on his mother, who now has the penthouse view of the city that a young Oz once promised her. But after her stroke, Francis is living in a vegetative state, which is exactly the outcome that she made Oz promise he would never let happen—even if it meant killing her. Despite everything she said to him at Monroe’s (and the fact that she stabbed him) earlier in the episode, Oz can now keep her alive and pretend nothing happened between them. And all Francis can do is watch.
When Oz goes downstairs, he sees Eve, now trapped in a rather disturbing form of roleplay as his mother. Eve is not only wearing the same dress that Francis wore to Monroe’s on that fateful night when Rex almost killed Oz but Oz calls her “ma” and has her tell him she’s proud of him as they dance together. Oz is a masterful manipulator, to the point that he’s capable of living within his own lies. Sofia managed to tear down his illusion, if only for a few moments, yet here he is still clinging to the same fantasy that he’s had since he was a child: that everything he does is for his beloved mother.
The finale ends with Eve telling Oz, “Nothing’s standing in your way now,” as Oz agrees and the Bat-Signal appears far in the distance. Between the Sofia–Selina Kyle setup and the first Batman reference since the opening minutes of the series, the conclusion of the season is the most The Penguin ever feels like an actual superhero series, for better or worse. Considering everything that transpired over the past eight episodes, it definitely seems like an odd time for Commissioner Gordon or whoever else activated the signal to finally call on the services of Batman, who has a lot of explaining to do the next time he appears.
The Penguin was likely better off without a sudden superhero cameo intruding on the events of a grounded, character-driven series, but now that Batman’s absence has been brought to our attention by the show itself, what could he possibly have been doing that was more pressing than an all-out war between Gotham’s most notorious crime families and the bombing of an entire neighborhood?! Either he was too busy putting out other fires in a city still reeling from the Riddler’s terrorist attacks or he was taking a vacation in Bludhaven with Selina, but maybe there’s a reason why this version of Gotham is in such a bad place.
Regardless of the mystery about Batman’s whereabouts during the chaotic events that occurred in The Penguin, the HBO series pulled off one of the best live-action Gotham stories ever made, all without the Caped Crusader making an appearance. It’s a testament to showrunner Lauren LeFranc and her writing team that the series could take a traditionally cartoonish villain like the Penguin—who is perhaps best known for Danny DeVito’s performance in Batman Returns, with his quirky umbrella weapons and jetpack penguins—and re-create him in the image of Tony Soprano. Farrell’s rendition has invigorated the character by reimagining him for a modern, darker vision of Gotham City in a way that feels both fresh and like an homage to classic crime dramas.
“A Great or Little Thing,” which at 68 minutes is the series’ longest episode, neatly ties up just about every character arc and plotline introduced across the season in a way that makes the end of this story feel final. While The Penguin wasn’t a traditional origin tale, the series successfully transformed Oswald Cobb from The Batman’s glorified Falcone henchman into a full-fledged mob boss who’s now working his way into Gotham’s political landscape. The Penguin used its last moments to tease Batman’s next appearance, with The Batman Part II set to arrive in 2026, but the show has already eclipsed the film that it originally spun off from, building on its foundations to create an even better stand-alone narrative. With a second season still uncertain, as Farrell makes it very clear he needs a break from the arduous process of transforming into Cobb, the real question is: When—or will—The Penguin return?
