The Ending Of ‘The Penguin’ Makes Oz One Of The Best Batman Villains Ever

The great achievement of The Penguin is that it has somehow managed to turn a perennial B-league second-stringer into – and I mean this – one of the best Batman villains ever. And that’s quite a feat. Oz Cobblepot – or just Oz Cobb, as this version keeps insisting – has always been instantly recognizable, partly because he’s ridiculous. Not in Episode 8, “A Great or Little Thing”. Here in the season finale, he’s terrifying, psychotic, and truly evil. In its ending, the HBO show delivers a legitimate and serious threat to Matt Reeves’ Batman, just in time to remember that the Caped Crusader exists.

All told, it’s a pretty remarkable episode of television to cap off an unnecessarily good series – one of, I think it’s fair to say, the best Batman stories ever, which is amazing considering Batman isn’t in it. Naturally, there’s a lot to discuss, so let’s go over the details and idly speculate about how all this might matter to Season 2 of this show and the next Reeves Batman movie.

Oz Is A Monster And His Mother Has Always Known It

Like the penultimate episode, “A Great or Little Thing” returns briefly to Oz’s childhood. In a neat touch, Dr. Rush is guiding Francis through this recollection, so it recasts Emily Meade, who plays the younger version of the character, with Deirdre O’Connell. This is a deep, dark memory she has kept buried for a long time.

It goes like this – Francis always knew that Oz had killed his brothers. She had found a flashlight in his coat. She knew he was there when they died, and based on the police telling her they had to pry the overflow tunnel’s door open, she knows he locked them in. Rex Calabrese gave her two options, essentially. She could look the other way and allow Rex to unlock Oz’s true potential as a criminal, or she could get Rex to murder him, which is what she planned to do when she took Oz out dancing at Monroe’s.

This is why the place is significant, and why Oz wakes up there in the present day, a hostage like his mother, of Sofia Falcone. For her own reasons, none of them pleasant, Sofia wants Oz to confess to killing his brothers in front of Francis, threatening to lop off her fingers with a cigar cutter if he doesn’t comply. And, true to form, he doesn’t. He won’t tell the truth even now.

Francis is disgusted by this, and stabs him with a broken bottle in fury, telling him that she should have let Rex kill him when she had the chance. And then she keels over, giving Oz an opportunity to kill Sofia’s men and escape. He takes Francis to the hospital and reunites with Vic, while Sofia puts a bounty on his head, offering control of the entire Gigante family as an incentive for whoever can get to him.

Theo Rossi and Cristin Milioti in The Penguin | Image via HBO

The Oz Cobb Takeover

As ever, Oz is scheming in The Penguin Episode 8. He immediately goes to see the Gotham city councilman he threatened to get the lights back on in Crown Point and feeds him a fantasy. Salvatore Maroni was running the Bliss operation. Sofia blew up the lab. It’s a classic organized crime tale, as old as time. Wouldn’t it be a big career leg-up for whichever public official managed to expose all that?

Meanwhile, Sofia gets overconfident. She assumes that the legacy of her family, the power she can offer, will be irrefutable. She burns down the Falcone mansion and meets with Zhao, believing wholeheartedly that his capture of Oz will be the end of it all. But she underestimates the burning-hot desire of the downtrodden to rise up. All of Oz’s speechifying to his men sank in. He doesn’t care about them, but he does get them. So Link turns on Zhao and his loyalists and takes over the Triads. All of Sofia’s men are gunned down, and Oz takes her for a drive, just like old times.

Oz doesn’t kill Sofia, as she expects him to. He leaves her to be arrested and sent back to Arkham – for her, a fate worse than death.

Oz Kills Victor

It isn’t all wins for Oz, but he’s delusional enough to reinvent his losses in his mind. Francis, for instance, suffered a stroke and remains in a – presumably permanent – vegetative state. Oz breaking down over this, and Vic quietly comforting him is one of the only moments that Oz resembles a real human being.

But it doesn’t last. There’s a sense of doom hanging over Oz’s final conversation with Vic, where the two of them thank each other, celebrate their success, and consider each other family. We know what happened to Oz’s family, don’t we? History repeats itself as Oz tearfully strangles Vic to death, telling him he can’t take him with him, as his love for him will make him weak.

We knew it was coming, but that doesn’t make it easier to see. If anyone still held onto a sliver of respect or admiration for Oz, the shred of an idea that he might be redeemable, this moment puts paid to it. He’s a monster.

Rhenzy Feliz and Colin Farrell in The Penguin | Image via HBO

The Penguin Ends With Oz On Top – For Now

The ending of The Penguin is a win for Oz, but it surely can’t last. There are a few loose ends that will likely be picked at in The Batman: Part II, which is currently slated for an October 2026 release. Oz will be in it, surely – he has risen to the top of Gotham’s underworld and made a few enemies along the way.

Sofia, for instance, is still alive and back in Arkham, but Episode 8 ends with her receiving a letter from her half-sister, Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman. She already hated Oz – her desire for vengeance against him now will be astronomical.

And then there’s Batman. Plenty have bemoaned the lack of involvement from Bruce Wayne in this series, especially when its events got big enough to level an entire city block. It didn’t seem reasonable that Batman hadn’t noticed what was going on, but this was always intended to be Oz’s story, and it remained that until the very end.

But nothing lasts forever. As Oz creepily dances with Eve, who he has instructed to dress and act like his mother in his new penthouse apartment, the Bat-Signal lights up the sky.