The Penguin finally gives Vic something to do

We open trapped in the land of dramatic irony—a.k.a., the past, a.k.a., the last really good day of Victor Aguilar’s life. As he kisses his girlfriend, spends warm moments with his family, waxes loving about his neighborhood, we know exactly how doomed this all is. Those looming shots of the Gotham seawall would make it obvious, even if the mentions of Bella Reál’s big election win party didn’t. Tonight, The Riddler is going to make some trenchant points about class inequality in the most fucked-up way possible, and he’s going to blow up Victor Aguilar’s life in the process. 

In reckoning with the bombing, The Penguin—three episodes in—makes its first major contributions to The Batman canon. In the film, the devastation wrought by the explosions felt nearly abstract, overshadowed by the battle against Riddler’s goons trying to murder Reál. Here, it feels visceral and genuinely horrifying: The camera captures exactly how bad it is to be on the ground floor for what seems to be Gotham’s first act of true supervillainy, and it sweeps Victor right alongside it in an impressive bit of effects work, fire and water swiftly disassembling nearly everything he loves. I talked, in my previous two reviews of the show, about how this character has been the weak leg of the tripod of our three main characters—more thanks to the writing than Rhenzy Feliz’s performance, which is doing the best with what he’s got—and, well, he still is. (Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti are doing some amazing work this week.) But at least it’s a more equitable split this time, as the show powerfully illustrates how much this kid lost in a single bad day and how it continues to shape his decisions.

Meanwhile, Oz and Sofia are trapped in an odd, fascinating little dance, as two people with a million reasons not to trust each other are forced together anyway in service of mutual gain. At least, that’s the motivation on Oz’s part: Once we get a look at her operation for the fabled new drug (which Cobb, in a moment of quick-talking hucksterism, names Bliss), we get a glimpse of Sofia as not just someone making Mafia power moves but a true believer in the drug’s power. As Sofia lays out to the mob boss they ultimately sell the drug to: In a world of nihilistic misery, where everything can be taken from you, why not build a better opiate for the masses? We don’t know what Sofia wants yet, deep down. (She has some very ominous facial expressions every time someone describes Bliss as merely a “party drug.”) But there’s an almost religious reverence that Milioti brings to her treatment of the drug that portends something larger than just another, bigger high.

The episode’s best scenes, though, focus on her relationship with Oz, as the two of them attempt to line up distribution for their drug through his “friends” in Chinese organized crime. If Sofia is a question mark in this partnership, Oz is a giant exclamation point at the end of the words “Do not trust”: Sofia watches him spin lie after lie in his efforts to get himself (and by extension, her) a little leverage, and we watch Milioti play out the push-and-pull of his aura of revulsion and charm in real time. She likes Oz, on some level—you can see her get an actual kick out of his fast-talk, his hustle, his guileless brand of guile. But she’s also been stung by this particular scorpion before.

It culminates in the closest thing this show can get to a heart-to-heart, where Cobb finally finds the lever he’s been looking for with her the whole time: an honest declaration that he doesn’t regret getting her sent to Arkham because it got him a little higher on the pile. He allows her to glimpse behind one of his masks. But it’s an odd thing about Colin Farrell’s performance here: He’s so good at selling Cobb’s various lies that it’s almost to the detriment of the character. If everything he says is convincing bullshit, then it gets harder and harder to parse out which parts you can actually put stock in as a viewer. In this way, The Penguin keeps us grounded in Sofia’s perspective more often than not. (Notice now many times in this episode the camera focuses on her face while he’s the one who talks.) She might have her issues, and might ultimately be the more dangerous of the pair, but at least we can trust when she looks remorseful, angry, or sincere.

In the meantime, it’s best to just enjoy the fun of their double act, with the pair falling into a rhythm of patter that speaks to their long association (and whatever intimacy was burnt to ash when Oz betrayed her to her dad, in a way that the show still hasn’t let us in on). Among its pleasures, The Penguin knows the joys of letting a con-man con, whether it’s Cobb putting a paternal hard sell on Victor over a fancy lunch, or successfully intimidating Johnny Vitti into helping him set up a meeting with Chinese leader François Chau. It also illustrates the limits of his flavor of sweaty, desperate manipulation: When it’s time to seal the deal, it’s Sofia, the True Believer, who clinches the sale. It’s the scariest thing about The Penguin, so far, in this extended look at his character: Whether it’s respect, money, survival, whatever, he’s not interested in any specific goal the way his boss/partner is. He just wants more.

