When is a supervillain origin story not a supervillain origin story? When the supervillain in question is Oz Cobb, aka the Penguin. In the flashback that opens the first season of his eponymous show’s penultimate episode, we get a portrait of the Penguin as a young man (Ryder Allen). One rainy day, in a fit of pique, he shuts his brothers in a municipal storm drain where they’d climbed down to explore, even though they knew Oz’s leg prevented him from following. They don’t seem to have been bad kids or bullies or anything like that. They did something insensitive, Oz did something stupid in response, and that’s that.
Only that’s not that. Earlier in the flashback, we see the jealousy in Oz’s eyes as he watches his able-bodied brothers romp with his beloved mother Frances (played as a younger woman by a perfectly cast Emily Meade). And he’s got all night to tell his worried mother where the boys are. Instead he lies, says they’re at the movies watching Beetlejuice, and sits down with his mom to watch Fred Astaire dance his way through the movie musical Top Hat in white tie. The older Frances hallucinates being back in time on that night, hours later, crying to the negligent cops that the boys don’t even have their umbrellas.
Top hats, tuxedos, umbrellas — there’s even a bit in Astaire’s dance where he mimes machine-gunning the other dancers with his cane…it’s as though The Penguin went out of its way to include everything that traditionally makes the Penguin the Penguin and then said “eh, none of that really registered with him, I guess.” Would a top-hat wearing machine-gun-umbrella toting Oz Cobb really be so terrible to show us?
Present-day Oz’s lack of sartorial flair and lethal parasols notwithstanding — he does still hang out in sewers, at least — this is a momentous episode for the aspiring Gotham City kingpin. It includes all the usual Oz-style reversals of fortune, but it ends with our man holding a weak hand for the first time in a long time. And it’s not just his life that’s at stake, it’s his beloved Ma’s, too, since she’s now Sofia Gigante’s prisoner.
Notice I didn’t say “Sofia Gigante and Sal Maroni’s prisoner.” Sal makes the mistake of personally infiltrating the Penguin’s sewer headquarters with a goon squad who take out Oz’s armed guards and lieutenants; the main man is to be taken alive and brought back to Sofia so she and Sal can kill him at their leisure. But when Oz goads the hot-tempered boss into a physical fight, his heart gives out, allowing the Penguin to crow about how he beat the great Sal Maroni right into the dying man’s face. He empties a clip into the corpse for good measure.
Yet it’s not Sal’s death that gives Sofia second thoughts about trying to run the city — it’s her own actions. When she visits her little cousin Gia in the children’s home, which is sort of like if Arkham opened a pediatric wing, she finds that the girl has begun self-injuring to cope with the loss of her parents. Sofia denies having killed them, though she says they were all bad people who got what was coming to them, and that Gia deserves a better life than what they’d have given her. Very reassuring.
After that, Sofia tells her simp shrink Julian Rush — who’d been all but salivating over the prospect of killing Gia on Sofia’s behalf — that she’s done doing things her father’s way. After all, hadn’t she been shut away when she became inconvenient too? Now all she wants is for her and Gia to be free…and for Oz to suffer. Yeah, that’s pretty important to her.
So Sofia doesn’t Oz’s operation off his hands, as he offers to let her do in exchange for his mother returned to him safe and sound. (He’s almost certainly lying, but be that as it may.) Instead, under the guise of a fake hostage handoff, she rolls a car bomb into his headquarters and blows the place up so bad the street caves in above it. Oz dives to safety down the same tunnel in which he locked his brothers all those years ago — precisely the kind of dark corny dramatic irony superhero stories love.
But the most pivotal moment isn’t Oz’s organization getting blown to smithereens, or Sal Maroni dying, or even Sofia demanding one last meetup with Frances Cobb’s life in the balance. It’s another flashback, and it’s the first time, apparently, Frances emerges from her bedroom after her sons’ deaths. Oz, who’s been dutifully making and delivering her meals, is surprised to see her dressed to the nines. She takes him out dancing at a jazz club in his finest suit, bowtie and everything…and in the midst of what must be a euphoric feeling of love and safety in a boy who knows he’s accidentally broken his mother by committing manslaughter against his brothers, she tells him he has to make it his life’s mission to provide her with the better life she so richly deserves. That’s a lot to place on a kid who’s already killed people pre-puberty!
Trying not to prognosticate about the finale, I’ll simply say that it seems like we’ve reached a real “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us” moment with Sofia and Oz. Yet at the moment, it’s hard to see Oz winning. All of his men have either been shot or blown up — maybe a few managed to survive like him and are staggering through the rubble just as he is (before a cop on Sofia’s payroll brains him that is). But without his Bliss mushrooms, Oz has no way of paying them any of the survivors, if there are any anyway.
But there’s one loose end Sofia isn’t counting on: Victor. When Oz arrives at his safehouse and finds the place trashed and his mom gone, he also finds a wounded Vic. Bringing his sidekick around, Oz entrusts him with raising an army to fight on his behalf. Neither Vic nor that army has been heard from since. But that’s what we have finales for, right? And every dark knight has his boy wonder.
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.