Recap: ‘The Penguin’ Episode 1 Kick-Starts A Gripping Mob Drama

The Penguin is a sequel to The Batman, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s the furthest thing from a superhero show you could imagine. Episode 1, “After Hours”, contains nary a mention of the caped crusader and is all the better for it. Matt Reeves’s Nirvana-tinged redo of Se7en gives way to a straight-up mob drama with impeccable performances and thoughtful characterization.

It’s worth mentioning out of the gate that Colin Farrell, in full makeup and prosthetics, is impeccable in this. Every scene he has – and his Oz Cobb, which the show is bizarrely insistent on calling its title character, dominates the premiere – is a reminder of this. I don’t want to mention it constantly and risk sounding like a broken record, so I’m getting it out of the way now. Honestly, he’s great.

And the show’s plot setup, spinning out of a power vacuum left behind by the events of the feature film, allow ample space to dig into this very grounded take on one of Batman’s most iconic rogues. Oz has the usual affectations – the limp, the nose, etc. – but a coiled resentment that gives his yearning for power and respect a new contour.

With Carmine Falcone dead, his strung-out son Alberto is due to take over his criminal empire. But within five minutes of The Penguin Episode 1 Alberto’s dead, having been shot by Oz for insulting him. It’s an impulsive reaction to mockery, something that Oz has clearly been grappling with for a lifetime, but it’s also a power play. With Carmine and his immediate successor gone, Oz finally has the opportunity to rise to the top of Gotham’s criminal underworld himself.

To this end Oz enlists the reluctant services of Vic, a stammering youth played by The Runaways’ Rhenzy Feliz, who Oz interrupts while he’s trying to steal parts from his ostentatious plum Maserati. This lightly funny double-act is the show’s brightest idea, because it simultaneously helps to reminds us that Oz is a villain – he blackmails Vic into helping him dispose of Alberto’s body, and then strongly considers killing him – while also showing a softer side to the villain, who mostly seems to just need a friend.

Cristin Milioti and Colin Farrell in The Penguin | Image via HBO

He won’t find one in Sofia Falcone, Alberto’s sister, who is freshly released from Arkham Asylum and intuits immediately that Oz had something to do with her brother’s disappearance. Pretty quickly she has Oz naked and tied to a chair while a goon tries to lop off his arm with razor wire, but Oz is smarter than most people assume, which is the idea that The Penguin is clearly going to hinge on.

For instance, he escapes this scene by using Vic to engineer a distraction that seemingly exonerates him as Alberto’s killer. With Alberto’s body missing its pinky finger, Sofia’s suspicions should turn towards Salvatore Maroni, Carmine’s imprisoned rival. Alberto used to wear Maroni’s ring, which he inherited from his father who stole it from Maroni, on that same finger. Earlier in the episode, Oz had returned the ring to Maroni to prove his usefulness is being underestimated. It’s such a tidy cascade of events that it suggests Oz might be a much more cerebral protagonist than anyone suspected.

But it’s perhaps his interiority that will be most intriguing to unpack. In The Penguin Episode 1 we’re introduced to his mother, Francis (Dierdre O’Connell), who far from chastising him for impulsively killing a mob boss reassures him that now is his time to seize power for himself. Her performance is limned by the suggestion of dementia, which makes it difficult to tell how much of her advice is coming from a sound mind, but she implies, strongly, that the disrespect Oz has suffered has been shouldered by the whole family, and that it’s about time things changed.

Will they? Well, that remains to be seen, but thus far Oz has made a pretty solid case for himself being a real player in Gotham’s underworld. And this Gotham – thrown into flux by the Riddler’s detonation of the seawall in The Batman – feels like the kind of place that suits him.