That same theme runs throughout the weaker leg of the tripod this week, as Victor ultimately decides he’d rather stay in Gotham and try to carve out a life of excess for himself than face his demons and leave the city with his girlfriend Graciela (Anire Kim Amoda). There are individual moments that work here, most especially his final confrontation with Oz in the bathroom of the Chinese club, Feliz letting out some of the rage and fear kicking around in the character’s head to shout his boss/captor down. But his trauma is also treated with a pretty heavy hand, as his mid-club panic attack takes the form of blipping images and racing sounds in a way that feels just a little too boilerplate. (Compare it to—and no, we weren’t expecting to put these two projects into conversation with each other either, but here we are—the panic attack from this summer’s Inside Out 2, which feels like a much more elegant way of illustrating how thoughts and feelings like these can go spiraling self-destructively out of control without having to do goofball jitter cuts to bodies being washed away.) At the same time, it feels like Victor’s motivations never come fully into focus: In the end, it feels less like he rejects Graciela’s offer of escape for organic reasons than because he’s the third-billed cast member of this TV show—and it still has five more episodes to go.

We end, then, on another moment of Cobb-standard triumph giving way to pants-shitting panic: the Maronis attack Oz and Sofia, and Victor just barely saves his boss, killing one of the goons in the process. (Cobb immediately orders Victor to leave Sofia to die, just to remind you why all these people are constantly telling you not to trust this asshole when the chips are down.) Vic looks terrified, having just entered this mob war in earnest; Cobb, meanwhile, is ecstatic. “We’re in it now, Vic!” he crows, happy to have stolen one more day from the world. “We’re in it now!”

Stray observations

• • We get to briefly see Calvin, who Victor will later try to steal hubcaps with—and who will then be shot in the head by Sofia—in the opening flashback.
• • This week, the penguin nose in the logo is directly contrasted with Vic’s face.
• • “Sixty years ago, two Sicilians jizzed all over the toe of that boot, now I’ve got three dozen Falcones breathing down my neck.”
• • Turns out Bliss comes from Arkham and grows on mushrooms. (Also, Sofia’s personal chemist, played by Tyler Bunch, a.k.a. Elmo’s dad from Sesame Street, has fun hippie energy.)
• • It sometimes feels like The Penguin is ticking down lists of more beloved crime shows it’s trying to emulate: Between the con-man double act, and the impromptu vehicular homicide rescue, the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul vibes were strong tonight.
• • “Did you print this out yourself?” Milioti can put a fantastic amount of withering scorn on very basic lines.
• • Victor, planning out how to break up with Oz in the most suicidal way possible: “You know I’m not a rat, right?”
• • He also gets one of those moments you can imagine Oz himself telling about his younger days, successfully bribing a corrupt Gotham cop into leaving him (and the drug stash) alone.
• • Typical Oz double standard: protecting Vic when the waiter at a fancy restaurant completes his stutter—and then doing the exact same thing later when he’s pissed off. 
• • The episode skips over whatever leverage Oz has over Luca’s wife to get her to set up Vitti. It feels like narrative convenience.
• • Milioti and Farrell are too damn fun when Sofia and Oz fall into partners-in-crime mode. “Sounds pretty good!” 
• • Comics Corner: I tried, unsuccessfully, to find Victor’s cellphone-screen art out in the real world, but it doesn’t look like it comes from any existing comics. Meanwhile, I re-read The Long Halloween, which is one of the ur-texts for both Nolan’s Batman films and The Batman, this week. It’s interesting to see how different its depictions of characters like Alberto, Sofia, and Johnny are.
• • “I don’t much care who our sales reps are.”
• • Oz putting a gun to Victor’s head when he realizes he makes him feel like a hostage is raising a lot of questions already answered by the gun pressed up against his head.