Why is The Penguin the most boring part of The Penguin?

Why does so much of “Gold Summit,” The Penguin’s sixth installment, make for genuinely riveting, tense television—until Oswald Cobb opens his mouth at the end? We’ve been told, again and again, that this awful little man’s primary talent is a gift for gab, for shaping the world around him by talking. Why doesn’t he ever sound like he believes his own bullshit? Why isn’t he a good enough con man to get those of us watching from the audience hooked on the con? Why is The Penguin the hole in The Penguin’s heart? 

These thoughts arriving in the aftermath of what is, ironically, probably the show’s best episode to date, largely on the strength of tossing its characters (including Cobb!) into scenes, two-by-two, that play firmly to their strengths. Unsurprisingly, two of the best of these two-handers feature Cristin Milioti: first, a moment of tenuous but building trust between her Sofia and Clancy Brown’s Sal Maroni and then, a far more heart-in-throat confrontation between Sofia and Oz’s “main girl,” Eve. 

As the show itself notes, this is the first time we’re seeing Carmen Ejogo’s character operating away from Cobb’s desperately stroke-needy ego, and it’s a fascinating showcase of calculation and steel. Eve knows she probably isn’t getting out of this conversation alive—even if Sofia wasn’t “The Hangman,” complete with a few new trussed up bodies in her wake, Eve still helped Oz cover up Alberto’s death—but she refuses to plead or even bargain. As in the earlier scene with Brown, meanwhile, Milioti shows that she’s still in touch with Sofia’s wounded human side, despite all the mass murders and BDSM power play she’s been having fun with lately. That’s how she “beats” Eve, in the end, getting her to give up Oz’s hiding spot: by revealing that underneath the flashy clothes, flashy violence, flashy armor and camouflage, Sofia Gigante is still also a woman who was horrifically used by the men in her life—including, pointedly, one Mr. Oz Cobb—so that they could carry on covering up all the other awful stuff they’ve been doing to women along the way. Even as her character gets increasingly (and enjoyably) cartoonish at the margins, Milioti can still get real power out of asking, “You still think I’m The Hangman?” It’s the central injustice of Sofia’s life, and she makes the viewer, and Eve, feel the hit.

As for Oz himself, we find him surprisingly ascendant this week, the show blithely skipping over however much time and work it took to transition the ruined trolley tunnels we ended in last time into a working, vibrant growth operation for Bliss. We won’t begrudge The Penguin for skipping over the boring bits—last week’s miserabilism in this plot-line was part of what made it a slog—especially if it means our main character is being a bit more dynamic this time around. Fat on onrushing success, we see Oz embracing his better delusions here—of being a good boss, a good son, a good man of his community—even managing to help the people of disaster-wrecked Crown Point by getting their lights and heat turned back on by strong-arming a city councilman. Colin Farrell, like everyone else in the show, benefits from the episode’s focus, whether he’s sharing warm moments with Rhenzy Feliz’s Vic or having a harrowing—if stock—conversation with his mom about her rapidly deteriorating mind.

(Harrowing, if stock, remains the best descriptor for the entire “Oz and his mom” plot-line, meanwhile, despite genuinely good work from both Farrell and Deidre O’Connell. O’Connell, especially, plays Francis Cobb’s confusion, her anger, her humor, and her wounded dignity with complete believability, whether partnered with Farrell or Feliz. It’s just that this is a very familiar story, from the ways his mom’s love is at the root of both Oz’s best and worst impulses to the inevitability of him going full-on monster the moment that she dies. It’s the lack of surprises in these scenes that rankles.) 

Where Farrell, and the script, genuinely can’t hack it, though, comes in the episode’s titular scene, a sit-down between all of Gotham’s minor gangsters meant to help them unseat the Gigante/Maroni alliance. We’re teed up to expect some grand twist or flourish from Oz, some master plan. Instead, we watch as Cobb—seated in a truck bed, drinking a beer—goes into yet another iteration of spin mode, spewing bullshit on François Chau and other assembled mobsters about the power of underdogs banding together to take down the rich and powerful. And maybe this would have worked on us, as it ultimately does on the characters, if we hadn’t seen Oz lie his way through so many confrontations already. One of the major problems of making your main character a pathological liar, turns out, is that it makes it extremely hard to invest in anything he says. (And it makes anyone listening to him seem like an idiotic dupe.) Farrell, who might be laboring harder under his accent than his makeup this week, tries his best to sell it, but we’ve seen pretty much the entirety of the tricks this character can do at this point. (Over-the-top-yelling! Quite, self-effacing reflection. Heavy squint. Repeat.) He’s out of ways to surprise us, apparently, and that means this week’s big climax arrives like a chunk of lead.

It’s possible, on reflection, that this is The Penguin operating as it’s intended to: a tense, quick-moving drama that milks genuine unease out of the damaged personalities at its core. (The episode’s most emotionally unsettling moment has nothing to do with mob shenanigans or implied threats, and comes instead as Oz and Vic get into a queasy sibling rivalry about how best to keep Francis happy.) But it continues to fail to make its case that The Penguin himself is a figure worthy of this level of TV scrutiny. Interesting things happen here, interesting scenes are created, interesting performances deployed. But is this an interesting story? Jury’s still out, which is rough news with just two episodes left to go.

Stray observations

• • Ah, voiceover: the last resort of the exposition-hungry scoundrel. 
• • It’s fascinating to watch Sofia go from full villain-power mode as she, uh, “finishes up” with Dr. Rush, before becoming much more vulnerable in the face of Sal’s heartbroken paternalism. 
• • “You don’t talk about my brother.” We can quibble about some of Farrell’s choices, but he can still project genuine menace when the script calls for it. 
• • “Hanging and the pinkie? Jesus, Sofia, pick a fucking lane.”
• • I skipped over this plot-line in the recap, so here is the grand culmination of the Squid Saga: He tries to force his way into the Bliss operation, Vic tries to buy him off, and Squid basically forces Vic to murder him in cold blood. It’s one more trauma on the pile but also another storyline where you could infer every single beat from its first moment without needing to actually watch it.
• • It’s genuinely sad when it seemed like Jessie Pinnick’s Roxy was betraying Eve—and it’s a small relief when it turns out it was on her boss’ orders.
• • “You think you can just raw-dog the people of Gotham with an invisible dick?” 
• • Oz telling the councilman how to back out of the parking space was a cute touch. This show’s better when it lets Farrell be funny.
• • This feels slightly weird to note, but does it look to anyone else like this episode played up some physical/facial similarities between Eve and Francis? This series loves its Oedipal overtones, after all. 
• • Speaking of: At first, I worried the episode would end with Oz walking in on Vic and Francis dancing, causing some sort of burst of bizarrely jealous violence to break out. Instead, we get a more conventional cliffhanger: Sofia sneaking in with a crowbar to discover one last Oz Cobb lie.