“It’s Everything You Wanted”: Analyzing The Penguin’s Finale

It’s hard to articulate why The Penguin works. On the surface, it’s simply a solid crime drama starring a classic Batman rogue. Breaking Bad (2008) but in Gotham City. Not a bad pitch, but it’s in execution that Penguin triumphs. Airing its finale on Sunday, it capped one of the best seasons of television to air in 2024 as well as some of the best comic book TV put to screen. My non-spoiler thoughts are that this is a modern classic, the start of the next great crime saga for the 2020s. A monstrously strong showing from DC and the team behind The Batman (2022). Instead of reviewing the episode in a traditional manner (I can only reverse engineer the sentence “It’s so good” so many times), I’m going to do my best to take it apart and analyze how it pulls off its show-stopping finale. 

 

Spoilers ahead, wise guy.  

 

Finales are hard. Look at how many long-running, successful television shows fumbled at the finish line. Penguin has it easier by being a limited series connected to a greater cinematic universe. Bare minimum, all it had to do was wrap up all of Oswald “Oz” Cobb’s (Colin Farrel) plots in a fashion that set him up for 2026’s The Batman Part II, but it manages to do much more than that. It dodges the most typical criticism levied at shows like Lost (2004) or The Sopranos (1999) by providing a definite, satisfying ending to this Gotham crime epic. 

The eyes of history will (hopefully) look back on this show and shower its lead actors with awards, but the entire cast truly brings their A-game. No amount of praise can truly capture the sheer magnitude of Colin Farrel as Oz. Just in this episode, he sells Penguin’s murderous glee with a smile as well as his terror with a subtle stutter. His performance transcends the bubble of comic book media and earns its spot alongside the all-time TV greats. He and Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone, heiress to the Falcone crime family, have more than earned their Emmys. Milioti is the show’s other half. Her’s is a richly layered and fascinating character whose depth is always brought to the fore of the performance. The both of them are electric in every frame and even more deadly when together. 

Deirdre O’Connell as Francis Cobb, Oz’s mother, is an absolute force. From episode 1, it’s established that she’s Oz’s motivation, but as the narrative progresses, their relationship is decoded, making it the deepest and most complex in the show’s repertoire. The ending was always going to revolve around this Freudian nightmare. Oz becomes the kingpin of Gotham, a seat of power he’s pursued in a cocktail of guilt, love, and pride he has for his mother, but in the end, he’s pushed Francis so hard that she no longer loves him. After a stroke, she’s in a vegetative state, and put up in Oz’s new penthouse,  she forever overlooks the city that took everything from her. “It’s everything you wanted,” Oz whispers to her, but that’s not true. It’s what Oz wanted. 

The show’s secret weapon is Victor Aguilar, played by Rhenzy Feliz. Amongst this heightened criminality, Victor provides a grounded perspective. He begins as an orphan turned car-jacker, but under Oz’s tutelage, grows to become a capable enforcer and schemer. Feliz plays this character so well that these changes are quite subtle at first, until by the finale, you realize how much he’s grown. He and Oz are birds of a feather, both disabled boys from the same part of Gotham looking to get what they’re owed. They grow close, like brothers, appearing when the other needs them the most. When Oz makes decisions, it blows back on Victor, and vice versa. These stakes effectively sell this story as a tragedy. 

Victor’s death at the hand of Oz, a slow, grueling strangulation, cements his descent into depravity.  Many viewers might have seen Vic’s death coming, but it happening in the second to last scene in the finale, without ceremony or gravitas, after he tells Oz that they’re like family? That’s diabolical. 

And Sofia’s fate, once again consigned to Arkham after Oz pins all of his meddling on her, has a painful poetry to it. The status quo returns to how it began, except Oz ascended higher than he ever has before. This series has seen Oz stripped naked during brutal interrogations and building drug labs in the very tunnels in which his brothers drowned to death, so seeing him finally achieve the highrise overlooking the city is bittersweet knowing what it took for him to get there. I hate him. Oz is despicable for what he’s done to Victor and Sofia, and I’m going to cheer when Batman gets his hands on him, but he’s so damn compelling that I couldn’t help but join in his victory. 

When I last wrote about Penguin, I pegged this story to be a retelling of a classic Batman narrative: the dissolution of the organized crime families that have historically ruled Gotham and the ushering in of the era of costumed crime. Typically, it’s Batman that incites this change. The Dark Knight (2008) insinuates that Batman’s existence leads to escalation, creating villains like the Joker, but The Penguin argues that this was inevitable. We’re led to believe that Francis fed Oz’s ambition to create the monster he is now, but the revelation about Penguin intentionally leaving his brothers to drown in the Gotham tunnels during a rainstorm implies he has always been like this. 

While the show has a cagey relationship with superhero aesthetics, it isn’t afraid to incorporate storytelling staples of the genre. Like Batman, Oz and Sofia dress theatrically to strike fear in their opponents, becoming the cutthroat heiress and the old-fashioned gangster. Oz is known for his suits and suspenders, wrapping himself in oldschool glitz and glamor.  Sofia cuts her hair and wears a sharp yellow dress at the Falcone family dinner before gassing them all, and wears a fiery red ensemble in the finale before burning down her family mansion. They both dress for the job.

Sofia and Oz are—at the risk of insulting your intelligence—bad guys. Supervillains. 

In the behind-the-scenes extras for episode 4, showrunner Laruen LeFrance said, in regards to Sofia, “she’s the closest thing we have to a hero in our show.” At first, I laughed. Sofia might be sympathetic, but she’s far from heroic. Only while writing this did I understand what this meant. Sofia’s own father pinned his murders on her with Oz’s help, leading to her being locked up in Arkham. She fits the supervillain archetype because she takes that pain, the same kind that turns Bruce Wayne into Batman, and turns her back on the world. Instead of devoting herself to productive change, or even living a regular life, she takes up her father’s role as mafia don and avenges herself against all who wronged her. Crime becomes a power fantasy. 

Classic supervillain behavior. 

Now, I could say the same about Oz, but he’s different. He’s the anti-Batman. He never lost his brothers; he refused to save them. Bruce and Victor lost their families to the city; Oz sacrificed his to it. Sofia isn’t a hero because of anything she does, but because she’s born from the same stuff that Batman is. While never making an appearance, The Penguin lives in the shadow of the bat. His absence is conspicuous, and I would have loved to see Robert Pattison’s Batman again, but I’m glad they didn’t shoehorn in a cameo for the sake of it. The show is better for staying in its own world. 

Going forward, it’s unclear as to how Penguin will factor into The Batman Part II, if at all. We see that Sofia receives a letter from her half sister, Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), AKA Catwoman, teasing a potential team up. Batman, Catwoman, and Sofia being on a collision course makes me giddy. What would Bruce think of Oz now? Could he find redemption in Sofia? Will Selina drag her further into supervillainy? If Part II pursues a different antagonist, we could see all of this lie in the background and resurface later down the line. These characters are brimming with potential, and I have faith this universe won’t squander it. 

I don’t like throwing around the word “masterpiece,” but my vocabulary fails me here. What other word describes something so excellently put together? Something so thematically rich it has you talking until your throat’s dry and typing until your fingertips ache? Its quality is self-evident, which is why I turned inward to analysis, dissecting how this show works and how it makes me feel. And it continues to make me feel—long after the credits roll—because it’s beautiful and horrible and everything a story set in Gotham should be.