On Sunday, The Penguin concluded a terrific eight-episode season of television that will go down as one of the best live-action narratives ever to come out of Gotham City, all without Batman making a single appearance.
Showrunner Lauren LeFranc and her team managed to take a minor character from The Batman and turn him into a fascinating protagonist who evolved from Carmine Falcone’s chief lieutenant into a criminal kingpin in his own right. That evolution has a lot to do with an incredible lead performance by Colin Farrell—and the remarkable work done by prosthetics and makeup designer Mike Marino to transform Farrell into the villainous Oswald Cobb—along with the rest of the show’s phenomenal cast. But it’s also a testament to the HBO series’ storytelling, as LeFranc and Co. crafted a thrilling crime drama that still fits within the narrative context of The Batman.
The Penguin enriches the world that The Batman director Matt Reeves has created in the overarching film franchise, which makes it a great companion piece to the preexisting (and ongoing) Batman story line. But it’s arguably an even better stand-alone project that showcases the advantages of using TV to tell isolated, character-driven stories. The series is also a huge success for Warner Bros. and DC Studios by just about any metric: The Penguin is a critical darling that is already garnering buzz for next year’s Emmys, and its viewership numbers continued to climb after it drew strong ratings to start the season.
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While Sunday’s finale, “A Great or Little Thing,” lays some groundwork for The Batman Part II or a prospective second season of The Penguin, the episode also serves as a fitting and wholly satisfying conclusion to the series’ story. The TV show was originally billed as a limited series set between the events of The Batman and its 2026 sequel, but as we’ve seen with other recent miniseries, such as HBO’s The White Lotus and FX’s Shogun, a show’s success can quickly change network executives’ plans. When LeFranc was asked about potentially returning for a second season in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she gave a diplomatic response that at least provides some insight into how she approached working within the bounds of a larger story that’s already in progress.
“My task was to make a bridge between The Batman and The Batman: Part II,” LeFranc explained. “I love all these characters, and it has been so much fun writing all of them, and it’s such an engaging world. There are endless stories you could tell in this world. I don’t think anything should continue if there are not better stories to tell, or if you can’t one-up yourself creatively. And so I think the only way for something like this to continue is if you feel like you can tell just as rich of a story, if not richer.”
Reeves says that “everything is on the table,” whether the next step is a second season of The Penguin, the continuation of these characters’ stories in The Batman Part II, or even a new limited series that centers on Sofia Gigante. As we patiently wait for official word on what comes next, the finale has given us plenty of clues about where Oz’s and Sofia’s stories could go from here, as well as about the impact that the events of The Penguin may have on Reeves’s upcoming film. Let’s break down where the Batman Epic Crime Saga stands following the conclusion of The Penguin.
Sofia Gigante and Selina Kyle
Although The Penguin ultimately belongs to Oswald Cobb, the introduction and evolution of Sofia are every bit as important to the success of the series. While Sofia Falcone made her live-action debut in 2017 during the fourth season of Fox’s Gotham (with actress Crystal Reed playing the part), the character had largely remained unexplored outside the comics until The Penguin gave her a share of the spotlight.
Sofia’s most famous comics appearance came in Batman: Dark Victory, a limited series written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Tim Sale that was published from 1999 to 2000. A sequel to Loeb and Sale’s Batman: The Long Halloween, Dark Victory finds Batman hunting down a serial killer known as the Hangman, with Sofia’s brother Alberto Falcone serving as his chief suspect. But the Hangman is eventually revealed to be Sofia, who goes so far as to kill Alberto herself as she goes on a crime spree driven by a desire for revenge against Harvey Dent for killing her father.
In The Penguin, LeFranc and her writing team make a clever decision to completely flip Sofia’s origins as the Hangman. She’s called to action because of her beloved brother’s death, but she doesn’t kill him herself. And rather than being the Hangman, Sofia is really just another one of Carmine’s victims; her father pins his own crimes on his daughter when she starts speaking to an investigative journalist. This change doesn’t just allow a more interesting character arc for Sofia to develop as she grapples with the legacy of her father and the Falcone crime family but also creates a compelling narrative opportunity that The Penguin teases in its finale.
In one of the last scenes of the episode, Sofia is back in Arkham when she receives a letter from her supposed half sister, Selina Kyle. While the contents of the message are left unspoken, Sofia begins to smile as she reads it. Sofia’s family once meant everything to her, but the Falcones destroyed her life as she knew it. First, Sofia discovers that Carmine killed her mother before basically placing Sofia in Arkham himself. And then, just as Sofia finally gets her freedom, Oz kills Alberto—the only family member she had left who truly cared for her. Everyone else in the Falcone family kept quiet when she was wrongfully imprisoned for being the Hangman, and they treated her as if she were crazy when she was finally freed after a decade. But in Selina, Sofia now has a kernel of hope and potentially the start of a new family.
