The Dark Recommends: The Penguin
**There will be spoilers throughout**
The Batman has its fans and I will grant it has a few things going for it. The main plot was decent enough. The muscle car Batmobile was at least a little different. Alfred was good. However, DEI was force-fed into it by the Warner comedy team of Sarnoff and Hamada. Catwoman lecturing Bruce Wayne on his White Male Privilege was stomach-churning. The Gotham City being flooded was a violent tonal shift, it hadn’t been that kind of a movie up to that point. And when all is said and done it was a skinsuit movie. Somebody wanted to remake Seven and couldn’t get it sold as such but could get it greenlit as a superhero movie.
I personally was completely indifferent to it and I didn’t think that a series on the origin of Penguin was going to be worth watching. I mean good lord why would anyone want to see a DC show? The Superman and Lois was good but look at the rest of it. It was either dull, or a too cliche product of treadmill. Or just plain trash or couldn’t even aspire to be trash.
I didn’t see why The Penguin, a side character that got shotgunned randomly into The Batman at random intervals could be any better.
Wrong call.
This is undoubtedly the best new TV series of the year, regardless of genre. The writing was an intricately well-constructed web. It followed a lot of the beats of an organized crime drama but thanks to it being technically part of a superhero show it could get away with things that would have felt too surreal in The Wire. Some things would have been just a little too melodramatic to be acceptable in something that is supposed to be this serious, was acceptable in The Penguin. It was hard-hitting and brutal. It would leave you holding your breath wondering if what you were about to see was really going to happen.
The characters were what really drove this show. The circumstances never felt contrived because these people would naturally do the things they did. The Penguin’s mother Francis, looks at first to be just a bit of plot baggage but turned out to be pivotal. She has early onset Dementia, this was shown in the first episodes when she tells Oz that “the boys are in the tub.” The look on Penguin’s face said it all. The boys were long gone. Although, it did raise the question of where were his brothers. The answer we instantly knew would be unpleasant.
And major props to Colin Farrell here, this is the performance of his career. And he did it while acting through more latex than an M-1 tank has armor. Absolutely brilliant. I hope the Emmy Awards will look past this being in a superhero show.
In fact, all of the actors were heavy hitters on their A-game. Clancy Brown is always a treat as a menacing villain, he played Salvatore, a deposed Godfather but was now climbing back up the ranks because Carmine Falcone had been whacked out.
Christine Miloti absolutely killed it as Sofia Falcone. A woman who started off as an innocent and was turned into an insane monster by her father.
Even the minor character of Victor, Penguin’s protege and righthand man delivered more than you were expecting from a character whose primary purpose was to have exposition delivered to him. A small-time car thief that Oswald gave a chance to. Victor was probably the only character in the show that genuinely loved Oswald and sadly for him, was the only one with genuine illusions about him.
The story of this show was the birth of a true villain. When we first meet Oz he comes across as a sympathetic character you can somewhat empathize with. He was born with a deformed foot that gave him a waddling gait. His mother was probably a prostitute but turned out to be good with numbers and started keeping the books for the local mob boss Rex. He’s always been overlooked and wants to make good. He’s viewed as the guy you can get away with disrespecting because everyone always has. But he’s smart and a good earner. He should have been rewarded more than he was. Who wouldn’t want to see a poor sap like Oz make it to the big time-?
But as the show progresses, you get to know the real monster that is the Penguin. His seemingly dutiful love for his mother is about as unhealthy as it can get. No, there is no incest but that doesn’t change the fact that his need for her love is an all-consuming obsession.
***spoiler alert***
In the episode Top Hat, we see Oz’s relationship with his two brothers. Even then he was the odd man, the third wheel that didn’t seem to belong like the other two did. Oz was deeply jealous of any attention that his mother gave to his brothers. When the oldest Jack gets the big boy job of running the numbers to Rex, Francis sends the other two with him. They play a prank on Oz and hide in the water overflow tunnel. Enraged at their humiliation of him, Oz locks them in the tunnel. He goes home as it starts to rain and tells his mother that his brothers went to see Beetlejuice. He gets her drunk and she lavishes all of her attention on him. He relishes her motherly love as his two brothers slowly drown to death.
In the climax of the show, Sofia Falcone has gone to war with Oz. She’s found out that he murdered his brothers. Moreover, she’s discovered that Francis figured out what happened to her other sons, she almost had the local mob boss Rex clip Oz but decided that her monster was all she had left.
Sofia is trying to get Oswald to confess his fratricide to his mother… By torturing his mother in front of him. And he never admits to it even after Francis screams, “I fucking know!”
The sympathetic figure we saw at the start of the show was the illusion of Oswald Cobb that he tried to project to the world. He murdered Sofia’s brother not because Berto had disrespected him as we thought at first but because Berto had dared to pop that illusion bubble even for a second.
It was a brutal shattering climax. Oz would rather let his mother get a finger cut off than break his own illusions about himself. By the end of the show, you know that Oz Cobb was just a mask that a monster called the Penguin wore.
This was a truly great story.
And what’s really sad about this is that at the end of the day, it’s yet another skinsuit show. In the last ten minutes of The Penguin Sofia gets a letter in Arkham Asylum from her half-sister Selina Kyle (that’s Catwoman, remember her!). And the very last scene in the show is the Bat Signal projected onto the dark and stormy clouds. Just as a little reminder, that this was, technically speaking, a Batman show. It obviously was not. This was somebody’s passion project for a 1970s gangster drama, that couldn’t get a sniff from the studios because it was an original idea. However, there was a key component of that stillborn project’s plot that meshed perfectly with the last Batman movie. Namely, that the Godfather is dead and there is now a succession crisis in organized crime.
And so we got The Penguin. It’s better than not getting something this good but it says so much about today’s Hollywood that it was never allowed to stand on its own feet.
The Dark Recommends with Enthusiasm (4.8/5)
