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This Penguin review contains spoilers.
“We’re in it now, Vic!” Oz Cobb shouts to his sidekick Victor at the end of The Penguin‘s third episode, “Bliss.” The line provides symmetry to the opening of the episode, in which we meet Victor Agular’s family, just hours before they all die in the explosions and flooding the Riddler caused in The Batman.
Vic takes center stage in “Bliss,” establishing him as more than just a kid caught in Oz’s chaotic orbit and into someone who chooses to follow in Cobb’s footsteps. But instead of making Vic more important, writer Noelle Valdivia and director Craig Zobel (in the last of three episodes he helms this season) in fact underscore the central problem with the show.
Vic’s plight is familiar to anyone who’s watched any gangster movies. He’s smart and hard-working, exactly the type of person whom the American Dream claims to be all about. He loves his family, whom we meet cooking dinner in their small Gotham apartment, and has a sweet girlfriend. But that’s not enough to satisfy Victor, who believes his father is being taken advantage of by his employer. When his father Juan brushes aside Vic’s suggestion that he press for a raise at work, Vic counters, “You act like wanting more is a bad thing.” And so, in the same way that Oz sees himself in Vic, Vic sees himself in Oz, a man who refuses to be pushed around and gets what he knows is his.
That dynamic plays out in the episode’s best scene, a confrontation that occurs in a fancy restaurant. After Oz barks out his order, Vic takes his turn, but his stutter prevents him from getting out the words. When the waiter finishes Vic’s sentence, Oz snaps, “Don’t do that. The man is speaking.” He then insists that the waiter pause for Vic to state his desires on his own.
It’s a powerful moment, one in which Colin Farrell‘s sometimes too big portrayal leaves room for Vic’s actor Rhenzy Feliz to work. Feliz sells the mixture of fear and confidence as he makes his order, feeding off Oz’s encouragement.
But instead of just letting the scene speak for itself, Valdivia and Zobel allow Oz to continue into the heavy-handed. He delivers a diatribe about taking what’s yours and never waiting for anyone else to give you respect. True, these are Oz’s mantra and the source of his bond with Vic. But it’s also the same thing that Oz has said in the two previous episodes, something that the waiter confrontation already made clear.
Ironically, Oz speech about confidence underscores a lack of confidence in The Penguin. The show was met with skepticism from the beginning, a spin-off reeking of Warner Brothers Discovery‘s need to create more “content” based on recognizable IP instead of a desire to explore one of Batman‘s oldest enemies. Moreover, it had to follow the realism of the Matt Reeves movie, despite choosing that film’s most colorful and cartoonish character as a lead.
Three episodes in, The Penguin seems desperate to be taken seriously as a character-rich crime drama, not a show about a laughable guy who stymies Batman and Robin with bird-themed crimes. That desperation is never more clear than it is in “Bliss,” with its characters who declare the show’s themes in plain dialogue and dramatic beats borrowed from other, more familiar works.
The problems in the Vic storyline are accentuated by the episode’s delightful B-plot, which finally puts Oz and Sofia on the same team. The pair of shifty schemers are ready to move Alberto’s heightened version of Drop, called “Bliss,” onto the streets. Because they’re playing against Luca and the current heads of the Falcone family (with Oz playing against the Maronis as well), they need to distribute through Gotham’s Triads. However, the Triads have one requirement: that Johnny Vitti, Luca’s right-hand man and sworn enemy of Sofia and Oz, call them personally to request help.
What follows is another fun caper sequence, in which Sofia and Oz blackmail Vitti by threatening to expose his affair with Luca’s wife. Unlike the previous episode, “Inside Man,” in which the pleasure came from watching Oz navigate a house full of enemies and dying informant, the fun here comes from the characters’ utter disrespect for one another.
Pushed to the limit, Vitti can finally speak freely about Oz and Sofia, pushing their buttons by calling the latter a psycho and the former a peon. To Farrell’s credit, it’s not clear if Oz breaks and starts to literally shove a phone down Vitti’s throat because he’s lost control or if he’s trying to perform loyalty to Sofia. Likewise, Sofia hangs back and lets her piercing eyes dart around, possibly because she’s impressed by Oz’s devotion or perhaps because she sees through him.
As always, Oz and Sofia’s plotting strikes the right balance for The Penguin. The two are just two steps away from rubbing their hands and cackling as they plot, an updated version of Burgess Meredith and Julie Newmar’s take on Batman villains in 1966. No, they aren’t as corny as that campy pair, but Oz and Sofia feel like they exist in a world with Batman and the Riddler, even if it’s Matt Reeves’s broody weirdo Batman. They feel like they exist in their own world and aren’t borrowing signifiers from other media.
Which makes “Bliss” all the more irritating when it turns away from the duo back to Vic’s dilemma. There’s very little to Vic’s story that we haven’t already seen in better gangster stories, from Scarface and Goodfellas to New Jack City and American Me. Unlike Vic and Oz taking what others have stolen from them, “Bliss” takes from these and other narratives, hoping to infuse the episode with gravitas and drama it does not have time to develop, just like The Penguin has done when cribbing from The Sopranos for Oz’s dynamic with his mother.
Yet, for all its insistence upon aping other dramas, dramas that don’t have to worry about Batman and the Riddler, “Bliss” does end with Oz and Vic racing away from a crime scene in the Penguin’s purple car, shouting “We’re in it now!” Maybe, now The Penguin has finished trying to build pathos by pretending to be something other than it is. Maybe, the show is ready to accept that it’s a Batman spinoff about supervillains in Gotham City. Maybe it’s ready to be in it now.
The Penguin airs on HBO and Max at 9 pm EST on Sundays.
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