In The Batman, Selina (Zoë Kravitz) is revealed to be the daughter of Carmine, who killed Selina’s mother, Maria, when Selina was young. Late in the film, Selina tries to kill Carmine to avenge both her mom and her friend Annika, the latter of whom Carmine strangled to death, just as he had so many other women who worked at the Iceberg Lounge and its secret underground club, 44 Below. Although Selina nearly succeeds, Batman stops her so that Carmine can answer for all his crimes and unmask the full scope of Gotham’s deep-seated corruption. But Carmine is killed by the Riddler before he even enters a police cruiser.
The last we hear of Selina in The Batman, the antihero better known as Catwoman is on her way to Bludhaven. The new prospective partnership between Selina and Sofia is exciting to consider, as the two would make for a dynamic duo to take down Oz, who’s Selina’s former boss at the Iceberg Lounge and Sofia’s former driver. They certainly have a lot of shared trauma to bond over and years’ worth of daddy issues to work through, but they also come from extremely different backgrounds: While Sofia was essentially a Mafia princess who never had to worry about money and once worshipped her father, Selina grew up poor and learned to steal as a means of survival—and Carmine never even knew of her existence. There’s so much that could be explored in a relationship between these two characters—but first, Selina will need to find a way to break her half sister out of Arkham.
Like just about everything else in Reeves’s Batverse, it remains unclear how, when, or even whether we’ll see Sofia and Selina cross paths on-screen. But considering how integral Sofia’s story was to The Penguin and how warm the reception to Cristin Milioti’s portrayal was, it seems safe to say that she will return.
“This idea of introducing [Sofia] was specifically about the way she was existing in this patriarchal world and in a way that makes you surprisingly start to root for her even though she is the antagonist to Oz,” Reeves told The Hollywood Reporter. “Then you realize, oh, they’re both so messed up. … That was so personal to Lauren’s vision that digging into [Sofia’s story] further is a very exciting prospect. But where it will go, truly, we don’t know yet. I’ve found that when you take on projects, they start to have a life of their own.”
Gotham City and The Batman Part II
The Penguin finished its first season in dramatic fashion: Oz beats Sofia to become Gotham’s new kingpin of crime, and the titular villain kills protégé Victor Aguilar to end a familial relationship that he viewed as his last vulnerability. Along the way, Oz completely reshapes Gotham’s drug trade and the hierarchies of power in the city’s most powerful gangs. And now, the Penguin—in his trademark tuxedo and top hat—has his eyes set on politics.
In the end, Sofia’s downfall doesn’t stem from some masterful plan whipped up by Oz; it comes about because she overlooks the little guys. She underestimates the likes of Victor and Link Tsai, the latter of whom serves as a lieutenant under Triad boss Feng Zhao. Inspired by Victor and Oz’s efforts to bring down the rich Mafia families that have run Gotham for years (including the Falcones and the Maronis, their rival family), Link and all the other lieutenants of criminal organizations around the city turn against their leaders in concert, killing them in increasingly gruesome fashion.
“Link was tired of being overlooked,” Oz explains to Sofia (in his own condescending way). “He ain’t the only one, neither. Years of being brushed aside, laughed at, told to eat shit and fuckin’ like it. It breaks ya. Makes ya wanna break somebody else. Figured you woulda understood that, you know, considerin’. ... But you, you and your kind, you’re so busy fillin’ your fuckin’ plate. You don’t see that everyone around you is starvin’.”
While Gotham’s gangs may quickly get back to business as usual, the collective uprising represents a shift in the status quo and a changing of the guard as the older generations that had run Gotham’s drug trade are all wiped out in one fell swoop. That includes the Falcones and Maronis and even Sofia’s fledgling Gigante family, all of whom are eradicated during the events of The Penguin. The Falcone-Maroni drug war plagued Gotham for decades, and it finally ends thanks to Oz, of all people. (Although it may not matter much to Batman whom, exactly, he’ll be beating to a bloody pulp whenever he decides to return to crime fighting, Oz has at least ensured that there will be a little change to his nightly routine.)
Cobb has helped transform Gotham’s criminal underworld, but he’s also trying to diversify his sources of power as he rises to the top. The Penguin had already taken advantage of Councilman Sebastian Hady’s debts to Carmine to turn the power back on in Crown Point, but in the finale, he positions himself “to be welcome” in Gotham’s City Hall and to meet the councilman’s friends. Hady reluctantly agrees in exchange for the information Oz gives him about the bombing in Crown Point, along with every other crime that Cobb is pinning on Sofia while (falsely) exonerating himself.
But Hady also warns him of the continued efforts of Mayor-Elect Bella Reál to clean up crime in the city. “You’re gonna have some trouble, Oz,” Hady tells him. “Reál, she’s forming a commission, anti-corruption. They’re going after cops, city officials. And they have a list of Carmine’s associates. They’re gonna subpoena you. You wanna be welcome? You gotta look … clean.”
