Colin Farrell's makeup prevented Sal from torturing him in this way on The Penguin

Last night, HBO ran yet another banger episode of The Penguin, the spinoff of The Batman that may be better than the original movie. Just like a lot of people in his life, I may have underestimated how compelling Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) could be. But The Penguin has been one of my recent TV highlights and I'm really looking forward to the finale next Sunday.

In the most recent episode, "Top Hat," we said goodbye to an important character: Sal Maroni (Clancy Brown), who has wanted Oz dead ever since he killed Sal's wife and son by setting them on fire. “At this point, Sal has tunnel vision,” Brown told Variety. “All he wants to do is kill Oz. If he could shoot Oz in the head, and then somebody shot [Sal] in the head, he would die a happy man. He is just is so full of rage and hatred for for Oz Cobb at that point, I don’t think anything else exists. I don’t think he has any designs to take out Sofia and he doesn’t care at all about the Gigante and Maroni alliance. I don’t think he cares a whit about that. He’s just using that in order to get to Oz, to kill him.”

Sal has envisioned several scenarios for how that would go. Obviously, he's considered setting Oz on fire; there's even a moment in the episode where Sal grabs a can of gasoline, but he ends up not using it. “I think it was actually in the script for a minute that he was going to douse Oz with gasoline after he talks about [Sal's wife] Nadia, and how Nadia smelled, but it became an impractical thing to do because of the makeup,” Brown said. “You can’t pour gasoline on the makeup, obviously. You can really ruin it by even pouring water on it, because it would absorb all the water and eventually get water logged and be even more miserable for Colin to wear.”

Sal did get to beat Oz with a golf club, and Brown may have gotten a touch too passionate about it. “At first, Colin thought and I thought, ‘Well, you know, [Colin’s] padded up pretty well,’ so Colin said ‘Just go for it.’ So I did. And you know, a couple takes after that, he pulled me aside and said, ‘Okay, don’t go for it so much.' I was really trying to break the club.” The makeup giveth and the makeup taketh away.

In the end, the fight between Oz and Sal is a bit anticlimactic, as Sal dies of a heart attack in the middle of their final brawl. That actually disappoints Oz, who wanted the satisfaction of finishing off Sal for himself. “I thought it was a great joke,” Brown said. “That’s in there in order to add another little layer of frustration onto Oz. Oz is a beast like Sal, and he needs to kill in a way that is satisfying for him. And that was very unsatisfying.”

Cristin Milioti names her favorite Sofia scenes from The Penguin

Sal isn't the only one who wants Oz dead. Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) has very nearly stolen the show out from under the title character; she wants to pay Oz back for betraying her, and succeeds at the end of the episode when she blows up his base of operations. But he's still alive, so their vendetta isn't over.

Talking to Andy Serkis in Interview magazine, director Matt Reeves — who's in charge of building out the greater Batman cinematic universe — talked about how he and The Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc built out Sofia's character. "I mean, we took [Sofia's father] Carmine from the comics and there was a lot of stuff from The Long Halloween, but I think there was something very personal that Lauren wanted to say with Sofia’s character," Reeves said. "She enters the story in this really delicious way, because you’re like, 'Who is this force of nature?' Cristin just embodies that so beautifully. She seems to be a foil in the beginning, and you are wondering, 'What is their history together?' But I think it’s really about being a woman in a very male toxic world and how she’s going to rail against that to become this incredible force, which she does."

As for Milioti, she's gotten a ton of praise for her performance as Sofia, so much that she may just win an Emmy alongside Colin Farrell when the next awards ceremony comes around. She talked to Variety about her favorite scenes. One of them is obviously Sofia's takeover of the Falcone crime family in the fourth episode, "Cent'anni," where she gives a seemingly conciliatory speech to her back-stabbing relatives at dinner before gassing the lot of them to death that night. “[T]hat whole sequence from the minute I entered the dining room to the very end of the episode was very, very thrilling,” Milioti said.

Another of her favorite scene came in "Top Hat," when Sofia visits Gia, the daughter of one of those relatives she killed after that dinner. Gia was blameless for what happened to Sofia, so she was spared, but the young girl still ended up in a group home, and Sofia has to work overtime to convince herself that it was worth it:

"I remember reading that scene and being like, ‘holy moly,’ it’s such a brutal scene. But I was so excited about it and so moved by it; it’s so complicated. But of course, this is what this person would do. What’s beautiful about that scene, too, is she’s quite literally trying to burn her father’s legacy to the ground and saying, ‘I’m nothing like him, he’s a monster,’ and she does the exact same thing to this little girl. She sentences her to the exact same life, in a way, but she truly is believing that she’s doing that child a service. In her mind, she’s doing the right thing — ‘I’m saving you from something you don’t know about’ — while ruining this child’s life."

Sofia and Oz will have their final confrontation this upcoming Sunday night on HBO and Max.

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