‘The Penguin’ Season Finale Twists Explained by Creator Lauren LeFranc
[This story contains major spoilers from the finals of The Penguin.]
HBO’s The Penguin concluded its first (but almost certainly, not last) season tonight, with Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb defeating his enemies at an enormous cost. The eighth episode saw Cobb return Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) to Arkham Asylum, imprison his stroke-addled mother (Deirdre O’Connell), and, most devastatingly, murder his admiring young mentee, Victor (Rhenzy Feliz).
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Showrunner Lauren LeFranc, who previously took The Hollywood Reporter through her steps to create the series, returns to discuss the biggest twists from the The Penguin‘s seventh and eighth episodes — and what the future might hold.
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Before we get to my finale questions, I wanted to ask about episode seven: The flashback sequence where Oz killed his brothers was so disturbing. It was sort of like you were sitting around the writers room and wondering, “What could inspire Oz to get a top hat? Here’s the most disturbing possible reason…”
I’m always looking to see if something can be more emotional or more disturbing because you want to make people feel a certain way. It was important to more deeply understand Oz as a character and what makes him tick. I wanted to pay homage to the previous iterations of the Penguin, and our Oz is not the type of guy to wear a top hat and monocle. But I thought about the movie Top Hat, where all these men are wearing the full penguin suit and dancing. I could imagine Oz as a kid watching that and being fascinated and aspiring to that. He loves old movies because of his mother and his drive is so connected to seeking his mother’s love.
He’s watching the rain, but he also turns around to look at the door and we never see his reaction to learning his brothers are dead. So I was wondering, is he fully aware that he’s actually killing them in that moment? Or does he just not care and is thinking about how he gets a nice evening alone with mom?
Oz is a very impulsive character. In his first scene, he didn’t plan to kill Alberto Falcone that night, right? It was because he was being laughed at and disrespected, and that’s a trigger for him. I don’t think he created a scenario where he would kill his brothers, or let them die. But it doesn’t matter because it’s just as violent to let your impulsivity control you and then to follow through. The more terrible action is the waiting. He has opportunity after opportunity to say something to tell his mom, “Hey, they’re down there and we should go get them.” He never does, and that’s what makes him so terrible and so despicable. So I think he knows definitively what he’s doing, but he’s inside with his mom. It’s warm and cozy. This is everything he wanted.
In the finale flashback, when Oz starts making his mom promises in the club about how he’s going to take care of her, does he know what she’s planning? Or do his — and this is what I was assuming — survival instincts send up a little signal flare that he needs to perform here and soothe her a bit?
I think it is more the latter. He previously told Sofia a story about how his mom didn’t get out of bed for weeks after his brothers died. He feels like he’s lost his mother, in a way. He can feel she’s detached, and he has to win back her attention and assure her it’s okay. That it’s actually it’s better now. It’s easier because she won’t have to feed as many mouths.
And I love that later with Sofia, he reverted again to being her driver again — under very different circumstances. That sequence was shot amazingly. Sofia seems so wiped out and resigned. Was a part of her disappointed when she wasn’t shot?
She would’ve liked to have won the day. I think she had everything at her fingertips, and yet her biggest crutch was her rage and anger towards Oz. If she was able to let that go, she might’ve had a better and freer life. And I think when she realizes that Oz double crossed her, there’s a minimal amount of respect there for him. She knows on that drive she’s going to die tonight by this man’s hand. But she does not anticipate at all that the greater death would be bringing her back to Arkham, which is what Oz does to her.
Did you ever consider having her die in the show, or was she always going to survive? To me, she’s too terrific of an addition to this world to kill off, at least this soon.
I thought about it. I hope some people wanted Sofia to beat Oz because Oz is a villain, and at the end of the day, we should have mixed feelings about the fact that he achieves what he achieves at the cost of all these other people’s lives. To me, for Sofia, the greater death is going back to Arkham after she experienced freedom and saw the potential of what she could have. To me, this is the more tragic way for things to end for her [Interestingly, Colin Farrell disagrees with LeFranc on this point]. I wanted her to have a little inkling of hope at the end in the finale, as well, because I think she deserves that much.
You admittedly got me with Oz killing Victor. I did not see that coming until seconds before. What made that decision right. Would he still have killed him if Vic hadn’t called Oz “family”?
That’s a great question and I’m so glad that I got you. When you first meet Victor, you think, “This kid isn’t going to last very long.” And he doesn’t. In a way, he shouldn’t have survived the pilot. I think Oz kills Victor because Victor has seen him at his most vulnerable and because Victor really cares about him and loves him — and because Victor does view him as family. He learned something from how desperate he was when his mother was threatened. I think Oz believes that for him to achieve the next level of power, he cannot have weakness. And he views love and affection and family as weak.
Everybody either got their worst, or second-worst, possible outcome. Vic is dead. Sofia’s back in Arkham. The last thing Oz’s mom said to him was that she hated him, and she’s now trapped in this perpetual hell. So basically, The Penguin won the crime boss game at the expense of ruining as many lives as possible.
And losing his humanity, or any form of humanity, that he had. That was my goal. And my pitch really from day one is this is a “rise to power” story. But it needs to feel like there was a cost to the choices he made and to what he achieved. And he really is living in his own delusion. He’s chosen to keep his mother alive. He’s dancing with Eve who’s dressed as his mother. And he’s creating his own narrative and his own world of what is acceptable — which, I think, is unfortunately strikingly relevant to what a lot of people in our world are doing themselves in positions of power.
This show is billed as a limited series, but is it still? On one hand, I don’t want more because it was done so well and it ended right. On the other hand, it was so damn good, and its hard to imagine it just ending. So what’s the latest on that?
My task was to make a bridge between the The Batman and The Batman: Part II. I love all these characters, and it is been so much fun writing all of them, and it’s such an engaging world. There are endless stories you could tell in this world. I don’t think anything should continue if there are not better stories to tell, or if you can’t one up yourself creatively. And so I think the only way for something like this to continue is if you feel like you can tell just as rich of a story, if not richer.
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All of The Penguin episodes are now streaming on Max. Read THR‘s post-finale interview with Colin Farrell.
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