The Penguin sets its delusions of subtlety (and several people) on fire

We’ve asked, more than once while considering The Penguin, what kind of TV show it actually wants to be. Are we sitting down each week to a gritty prestige crime drama about a damaged personality imposing its raging insecurities onto the world? A Coen-esque, lightly comedic crime caper about an eternal bullshitter flop-sweating his way to success? A pulpy meditation on trauma? “Homecoming,” the series’ fifth installment, doesn’t answer these questions so much as it throws up its hands at the whole concept of picking a lane in the first place. “Fuck it, two shows!” it messily declares: Welcome to our double feature, then, Oz Cobb’s Failure House and Sofia Falcone’s Big Day.

Sorry, that should be Sofia Gigante, as we watch Cristin Milioti finally go somewhere close to full-on-Gotham as she embraces Sofia’s turn from “extremely angry person” to “actual no-fucking-around supervillain” from last week. Of our two shows tonight, this is for sure the more enjoyable one: Armored in fantastic coats and smoky eyes, we watch Sofia waltz through the ruins of Gotham’s old crime families and swiftly construct a new one of her own, now very deliberately positioned in her mother’s name. The important thing about these scenes—more than the weird vacillations of Michael Kelly’s Johnny Vitti or Sofia’s promises of a socialist criminal utopia for her new hires—is that Milioti is clearly having a blast doing it all, whether she’s effortlessly bringing Dr. Rush in as her new hench-boyfriend or toying with Clancy Brown’s takeout. After four episodes largely marked by reserves of stillness and restraint, watching Milioti grab some big chunks of scenery and chow down on them is the biggest delight the episode has to offer. It may not be subtle (it is in no way, shape, or form subtle), but where does a TV show called The Penguin get off trying to be subtle, anyway?

Oz’s show starts off on a similar trajectory—but then, well, Oswald Cobb intrudes into it. We mean that in multiple senses, some the show intends and some it almost certainly doesn’t. We’re meant, for instance, to be contrasting Oz, who spends this episode settling old scores, trying to salvage the Bliss operation, and then literally retreating to his childhood haunts when the whole thing blows up disastrously in his face, with Sofia, who’s all about seizing the future. In a perfect world, this series of abrupt setbacks would carry an energy of their own, Colin Farrell finding parallel fun in his character’s drop to the one Milioti found in Sofia’s ascent. Instead, though, his scenes largely hang limp, Farrell retreating back to the few tricks his facial prosthetics allow him, mostly vocal: an increasingly familiar whip-sawing between bluster, petulance, and smallness; occasional glimpses of the monster literally buried deep underneath the façade. (The fascination in his eyes while he watches two-thirds of the Maroni family burn to death is one of the only really compelling moments he gets tonight.) It leaves us asking, again, the question we floated back in our review of the pilot: Why is this guy worth centering a TV show on? What about him, beyond the spectacle of watching a good actor struggle with a self-imposed deficit, is meant to be entertaining television? 

“Homecoming” points pretty hard to what it thinks the answer is, giving Oz more scenes with his mother Francis as he panic-evacuates her to Gotham’s ruined poorer neighborhoods. The irony, though, is that actor Deidre O’Connell finds a much more compelling scene partner in Rhenzy Feliz than in Farrell: The Vic And Francis Show at least has some life to it, as Oz’s young protege and his mom navigate the ruins of the Riddler’s bombings, him wary and scared, her enjoyably acerbic. Whereas when Oz shows up, the beats of his Oedipal drama are so rote that the eye drifts, panning around for any meaningful nuggets of backstory that can be harvested from the mire. (How did Oz’s brothers die, Vic asks, intruding into what we can only assume is the Formative Trauma the show has been so slowly building toward. “City took ’em,” Cobb answers back cryptically, because god knows we can’t get there yet! We have to have more meaningful glances at ominous sewer doors first.) 

