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This Penguin article contains spoilers.
Oz Cobb is now in full descent into villainy in The Penguin. While he was already an established mobster when we first met Colin Farrell’s wise-cracking waddler in 2022’s The Batman, Lauren LeFranc’s spinoff series has more fully fleshed out the character’s backstory. In fact, this week’s episode, titled “Top Hat,” gave Cobb a brand-new origin story. With it, the show’s penultimate episode gave the Penguin his most villainous turn yet.
Despite Oz being a slippery character who’s only seemingly out for himself, The Penguin has established a complicated but loving relationship with his mother. Deirdre O’Connell has brilliantly played Francis Cobb, and in episode 7, The Penguin jumped back in time to reveal what happened to her other sons, Oz’s brothers. Earlier in the series, Oz said that “the city took them,” while a confused Francis had previously mentioned her other sons as part of her worsening dementia.
In the comics, Esther Cobblepot was Oswald’s overprotective mother. Unlike in The Penguin, Oswald was her youngest son, with comic book Penguin having three older brothers called Jason, Robert, and William. “Top Hat” takes things in a different direction, with a young Oz being the jealous middle brother of Jack and Benny. When Sofia Gigante (Cristin Milioti) probed a confused Francis using the methods of Dr. Rush (Theo Rossi), she finally learned what happened to Oz’s brothers.
After revealing that Oz’s limp comes from a “bum leg” as a kid rather than an accident as an adult, things take a tragic turn when his brothers hide from him in an overflow tunnel that’s only accessible by a ladder. A vengeful Oz locks them inside, saying “Have fun getting out”. While it’s ambiguous about whether he meant to leave them there, Jack and Benny drown after a night of heavy rainfall. Meanwhile, Oz goes home to watch 1935’s Top Hat with his mother and gets all her attention by lying that his brothers have gone to watch Beetlejuice. It shows that even as a child, Oz was willing to do horrible things in his quest to reach the top.
It’s also revealed that Oz was ambitious from a young age and idolized the gangster Rex Calabrese (Louis Cancelmi). Francis did some work for Calabrese, and while there’s an unconfirmed theory that the gangster was actually Oz’s father, the fact that Jack tried to keep Oz away from Rex suggests there could be more to this. As for the fate of Oz’s brothers, Farrell told RadioTimes.com it’s a “cornerstone” moment that makes him the disillusioned monster we see today: “I understood it and was horrified by it. I think he washes his hands of it totally, and has convinced himself that it didn’t happen the way it did. It’s that grave. But it’s in there somewhere—the darkness. And it was there at that age, that’s the thing.”
The twist with Oz’s brothers takes a more morbid turn when you realize his base of operations running his Bliss empire in an abandoned trolley station is down in the sewers where he let his brothers die. When Oz first went down there with Vic (Rhenzy Feliz) in episode 5, he stopped by the very door that his brothers died behind. There’s a sense of irony that the door Oz used to lock up his brothers is the one that saves his life when Sofia tries to blow up his lair at the end of the episode. The latest episode also shows Oz finding the trolley coin which we saw was part of Francis’ belongings in episode 5.
Farrell says that LeFranc wanted to explore the idea of monsters being created by their family and situation. Francis begging a young Oz to give her a better life while dancing at Monroe’s Jazz Club shows how she’s also helped push him down this dark path. Whether Sofia will use Francis as leverage to try and topple Oz, we know he’s at least surviving through to the events of The Batman Part II. This suggests Oz will be victorious in climbing Gotham’s criminal ladder, but for everyone else, it’s not looking good.
The Penguin has been littered with foreshadowing and easter eggs, so with Top Hat being his favorite movie, will we see Farrell’s Cobb getting a more “classic” Penguin look and wearing a top hat in the finale? We’ll find out soon enough.
The post The Penguin Brothers Twist Just Made Oz’s Villain Story Way Darker appeared first on Den of Geek.
