In The Penguin's top-shelf finale, everybody gets to hell in their own way

How do you make a monster?

If The Penguin has one central philosophical query, it’s this one. The show already ran us through a test course on the subject back in “Cent’anni,” of course, demonstrating how a rich daddy’s girl with a skosh too much conscience got herself twisted into one of Gotham’s most notorious boogeymen. Tonight, in its occasionally silly, but also genuinely horrifying, finale, The Penguin goes for the gold: striving to answer once and for all exactly what kind of monster Oswald Cobb really is and how he got there.

If you ask his mother—and apply lethal amounts of manipulation and pressure to get the truth out of her, as Sofia Gigante ultimately does tonight—then Oz was maybe just born bad. We open with Francis Cobb finally getting her turn in the show’s flashback machine, plunged by Sofia and Dr. Rush back into the days immediately after two of her three sons drowned in a Gotham storm sewer due to the actions of the third. Visited by friend/employer/local mobster Rex (Louis Cancelmi), Francis admits that she found Oz’s flashlight in his coat pocket right after Jack and Benny’s deaths, revealing that he knew precisely where his brothers were as they choked on their last few gasps of air. For Francis, there’s no doubt: Oz killed them so he could have her all to himself.

What’s interesting about these flashbacks, though—and in contrast to the others we’ve seen in the series, both in terms of presentation and, frankly, artfulness—is that they’re very much presented not as objective truth but as memories. Most notably, that’s by having Deirdre O’Connell continue to play Francis throughout the sequence (after sparing a glance in the mirror to see last episode’s Emily Meade looking back). That’s smart on multiple levels, not least for the simple reason that it doesn’t divorce one of the show’s best performers from her character at the moment of her greatest agony. But it also highlights the subjective nature of the scenes, as a bitter and heartbroken Francis wavers on the question of whether to take Rex up on his offer to eliminate the “devil in her home.” We in the audience know Oz locked his brothers away in a moment of impulsive anger, not calculation (with shades of his decades-later killing of Alberto). We saw him anxious as they failed to come home, even as he cozied up to his mom. We didn’t see him exult in their deaths, and while he does appear as more of a needy manipulator in his flashback scenes tonight, well, those are happening in Francis’ head, too, right? The important thing is that she believes it—has always believed it—and it’s informed everything about their relationship ever since.

In fact, “A Great Or Little Thing” goes so far as to suggest that Oz can’t truly understand why anyone would blame him—for anything. The episode finalizes the show’s thesis, which it’s sold us on again and again, that Oz Cobb’s greatest gift isn’t for deceiving others but himself. That his endless unwillingness to give up, and his seemingly inexhaustible font of bullshit, both stem from the same place: a constant reshaping of reality to fit the narrative endlessly running in his head. He can’t confess to killing his brothers when Sofia is threatening to cut off his mom’s finger—in the bloody “family therapy session” that kicks off the episode, once we’re through the cold open—because he’s told himself the story where he’s blameless (“City took ’em”) so many times that there’s no room left for guilt or regret. Much later in this finale, Sofia will tell him she’s saving a spot for him in hell, and he’ll scoff. It reads in the moment as the arrogance of the victorious schemer, but the deranged thing is that he’s right to dismiss the idea: As we’ll see, there is no purgatory so horrifying or grotesque that Oswald Cobb can’t tell himself is heaven.

I’ve complained in the past about the deformities that an endless gift for lying can impose on a character at the center of a story—about how having a protagonist who will say and do anything to survive, with complete conviction, robs both Cobb’s story, and Colin Farrell’s performance, of anything solid for the viewer to grasp on to. (To put it another way: Farrell can’t project depth when his character is pathologically incapable of possessing it.) The cleverness of “Great Or Little Thing,” then, is in how it deploys these traits as horror rather than asking us to identify with what Cobb is doing. It’s horrifying to see Oz worm his way into respectable society by spinning a (shockingly plausible) lie about the Falcone/Maroni “drug war” to his pet councilman. It’s horrifying to see the lieutenants of the various crime families fall prey to his self-serving rhetoric about the rise of the underdogs. It’s horrifying to see him do The Most Predictable Thing Ever to Vic before literally discarding him without a single glance back. And it’s especially horrifying to see what “victory” ends up looking like for the monster who would be king.

Before I get to that horror show, though, let me circle around and say farewell to the rest of our cast before I bid The Penguin farewell for good. I’ve given Sofia shorter shrift than usual tonight, because she’s mostly in “overconfident antagonist” mode, doing a lot of things that do not involve shooting her nemesis in the head, in hopes of working out her Papa Falcone issues. (That’s not subtext, by the way; she pretty much says it.) Cristin Milioti gives one last gift to this show in her final sequences, though, projecting sheer joy as she finally burns the Falcone mansion to the ground. (That shot of her with three cigarettes in her mouth, getting ready to burn Carmine’s birthday watch, feels tailor-made for memes.) I’ve gushed pretty endlessly about Milioti’s work on this series, but that’s just because it’s been the textbook definition of understanding the assignment: It is not easy to play a character who’s deliberately running her manic side as hard as it can go while also keeping in touch with her humanity, but Milioti has managed it at basically every turn. I can only hope this series will take her on to bigger and better things, because she’s proved she has the chops for the big leagues.

