The Penguin's Antihero Tropes Make It An Instant Classic - And Not Just For Comic Book Fans

 

 

Spoilers for The Penguin below:

The last shot of The Penguin shows Oz dancing in his penthouse and the Bat-Signal flickering on right next to it. It might have been just as satisfying and more accurate for the final shot to have Oz dancing to ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ or ‘Baby Blue’.

Because part of the reason that HBO’s The Penguin – already considered by both critics and audiences one of the best shows of the year but currently ranked on imdb.com as the 70^th greatest TV series of all time – has resonated beyond the usual comic book fans and pop culture students is because the series is an organized crime drama that just happens to be set in Gotham City, rather than in Jersey or Albuquerque. Fans have spent the last two months searching for the easter eggs from the world of Batman; I’ve spent just as much time looking for the parallels between The Sopranos and Breaking Bad something I’m relatively sure I won’t be alone in doing in the weeks and months to come.

The parallels to The Sopranos have, of course, been obvious since the teasers were dropped. Colin Farrell, one of our greatest actors, spent the entire series channeling James Gandolfini far more than he was any predecessor of The Penguin in film, TV or comic book. It can’t have escaped the viewer both his appearance and accent are very close to Tony Soprano (particularly in the later seasons as Tony got bulkier and uglier) as well as the relationship with his disturbed mother. It is a credit to Deidre O’Connell that we spent the entire series truly thinking Francis was just suffering from dementia and genuinely loved her son and it is not until the final episode that we realized just how truly dark and twisted it always has been.

The clearest parallels in addition to this being a story set in the world of organized crime are through how we see Oz. Oz constantly claims to long for an easier time, much like Tony yearned for ‘the strong, silent type’. There is the troubled relationship with his mother (complete with the fact that Francis, like Livia, ordered a hit on her son – though few would argue Francis’s logic was far more justifiable), the relationships with the women in Oz’s life which have parallels to Tony’s relationships both with sex workers and his family, Oz’s reckless violent streak which often leads to making decisions that backfire on him and his relationship with Victor, the young man he meets in the Pilot who becomes his go-to guy.

Because is Oz starts out lower down on the food chain then Tony does when we first meet him, Oz is far more of a scrapper than Tony has to be. As a result we have to watch him build temporary alliances and be willing to play them against each other. Oz is constantly on the verge of dying throughout The Penguin in a way that Tony rarely is. And Oz’s ability to lure people to his side is his speaking that he is ‘a man of the people’  a ploy that Tony could never have gotten away with even among his own crew. But in a way there are parallels between how Oz and Tony manage to use political influence in order to get protection from themselves.

There were in the finale several callbacks to The Sopranos that the casual fan of the series will clearly recognize. Oz’s taking Francis to the hospital parallels Tony’s appearance at the hospital when Livia has a stroke at the end of Season 1. In both cases, their mother has just tried to have the son killed but in Oz’s case he wants to keep his mother alive. When Oz is driving Sofia into the woods in their final scene together, we are clearly meant to remember how Silvio drove Adriana out into the pine barrens for her to be executed after Christopher betrayed her to Tony. In this case Sofia thinks she knows what is coming and is far calmer about her fate than Adriana is; the shock comes that she doesn’t die but is sent to fate worse than death. And the last scene between Vic and Oz reminds us the final scene between Tony and Christopher in ‘Kennedy and Heidi’ when Tony kills the closest person to him out of fear he would be a weakness down the line. Oz is far kinder about it and Victor far more shocked but the fact remains he does die of oxygen deprivation the same way Christopher does.  Those are just the clearest ones in the series finale; I suspect eventually my fellow critics will find more that I missed.

But there also very clear parallels between the journey of Oz Cobb to the Penguin and Walter White’s path to Heisenberg. The biggest one is that Oz’s rise to power involves the manufacture of a new street drug called Bliss and he and Victor spend much of the series looking for a place to grow the mushrooms for it. In that sense Oz and Vic can be seen as parallels to Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in many ways –  the unlikeliness of their initial relationship, the often father-son bond (far more affectionate than we ever saw on Breaking Bad) the way that Oz will admonish him but also be there for him; the dark background of Vic, the way he finally sees the only way out is to kill a rival (a parallel to Jesse’s shooting of Gale Boetticher) and the fact that Oz is willing to sacrifice Vic when it suits his needs. (The only reason Jesse doesn’t die at the hands of the bikers is because they choose to double cross Walt in Ozymandias.) Throw in the fact that in the penultimate episode Oz is willing to blow up his ‘Superlab’ to escape detection and  the parallels are very clear.

But they actually go deeper than that with some of the other characters, particularly Sofia. It might be a bit of a reach to parallel Kristin Milioti’s incredible work as Sofia with that of Giancarlo Esposito’s groundbreaking work as Gus Fring but it’s hard not to see them. Sofia is considered by the world of her family harmless in the way the cartel considers Gus less dangerous than he is until its too late for both of them. Sofia’s backstory is, if anything, more inclined to be sympathetic than Gus’s was, particularly when you consider just how many betrayals were involved and that her loved ones were the most responsible. And how can the viewer not see the parallel between the final moments of Cent ’Anni as Sofia walks among the bodies of her families with that of ‘Salut’ when Gus Fring executes a plan of revenge against the cartel decades in the making.