Reál, played by Jayme Lawson (reprising her role from The Batman), even makes a brief cameo in the episode, just as she did earlier in the season during a TV news segment. At the end of The Batman, Reál was positioned as a political figure who represented change and hope in a city that desperately needed both after the Riddler attacked Gotham and exposed its corrupt leaders. The Penguin gives us glimpses of her putting in the work in the aftermath of the citywide flood, but it also demonstrates the futility of her actions as Hady secures more political power and public favor by carrying on Gotham’s greatest crooked tradition.
Although Oz probably won’t be running for mayor (at least, not yet), he’s forced his way into a seat at the table. In the last scene of the finale, Oz’s lover Eve Karlo tells him, “Gotham’s yours, sweetheart. Nothing’s standing in your way now.” And while it certainly looks that way right now, much of the audience understands the inherent irony of the statement, which the series confirms moments later: The Bat-Signal lights up the night sky, reminding us that Batman will always be there to stand in the way of Gotham’s villains. (OK, maybe not always, but I’m sure Bruce has a good excuse for his absence over the past eight episodes.)
It remains to be seen whether the Penguin will serve as the primary antagonist to Robert Pattinson’s Batman when the movie franchise returns with The Batman Part II in October 2026, but it doesn’t sound like that will be the case. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Farrell said that he hadn’t read a script yet but that “I was told I have five or six scenes” in the upcoming sequel. The Irish actor also explained that while he signed up for three Batman films, he didn’t even originally know whether he would appear in the second film.
No matter how big a part Oz ends up having in The Batman Part II, the changes that he has made to Gotham will be felt by Batman.
The Penguin Season 2 and Other Batman Spinoffs
Between Oz’s rise to the top of Gotham’s criminal underworld and his nascent entry into politics, there’s plenty of room for The Penguin to tell a new story that builds on his journey, in addition to Sofia’s chance for redemption. In September, Farrell made headlines when he cast doubt on the possibility of a second season before the series premiere even aired and complained about his difficult physical transformation into the Penguin. (That’s a pretty mild way of putting it, though, I suppose. In Farrell’s own words: “When I finished I was like, ‘I never want to put that fucking suit and that fucking head on again.’”) However, Farrell has since walked back his previous comments, chalking them up to a writer taking his words out of context. It seems as if Farrell, LeFranc, and Reeves are game for a Season 2 provided that the right story is there and Warner Bros. gives them the green light.
In the meantime, The Penguin has opened up the door for Reeves to continue to expand his sprawling saga of crime stories. Even before the show became a hit for Warner Bros., Reeves spoke to Entertainment Weekly about his ambitious plans to have multiple series set within the same world that would, together, create a tapestry of Gotham’s dark side. “When I talk about the other shows that we’re talking about doing, what’s exciting is to think about going down another alley that we weren’t able to go down with The Penguin and The Batman,” Reeves said.
Reports of Reeves’s potential Batman spinoffs have been surfacing for years, and the filmmaker has already confirmed that some projects—including a series centered on the GCPD and another set in Arkham—have been scrapped. To add extra uncertainty, DC Studios cohead James Gunn has been busy rebooting the DCU, and he has his heart set on bringing in yet another Batman to star in his new cinematic universe. Audiences are used to actors handing off the cowl to a successor from time to time, but two live-action Batmen operating simultaneously, in separate on-screen realities, could be confusing.
Gunn may be wary of oversaturating screens with DC’s Bat-related output, particularly after Joker: Folie à Deux became one of the biggest flops of the year upon its release in October. (Speaking of Gunn and the Joker, the DC exec recently took to Threads to shut down rumors of a Joker spinoff series starring The Batman’s Barry Keoghan.) But given the success of Reeves’s The Batman and, now, The Penguin, DC Studios may look to use its Elseworlds branding to keep expanding Reeves’s Batman Epic Crime Saga, even as the new DCU nears its launch.
Whatever lies in DC Studios’ future, The Penguin has achieved a rare feat in the never-ending cycle of superhero narratives: It told a self-contained story with a satisfying conclusion. Although the show is set up by The Batman’s events and in turn sets up The Batman Part II, it’s an engrossing stand-alone series in large part because of characters that it introduced—like Sofia, Victor, and Francis Cobb—who may not appear again in any franchise follow-up. The Penguin sought to deliver a fresh take on a decades-old character by providing a look into the mind of Oz Cobb as he seeks to claim power in Gotham, and it succeeded in spectacular fashion.
“I knew the goal of the series, by the end, was to have him rise to the top, or get closer to that goal,” LeFranc said in the finale’s “Inside Gotham” segment. “But when he achieves power … he’s lost a lot of himself as well. I’ve always sought to make it feel operatic in ways, to have it feel very tragic in the end. So even when Oz succeeds, and even when Oz gets everything he wants, I wanted it to feel tragic. He created his own delusion in that way.”
The Penguin got its tragic ending on Sunday. Now it’s up to Warner Bros. and Gunn to build on the series’ success instead of stifling Reeves’s Batman saga in its early but promising stages.
