The Penguin cast and crew explain the tragic ending(s) and what's next for Oz

This past Sunday, HBO aired the eighth and final episode of The Penguin, and it was terrific. I didn't expect a spinoff of the 2022 movie The Batman about a supporting villain character to become one of my favorite shows of the year, but here we are. The Penguin was dark, funny, exciting and finally tragic, as Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) finally got what he wanted — to be the king of the Gotham City underworld — at the price of any goodness he had left.

Oz sells his soul a couple times over in "A Great or Little Thing." At the very end, we see that he's bought the beautiful penthouse he always promised he would buy for his mother Francis, but also that he's keeping her there in a near-comatose state, going against the personal plea she made to him a couple episodes before: to let her die with dignity.

The last thing we see Francis do before the credits roll is shed a single tear. “I don’t even know if he knew he was doing it and I don’t know how a human can do it, but he withdrew his love,” actress Deirdre O'Connell told Variety about playing that scene. “It was absolutely clear in the room that Oz withdrew his love and I felt it, and my blood ran cold. He gave me the tear.”

The final episodes dive into Oz's backstory. We find out not only did Oz leave his two brothers to slowly drown to death in a flooding tunnel so he could be mommy's one and only favorite child, but that Francis has known about it all this time, and decided to live with the knowledge rather than getting justice on behalf of her other sons. “Episode 7, in a way, is not just Oz’s origin story, but Francis’s as well, because you see she’s a loving mom," showrunner Lauren LeFranc told Indiewire. "She’s a single mom. She’s got three boys. She has her hands full. She’s overworked. She’s doing the best she can. She always has a brash tone because that’s who she is, but there’s a lot of love and affection there. And then what we start to realize through that episode and into the finale is that she changed too. As a result of Oz’s actions, something changed in her and there was something that she lost in herself by what Oz did.”

At the start of the series, it looks like Oz might be the way he is because of his mother's malignant influence, but the final episodes flip that idea, leaving Oz with no excuses for being a monster. “In the comics, he is mistreated so deeply, in such a way that it then merits what he chooses to do as an adult, and I really wanted to shy away from those tropes,” LeFranc said. “I was very firm on making sure that we don’t make an excuse for him.”

It's pretty impossible to make those excuses by the end, when Oz has his girlfriend Eve (Carmen Ejogo) dress up as his mother to give him the affirmations Francis no longer can, and never wanted to. Rather than love, he's settled for a lie. “He can’t get what he needed from his mother because she’s no longer in that state because of the dark events and what he’s done, so he recreates it in this other way with Eve, and it’s very disturbing,” director Matt Reeves said on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “That was something we thought was a great idea and was so emblematic of this guy’s internal state. It’s like even as he now seems to have gotten that first major step toward being the kingpin, you know that some part of him will never be filled. These are the moments why we’re doing the show. We’re getting him to where by the end of that he’s in a different place so that when you meet him in the next movie he’s been transformed by the events that you’ve seen in watching this show.”

The Penguin stars talk Vic's final moments

Francis' final moments were tragic enough for one episodes, but The Penguin finale gave us another scene that hit at least as hard: after Oz has bested his rival Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), he shares a quiet moment with Victor Aguilar, aka Vic (Rhenzy Feliz), an orphan who had fallen into the position of Oz's right-hand man. Against all odds, Vic had come to care for Oz like family. But Oz had just been reminded of how vulnerable close ties could make him. Instead of opening his heart to Vic, Oz strangles the young man to death on a park bench.

"The important part of nailing it for Victor is the first half of that scene: this incredibly vulnerable state that he allows himself to get to," Feliz told TIME about the scene. "It’s pretty soft. It’s slow, and it takes its time, and it’s paced out. Victor is telling Oz, in their own words, 'I love you,' basically. That’s the subtext. They’re too macho to say those words to each other, but that’s the feeling. When I read it, I thought it was beautiful, and I wanted to give it air and space. Me and Colin’s coverage was shot at the exact same time, so it all feels very organic and back-and-forth and sweet ... right before it isn’t."

"It took all night. We were outdoors, it was a cold winter day in New York. We shot that on Roosevelt Island on the riverbank. It was real silent. It’s gruesome, and it’s brutal. Toward the end of the show, those light moments kind of dissipate and we’re left with something pretty dark and twisted. We’re witnessing Oz turn into something kind of irredeemable. Being on set that day, everyone felt sullen. There was a darkness in the air, there was a hush."