As for Rhenzy Feliz and Vic, well…he did his best with what he was given, right? Vic has had a nice little arc throughout this season, which even gets some nice payoffs as he comes to Oz’s rescue multiple times tonight. But the fact is that this character was introduced as an adjunct to Oz, has existed only in relation to his story every step of the way, and dies tonight to demonstrate the apex of that tale. He was always going to go like this, because The Penguin is not a show that can let its Symbol Of Innocence survive to the endgame. In a series that has a terrible tendency to just have characters say the point of the scene so that nobody’s confused—see Rex hamf-istedly laying out his manipulation tactics in the cold open, or Oz just begging his comatose mom to tell him she’s proud of him later on tonight—few have clunked harder than Vic telling a man who has destroyed every person he’s ever loved that he thinks of him as family and then not anticipating what happens next. He might as well have died of subtlety deficiency, instead of having his uncle-boss’ hands wrapped tightly around his throat.

Which leaves us, inevitably, with our last man waddling. In eight weeks of critiquing this show, I’ve often bemoaned the fact that The Penguin operates more as a collection of references to other, better shows, unwilling to be truly bold enough to do anything original. Sometimes it was an okay Gotham, or a pretty lazy Sopranos, or a fitfully entertaining Breaking Bad. But it hits a genuine note that’s all its own in its final sequence tonight, as Oz—all enemies defeated, all accounts settled—comes home to his new penthouse apartment to slay that old bugbear subtext at last. He checks in on his now-comatose mother, brimming with pride at having subjected her to what he’ll never understand is a fate worse than death. Then he goes downstairs to his best girl Eve—and boy howdy, were those comments I made two weeks ago about the show playing up the resemblance between Carmen Ejogo and Deirdre O’Connell prescient, huh?—who’s dressed up in his mother’s old dress, dancing to his mother’s old music, and smiling as she tells mother’s old son that he’s a very good boy (while he happily calls her “Ma”). We don’t get Eve’s perspective on this latest weird and humiliating gig in what’s presumably been a long line of them, outside a few pained expressions over Oz’s shoulder. But the honest, awful truth is that we don’t need to: Oswald Cobb is the king of Gotham now, and that means what he says—and believes—is true. God help us all…at least, as a flickering spotlight in the sky reminds us, until The Batman 2.

Stray observations

• • I kept trying to place what Sofia’s black dress/red scarf combo in the jazz club scenes was evoking; it felt very Liza.
• • Serious question: Can anyone remember Theo Rossi changing his facial expression even once in this entire series?
• • Ryder White gives a nice performance as young Oz; it’s the right level of obsequious and ridiculous. Can’t quite manage Oz’s very silly “Won’t you be my prom date, Mommy?” speech, though.
• • Robert Lee Leng gets a few good moments tonight as Triad deputy Link, including socking Vic in the gut as a way to save his life when he confronts the crime bosses for abandoning Oz.
• • Poor Sofia: You can tell she worked so hard on that baby bird allegory, but she’s delivering it to a guy whose brain can’t even receive it.
• • Did they give Farrell a lighter version of his make-up in the jazz club scenes? It’s one of the only times in this show he actually looks like Colin Farrell. (Maybe it’s just the un-greased hair.)
• • Milioti is clearly having a blast playing Evil Therapist for the Cobbs.
• • There’s a fun cut to Sofia’s drops-loving detective enjoying a nice day outside…for like a second, before Oz shoots him in the head.
• • Oz’s “man of the people” schtick is 99 percent bullshit, but it is interesting to contrast his Gold Summit with Sofia’s meeting with the minor crime bosses tonight—including the fact that she pours a drink for no one but herself.
• • “You look—it’s good! No blood!”
• • I can critique the character, but it’s still fun to watch Farrell spin a compelling line of bullshit, as he does with his big speech to the councilman. “It is what it looks like.”
• • Eight episodes in, you’d be forgiven (at least until the very last second of the episode) for forgetting that this show has any connections to The Batman, but the series’ love for needle drops does incorporate a cover of Nirvana’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”
• • Boy, the Bliss plot-line never really went anywhere, huh? Considering I was seeing online speculation that went far enough afield to suggest it meant one of our characters must be Batman-verse versions of Poison Ivy or Scarecrow, it turns out it really was just a more potent party drug all along.
• • A genuinely clever camera trick as Sofia prepares to get a bullet in the back of the head: the distorted lights in the background tracing a trajectory for a shot that never comes.
• • It’s not really Farrell’s fault, but having our main character just scream “Tell me you’re proud of me! Tell me I did good!” at his comatose mother has made me laugh both times I’ve watched this episode. “Ohhh, that’s what this was about. Thanks, TV!”
• • On the other hand, he has some of his finest moments of the whole show as he murders Vic. You actually believe the things Cobb’s saying—because, on some level, he does. Farrell’s complete commitment to making everything this character says sound plausible has been a double-edged sword, but once he goes as mask-off as Oswald Cobb can, it’s utterly chilling.
• • Sofia’s personal hell is, of course, a return to Arkham—complete with Dr. Rush back in charge of her care. But there is a silver lining: Amidst the usual “rants, poems, marriage proposals,” she gets a letter from Selina Kyle. We don’t see the contents—presumably they include the line “Sorry, Warner Bros. wouldn’t shell out for a Zoe Kravitz cameo”—but hearing from the only other person on the planet who truly understands what a monster her father was seems to give Sofia some measure of hope.
• • I spent way too long trying to find a deeper meaning or Easter egg behind Oz’s new apartment being in the “La Couronne” building, before realizing it’s just French for “the crown.”
• • “I know. It’s everything you wanted.” And just like that…one more promise in the trash.
• • And that’s a wrap on The Penguin! I know I’ve been hard on this series, but it’s the kind of critique mostly predicated on obvious potential in clear danger of being squandered. Three great performers at the top of the cost, lots of source material to work from, and a fine creative pedigree, and the end result was a show with some very dull lows to counterpoint the very high highs. In the final sum, Sofia Falcone was probably worth the price of admission, and the quality of tonight’s finale bumps my estimation up a notch. But that doesn’t mean it’s not hard to imagine sitting through a hypothetical season two.