Following last night's shocking, and oftentimes harrowing, season finale of The Penguin, Max has released a new featurette taking a deep dive into "A Great or Little Thing" (you can read our full spoiler recap here).
As you might expect, Oz Cobb's decision to murder Victor "Vic" Aguilar in cold blood is a major talking point. The teenager has seen Oz at his most vulnerable and the villain decides that keeping him around will make him weak; he then cruelly strangles Vic to death despite the fact he wouldn't have reached the top of Gotham City's underworld without his help.
"Towards the end of the show, Victor has seen Oz at his most vulnerable," showrunner Lauren LeFranc explains in the video below. "The two of those guys have been through everything together. Someone seeing his vulnerability feels like a weakness and, in Oz's opinion, he cannot achieve what he feels he needs to achieve if he has those weaknesses around."
She adds, "That moment when he kills Victor is him killing his own heart and becoming the monster...I knew that the goal of the series by the end was to rise to the top or get closer to that goal but when he's achieved power, he's lost a lot of himself as well."
Rhenzy Feliz, who plays Vic, chimes in to say, "For him to be betrayed by the person that he considers family now after we have finally done this thing. We got to the top of the game. It made me, reading the scripts go, 'Wow, this guy is worse than we thought.'"
Colin Farrell did warn us that we'd no longer like Oz when The Penguin ends and, well, he wasn't kidding. For producer Matt Reeves, "The fact [Oz] goes to such extremes because he's so broken, that's the tragedy of the story."
While Batman doesn't show up in The Penguin, the finale concludes with the camera panning outside of Oz's new penthouse apartment where the Bat-Signal shines across Gotham City's skyline.
The implication is that it will be Batman who puts an end to the villain's machinations, hopefully meaning the gangster won't get away with what we saw from him here. In other post-finale interviews, Farrell has confirmed he'll appear in The Batman Part II and The Batman Part III, so it very much feels like the stage is being set for him to become the Caped Crusader's final obstacle in ridding Gotham of crime and corruption.
An official look at that chill-inducing moment can be seen at the end of this featurette or in the X post below.
The Penguin's cast includes Colin Farrell (Oz Cobblepot), Cristin Milioti (Sofia Falcone), Rhenzy Feliz (Victor Aguilar), Michael Kelly (Johnny Viti), Shohreh Aghdashloo (Nadia Maroni), Deirdre O’Connell (Francis Cobb), Clancy Brown (Salvatore Maroni), James Madio (Milos Grapa), Scott Cohen (Luca Falcone), Michael Zegen (Alberto Falcone), Carmen Ejogo (Eve Karlo), and Theo Rossi (Dr. Julian Rush).
The series is executive produced by Matt Reeves, Dylan Clark, Colin Farrell, Lauren LeFranc, who writes and serves as showrunner, Craig Zobel, and Bill Carraro.
Based on characters created for DC by Bob Kane with Bill Finger, The Penguin is produced by Reeves' 6th & Idaho Productions and Dylan Clark Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television, where Reeves and 6th & Idaho are under an overall deal. Daniel Pipski also serves as executive producer.
All episodes of The Penguin are now streaming on Max.