This is another point of no return for Oz in an episode full of them. “There was a dark energy that night,” Farrell told Variety. “If you’re going to ask the audience to fall in love with the character, which I feel the audience has fallen in love with Rhenzy’s Vic, there’s a world that the crew are gonna fall in love with that character as well.”

It sounds like Vic was always going to die, but at one point LeFranc was thinking of the death scene differently. "In the initial pitch, she envisioned how Vic was supposed to protect [Oz’s mom] Francis, and that had gone wrong. And in the struggle between Sofia and Oz, that Sofia was able to manipulate things in such a way that she turned Oz against Vic," Reeves revealed to The Hollywood Reporter. "And that would be this tragic thing. I thought that sounded great. But then, as we got deeper and deeper in, and she wrote the scene, she had changed her conception slightly, but in a critical way that I think made it even more powerful — an idea that was truly horrendous, but also profoundly tragic, which was that Oz needed to kill Victor because he couldn’t bear that level of vulnerability."

Will Sofia ever return?

Compared to Oz and Francis, Sofia Falcone almost got off light. Sure, she's back in prison after being locked away under false pretenses for a decade, but at least she's not dead or existing in a near-vegetative state of constant despair.

That said, LeFranc did consider alternatives. "I thought about [killing Sofia]," she told THR. "I hope some people wanted Sofia to beat Oz because Oz is a villain, and at the end of the day, we should have mixed feelings about the fact that he achieves what he achieves at the cost of all these other people’s lives. To me, for Sofia, the greater death is going back to Arkham after she experienced freedom and saw the potential of what she could have. To me, this is the more tragic way for things to end for her. I wanted her to have a little inkling of hope at the end in the finale, as well, because I think she deserves that much."

I think a lot of fans think she deserves that and more; Sofia is arguably the breakout character of the show. "[M]y goal for the show was to create a character that I hope now lives on in the canon and is one of the more complicated female characters in this genre than we’ve gotten to see," LeFranc told The A.V. Club. "I hope she takes on a life of her own. The best thing about Penguin is he’s had 75 years or so of existence, with various iterations of that character. This is just my version of Sofia. I hope she can evolve in the comics. And maybe one will be written about her in the future. That would be fantastic. "

Why didn't Batman appear in The Penguin, and what's next for Oz?

Seeing Sofia again would be fantastic, which leads to an important question: when will the characters from The Penguin next show up on our screens? We know that the Penguin himself will show up in The Batman: Part II, which is due out in theaters in 2026, although he probably won't be the main villain. "I was told I have five or six scenes," Farrell told The Hollywood Reporter about his role in the movie.

The end of The Penguin pretty clearly sets up The Batman: Part II, what with the bat signal appearing in the sky while Oz dances with his fake mom. "I very much liked the idea of the Batman undercutting the strange, delusional scenario that Oz created for himself at the end, to merit all of his previous actions and to say, 'I finally made it.' And then for us to say, 'Maybe not. Maybe you haven't,'" LeFranc told Entertainment Weekly.

In fact, LeFranc and Reeves talked at various times about including Batman in the show itself, with Robert Pattinson reprising his role from the movie. "Over the course of writing the season, we discussed many times whether or not there might be some cross-through that would feel earned," Reeves said. "We tried a few different ideas conceptually, nothing that was ever written ultimately, but nothing seemed to quite gel in a way that felt earned."

One idea they had was for Bruce Wayne to have a run-in with Vic, but ultimately they decided to leave Batman out of the show entirely. "We wanted our characters to be the predominant people that you're following in this show," LeFranc explained. "Anything that started to detract from that wasn't servicing the type of show we wanted to do."

But what about a second season of The Penguin itself? Ratings have been great and only gotten better as the show went on, with the finale netting the show its highest ratings yet. Surely HBO is tempted. "We are, in a very preliminary way — me, Lauren, [Reeves' producing partner] Dylan [Clark], and Colin — starting to talk about what would be the way," Reeves said. "For me, what's really important is that we earn it. The idea of revisiting means that we have to keep that same bar. I know that none of us wants to go back and just do more. We want to go back and do something great. So that's what we're talking about now. We do believe that there's going to be something in there, but it's just beginning. It's exciting though. It's very gratifying."

Farrell, at least, sounds willing to get buried under all those prosthetics and have another go, provided the idea is good enough. “If there’s a great idea [for season two], and the writing was really muscular and as strong or stronger on the page than it was the first season, of course I would do it,” he told THR.

But that'll be then. For now, congrats to the cast and crew of The Penguin for a great season of TV. See you at the Emmys.

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