If there’s one thing we like to do, it’s root for the bad guy. And despite all evidence to the contrary, that’s what fans have been doing for eight episodes of The Penguin. Sure, we like Sofia Gigante (Cristin Milioti) as well. But even though he’s not a good guy, we want Oswald Cobb (Colin Farrell) to succeed in taking over Gotham City. Only in a clear case of “be careful what you wish for,” we got what we wanted in The Penguin finale, with the horrible cost of — spoilers past this point — watching Oz ruthlessly kill poor Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz).
Here’s what went down, in case you’re still too in shock to process. After successfully getting Sofia tossed back in Arkham, and consolidating control of the Gotham underworld under his thumb, Oz and Victor are sitting by the water and celebrating their victory. Oz is telling Victor he did a good job convincing the underlings of the gang bosses to rebel, and that he’s proud of what he did.
Victor, inspired by what Oz is saying, stutters for the first time in the episode — almost as if he knows what he’s about to do is the wrong move. “You’re like family, you know,” he says to Oz. And Oz sighs and shakes his head.
That’s when Oz tells Victor he can’t take him with him to the top and seems like he’s hugging his second-in-command. He’s not. He’s choking him to death.
“Your family,” Oz says as Victor feebly tries to free himself from his grasp. “It’s your strength. Makes you weak, too. I can’t have that no more.”
Oz is referring to how his mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell) was the one thing that temporarily gave Sofia an advantage over him. She’s now in a vegetative state after having a stroke, and that’s a whole other thing. But this scene ends the only way it can, with Oz letting go of Victor’s lifeless body as it falls to the ground.
Oz then takes the money out of Victor’s wallet, and then his driver’s license — the same one Oz took from Victor in the series premiere as safekeeping — before tossing it in the river and leaving Victor’s body to presumably be found later, looking like he was killed and robbed randomly.
It’s horrific to watch because despite delving into a life of crime, Victor is at his heart a good person. He’s more similar to Sofia, someone who shows an ounce of humanity, than Oz, whose own mother confides “I got the devil in my house,” after revealing she knows Oz murdered his two brothers just to get closer to her. Whatever excuse Oz uses to kill Victor, it’s ultimately because he’s a rogue element. He’s a killer. He’s a complete sociopath who has no feelings for anyone other than him. Even the devotion he shows to his mother isn’t about her, not really… It’s about how she dotes on him. How she tells him she’s proud. This is why he keeps her alive in a vegetative state, trapped in her own body, even though she begged him to kill her if that ever happened.
But Victor’s death, arguably, is the thing that cements Oz as an unsympathetic villain; what he does to his mother is just the cherry on top. In her case, she also did some very bad things along the way, not least of which was weaponizing Oz for her own potential benefit. Victor needed a family after his own died in The Riddler’s (Paul Dano) flood, and he thought he found that with Oz. Not only that, he was told that they were the same, and on a similar path. Victor even gave a whole speech to Oz about what he provided to people: hope, in terms of turning on the lights of Crown Point, and bringing together people to sell the drug Bliss. Victor has bought the stories Oz told him about raising yourself up, hook, line, and sinker.
That’s ultimately Victor’s downfall, that he put any trust and hope in a man who didn’t deserve it. While they may have started as a twisted version of Batman and Robin… Oz is not Batman. There is nothing redeeming in him. He is not bringing hope to the people of Gotham… He’s robbing them blind, and taking whatever benefits him, the most. Victor thought he was dealing with a man who was good at heart when he wasn’t even dealing with a man at all.
And for viewers, this is the point the show has been making. We like to deify these villains or paint them as anti-heroes. That’s not what Oz was, and he never was from the moment he was born. There’s nothing hopeful or worthy of striving for in him. There’s just a never-ending pit of self-serving violence. He even kills Victor trying to explain it like he’s doing it for him, that it’s a good thing to keep him out of a life of crime. It’s not. Victor is dead and left on a riverbank to rot. There’s nothing redeeming there. No motive other than Oz decided it was time for Victor to die.
That’s what the show is driving home for viewers… We are Victor. And Oswald isn’t someone we should cheer for. We should be trying to stop these people who rob our wallets and tell us it’s for a good cause.
In the final moments of the episode, we do get a literal ray of light, though, as Oz and Eve Karlo (Carmen Ejogo) dance. “Nothing’s standing in your way now,” Eve says. “You’re goddamn right,” Oz answers as the camera pans to show the Batsignal lighting up.
Batman may not know who Victor was, or what he means to us in the viewing audience — or Oz’s rise to power. He’ll likely never know. But when we finally get to see Oz’s comeuppance in The Batman Part II, it’s going to be satisfying because of what he did to Victor… What we, the audience know he did, even if Oz will never recognize it himself. He’s the bad guy, and he deserves every punch he gets from Batman, and every broken bone. Justice for Victor, and shout out to The Penguin for giving us a true, completely unredeemable villain origin story.
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