The Penguin finally goes to the flashback factory

We open tonight in the distant reaches of Flashback Land—call it Eh, FineFellas, maybe, or The Mini Saints Of Newark. Yes, it’s time for The Penguin to finally deploy The Grand Dramatic Backstory of one Oswald Cobb, and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s pretty much what I’ve been led to expect. A motherboy middle child whose latent desires to be an only child end up accidentally(?) manifesting in the worst possible way, the young Oz (Ryder White) is already a bit of a bitter, obsequious suck-up when we meet him. I’ll dip back to this flashback at episode’s end—as “Top Hat” eventually makes its case that Oz is just as much a victim of parental programming as his last remaining rival, Sofia Gigante, despite it arriving in the form of hugs, forehead kisses, and need, instead of phantom hands around the neck. But for as much drama and mystery as The Penguin has tried to build around Oz’s defining trauma, there’s not much here I couldn’t already extrapolate from the present-day interplay between Colin Farrell and Deirdre O’Connell. (At least I know now that most of this stuff probably actually happened, a recurring issue when your main character is a pathological liar.)

Once the flashbacks are dispensed with and the title card rolls, “Top Hat” mostly concerns itself with the ongoing war between Oz’s crew and the Maroni/Gigantes, a pretty classic example of one of those TV show fights where the winner is determined by “well, the script says we need Oz back on top for a minute, so I guess his guys are suddenly really good at gunfights.” Credit where it’s due, though: The decision to have Clancy Brown’s Sal die, not from Oz coming out on top in a brutal physical struggle but in the throes of a sudden heart attack, is a genuinely clever touch. Farrell sleepwalks through half this episode—he’s denied any really compelling partners for most of it, leaving him to Oz-by-numbers for many of his scenes—but Cobb’s genuine exasperation at Sal fucking up his game by suddenly dying on him in the middle of a fight is a fantastic touch. Between the flashbacks (which, hilariously, remind us that Oz’s halcyon childhood was happening concurrent to Beetlejuice, not in some bygone era of Don Corleone-esque genteel gangsters) and Farrell’s petulance at Sal’s sudden death, the episode underlines how important Cobb’s delusion of himself as a heroic, underdog man of the people is to him. (Still, if you’ve got to put a few bullets in an already-dead gangster to sell the narrative, both to yourself and your followers, you gotta do what you gotta do.)

Meanwhile, in what’s become a depressingly recurring refrain for The Penguin, the episode gets far more compelling once we move away from The Penguin for a bit. I could have already expected, going in, that a confrontation between Sofia Gigante and Francis Cobb was going to be a fun one, anticipating the tense scraping of steel on steel (shades of last week’s Eve/Sofia verbal duel). But it’s still a pleasure to watch Cristin Milioti and Deirdre O’Connell spar tonight, hunting out the weaknesses in each other’s characters over coffee and toast. Sofia does the more overt damage, cracking Francis’ “tough broad” armor with a question about the deaths of her sons. But Francis probably lands the more long-lasting hits by reminding Sofia that a Falcone is still a Falcone, no matter what she calls herself—compounded when the ascendant mob boss is informed by the eternally cow-eyed Dr. Rush that her young cousin Gia might be talking to the police. The Penguin is rarely subtle, which is why Milioti’s performance, which is unafraid to be overtly cartoonish when Sofia embraces one of her various public masks, gels with it so well. Dressed like a wicked stepmother, and tactically deploying the language of familial love, Milioti gives a much better Carmine Falcone impression here than Mark Strong managed back in episode four, gaslighting Gia back into silence. But Sofia remains a compelling protagonist in this series—and I can’t help but think of her in those terms—because the show itself is still deeply invested in her humanity, as awful and broken as it is. Watching her, from the depths of a panic attack, ultimately reject her father’s legacy makes for the most thrilling moment of the episode. Sofia Gigante doesn’t want to be a mob boss, a drug kingpin, a Gotham power broker. She wants only two things: freedom and to make Oswald Cobb suffer.

The way that vengeance plays out, meanwhile, reminds me that The Penguin is pretty much always a better character piece than it is a crime show. I ask sincerely: Was there a single person in the audience who genuinely thought Sofia was in the back of that SUV or that there was anything lurking in its trunk except a big ol’ bomb? (I find myself especially annoyed at the cut of Sofia’s car door opening at the same moment Oz checks the car, an editing choice that I can only receive as “smug.”) After Oz survives by hiding himself in the exact tunnel where he slaughtered his brothers—I mentioned before about the subtlety, right?—he emerges out of being nigh-literally buried alive in his own trauma right back into a Gotham returned to a war-zone state. (So much for being good for Crown Point, eh, Oz?) Two seconds later, Sofia’s pet detective clubs him in the face, and that’s our finale all set up.

And it’s one that I am, despite my frequent grousing about on-the-nose choices and the occasional lazy performance, finding myself genuinely excited for. Excepting flashbacks, The Penguin has kept Oz and Sofia separated from each other for four full episodes at this point, after making a strong case for them being the most electric pairing on the show. Farrell, more than anybody else in this series, feeds off his scene partners, so the thought of these two facing off once and for all, possibly with Francis on the sidelines to roil things up, is genuinely thrilling. But that’s the future; for now, let me dip back to the past, to the real version of that supposedly heartwarming anecdote Oz relayed to Sofia back in episode two, where his mom took him to a jazz club to overcome her grief. Revealed to the cameras, it’s a much more chilling sight: a broken woman dressed up like a strong one, implanting one whole TV show’s worth of pathologies into her son’s head in one fell swoop. As played by White and The Deuce‘s Emily Meade (who’s quite good tonight at the younger Francis), it ably builds on much of the queasy energy that’s underscored so many of the scenes between Oz and his mom: grotesque, a bit over the top, and maybe even a little sweet—not unlike The Penguin itself.

Stray observations

• • Sofia and her goons take Francis to the same club where Oz and his mom danced, because vengeful gangsters and TV writers often have very similar narrative impulses.
• • The episode title comes from Oz’s favorite Fred Astaire flick as a child, Top Hat, which he and Francis watch while his brothers suffer their death-by-voiceover.
• • The Penguin scores a little Scorsese cred-by-association by casting The Irishman and Killers Of The Flower Moon‘s Louis Cancelmi as Rex Calabrese, the mobster Oz is always waxing nostalgic for.
• • Vic’s only in the episode long enough to catch one clunker of a line—”Fuck your guilt!”—before vanishing, presumably so he can mount some kind of rescue next week.
• • “So, you two bring me all the way out here to feed me toast, or are you gonna kill me?”
• • It’s genuinely hard to note all the good lines in the Sofia/Francis scene because it’s absolutely magnetic TV. I hesitated to pause and jot something down because it’d kill the flow.
• • Really, The Penguin? A boiling kettle as a metaphor for a character starting to crack?
• • I’m interested to see whether Rush’s EMDR session with Francis ends up producing anything meaty for the finale. He’s a character heavy in portent who hasn’t actually done anything yet.
• • Oz, as ever, finds a weak point in the Gigante-Maroni alliance, provoking Sal into attacking him when Sofia’s goons are under orders to keep Cobb alive.
• • Farrell’s “The fuck?!” when Sal up and dies on him in the middle of their fight is genuinely good.
• • Oz, buddy, you’ve got a 20-second countdown: You can’t toss one “Hey, a big bomb!” over your shoulder on the way out?