There have been moments, earlier in The Penguin’s run, where it made a virtue of the fact that its title character is actually kind of a loser. Farrell is a gifted comic actor, playing a character with a shameless gift for bullshit—and there were scenes, especially back in the pilot, that made it clear the show understood the entertainment value of watching a guy like that flail around. “Homecoming” feints back toward that energy in its final moments, when Oz triumphantly stumbled onto his own personal Bat-Cave down in Gotham’s old abandoned trolley tunnels, only to have the power unceremoniously cut out at episode’s end. But it gets so distracted in trying to build pathos for the character—in his interactions with Carmen Ejogo’s Eve, in every single scene with his mom, in his mournful gazing out the window—that it loses sight of its own strengths. Forget all the high-minded talk about the show’s vacillating tone: Watching our main character lose everything, right on the precipice of success, shouldn’t be this deathly dull. (Even Farrell seems bored during his big tantrum when Eve breaks up with him; a thrown vase of flowers has rarely ever looked so perfunctory.) Oswald Cobb can be a fun character and manages it once or twice tonight. But very little has suggested that he’s a deep character. Cristin Milioti has sounded the depths of Sofia Gigante successfully, and is now having a hell of a time floating betwixt the trauma survivor and the camp mass murderer. Farrell keeps fluctuating wildly, and it’s enough to make us worry that he’s eventually going to drown. 

Stray observations

• • R.I.P. Oz’s gaudy purple “chariot.”
• • Also R.I.P.: The Tik Tok career of “ViewFromTheTaj,” a.k.a. Taj Maroni. Also also R.I.P.: Taj Maroni.
• • Con O’Neill reprises his The Batman role as Gotham police chief Bock, having a fun, tense little scene with Sofia. Are we right in thinking he’s only the second Batman actor to show up in this after Farrell himself?
• • We harp on the Penguin makeup a lot, but it feels damning to contrast it with Milioti, who gets such amazing mileage out of the degrees of expressiveness in her face. (Watch her in the above scene, where she silently switches from “distraught survivor” to “intimidating the chief of police” in two seconds of perfect stillness.) It gets harder and harder, as the show goes on, not to view the prosthetics as a handicap obscuring the good work Farrell is doing.
• • “My ma…she’s what keeps me good.”
• • Michael Kelly gets his One Good Scene of the whole show early on tonight, begging Sofia for his life by playing on the memory of her mother and painting himself as another victim of Carmine. Then he (very stupidly) runs his mouth in the middle of her big meeting—in a way that doesn’t entirely track with “got nearly tortured to death 12 hours ago”—and unceremoniously gets shot in the head. Bye, Johnny. Don’t try telling Sofia Gigante she needs you.
• • That’s the (very recently) late Gena Rowlands, in 1980’s Gloria, playing on Francis’ unattended TV.
• • “Don’t lie to me, you’re bad at it.” This is O’Connell’s best episode to date. You can get a real sense of what a terror Francis must have been once upon a time.
• • Skipped over the death of Shohreh Aghdashloo’s Nadia Maroni tonight on the grounds of it being something that probably sounded cool on paper but looks extremely goofy in practice: She dies literally from being unwilling to let go of her immolating son, in case you like your “subtext” to arrive in the form of two fully flaming human corpses.
• • Note to people hiring contract killers: Maybe don’t tell them to tell your victims “So-and-so sent me,” just in case things don’t go entirely to plan!
• • Oz is now down to two buckets of Bliss mushrooms. Does Sofia even care about Bliss at this point? She seems busy.
• • Hilariously, the show skips over how Sal Maroni broke out of Blackgate—which, we feel moved to remind you, is an island—with a single line about “getting the keys.” Still, it’s always good to spend time with Clancy Brown.
• • Sofia seems to agree: “What a funky hideout.”
• • Oh, and Vic and Oz are probably going to have trouble with Squid, a petty criminal who Vic knew before the bombings. Can’t wait to get to the payoff for the Squid subplot.