It's hard not to see the parallels between Gus and Walter during the third and fourth season of Breaking Bad. Sofia knows how reckless Oz is and is far more suspicious of him than Walter was of Gus initially. The alliance they form is built out of necessity and when Oz reveals his true colors at a critical moment Sofia is determined to go to war. Sofia makes alliances with her own devils (Sal Maroni, who in this scenario does have parallels to Mike Ehrmantraut) and the two of them spend a great deal of time trying to expand their territory and take revenge on Oz for what he’s done to them. In the case of Sal and Sofia, however, we are far more inclined to be on their sides than we were of Mike and Gus, at least initially because we’ve seen the damage that Oz is capable of and just how monstrous he is.

Sofia wants to destroy Oz and she decides to go after his weakness. (It’s hard not to remember Gus telling Walter: “I will kill your wife. I will your infant daughter in a cold and matter-of-fact tone.) Unlike Gus, however, she had more self-awareness about not only who she was but what she was becoming. This was clear in the penultimate episode when she basically abandoned her last living relative to the Gotham orphanage, the exact same fate she’d been dealt when her family turned her over to the Hangman. Sofia knew who she was and was determined to get out, which makes her story more tragic than Gus’s was.

That may be the most crucial difference between Oz Cobb and both Tony Soprano and Walter White. Along those two famous antiheroes who eventually became monsters during the course of the series Oz was always a monster, capable of doing horrible things to the people he loved. Walter White, for all the destruction he brought on his family, never decided to do something so monstrous as the murder of his two older brothers in the flashback to his youth and Tony Soprano at least tried to be a good father. (He sucked at every other relationship in his life of course.) And unlike any of these characters we see that there is no repentance in Oz at the end of the series. We’ve gotten hints that he will do anything possible to save his own skin ahead of his own but up until the final two episodes we still wanted to believe there was something redeemable about him.

But when we see him refusing to admit even as his mother is tortured his crime we know what Francis has realized all along: there’s nothing in him. Oz Cobb is even more of a psychotic than Dexter Morgan was because even Dexter knew there was something wrong with him. Oz was willing to let the person he supposedly cared about the most die rather than let the truth about him be known.

And in the finale we realize the depths of Oz’s delusion and the finale all the more frightening. His mother knows what he did and has stabbed him with a broken bottle, but a part of him still believes at the end that she’ll forgive him once he achieves his dreams. The fact that she is now trapped in her own mind forever is almost a better fate than the one we see Oz in the final scenes: even after everything she told him, part of him believes she would be proud of him. The fact that in the final scene Eve – who told Sofia that she knew the kind of man Oz was all along – is dressed as her mother telling her ‘son’ that she’s proud of him shows that she has a greater awareness of who Oz is than he ever will. He doesn’t have to be sent to Arkham for us to know he’s crazy; he’s already there.

Even though there is no sign of Batman in any form during the series there’s an argument that The Penguin is telling the same kind of story about Batman that Matt Reeves’ film did so well in 2022. Reeves’s movie, nearly as well as the work of Christopher Nolan, made the argument that not only is Batman’s cause futile but that he’s doing as much harm as he is good. Some might argue where Batman was during all of the horrible things that happened; I’d argue the fact that he was absent is the point of The Penguin. Batman has spent his entire career trying to clean up the mess of Gotham rather than do anything to fix the root causes of the problems. We saw this illustrated in so much of Edward Nygma’s revelations in the film and how popular they played out.

The reason that Oz Cobb can come across as a ‘man of the people’ is while his bluster are lies, the anger behind them is not. Most of the series takes place in the poorer section of Gotham which has been left behind for years, where the victims know nothing but poverty and must turn to crime to survive. I suspect if Batman had found Victor at the start of the series he would have been far crueler to him than Oz was immediately. In a sick way Victor was given hope in a way its hard to imagine the Bat-Signal can. Oz doesn’t know he’s met Bruce Wayne, but if he did (and maybe that will happen in the sequel) he would no doubt loathe him more than he does Batman. Wayne is a symbol of everything Oz loathes as much as Batman is – and the fact that Bruce Wayne has spent his fortune beating up criminals rather than helping the poor and downtrodden is an unspoken point in The Penguin.

To call The Penguin one of the best shows of 2024 doesn’t seem adequate enough. It is one of the best limited series in HBO’s history of producing masterpieces over the last decade, ranking with Chernobyl, The Night of and yes, Watchmen. It is one of the best limited series of the decade so far,  deserving to stand with such masterclasses as Dopesick and Maid. And it is yet another example as to how the limited series, perhaps more than any other format, can do much to show the potential of comic books than any film possible. It compares favorably in that sense with WandaVision which was powerful not just because of its performances but because it was a meditation on a far more universal theme: grief and dealing with loss.

Reeves has made it very clear that this will be the only season of The Penguin we will get and while like many fans I hope he backtracks, I would be fine if he stays the course. He has, however, indicated that there will very likely be a world of limited series taking place in the Gotham he has created both in his films and The Penguin. While it is hard to imagine another story being nearly as brilliant to watch the world of Batman has always been large enough to contain multitudes as well as depths for its villains and supporting characters in the way few other comic books – indeed, franchises – do. I don’t know if it is possible. But I’ll keep my eye out on the horizon for the Bat-Signal.