‘The Penguin’ Episode 2 Recap: Lying Is the Most Fun a Goombah Can Have Without Taking His Clothes Off

“If this is a mafia show, why is the Penguin in it? If this is a Penguin show, why isn’t Batman in it?” Unless and until The Penguin provides a satisfactory answer to these questions — and no, Colin Farrell vanishing into prosthetics and Brooklynese is not sufficient — it’s going to remain a puzzling, even frustrating, show. But then, this is a franchise with a tendency to be embarrassed about what it is, as if changing the surnames of the Riddler and the Penguin from Nygma and Cobbleplot to Nashton and Cobb will make the idea of a billionaire who dresses up like a horror movie monster to beat up criminals any less whimsical at heart. Just be what you are!

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But this is not to say some enjoyment can’t be had even on a show that feels the need to preemptively apologize for itself in that way. This week’s episode serves up a strong action sequence, a tense bit of murderous skullduggery, and a closer look at what kind of villain this version of the Penguin really is: A enjoyably awful one, as it turns out.

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This episode largely concerns Oz Cobb’s attempt to further the gang war between the Falcones, the family to whom he belongs, and the Maronis, the family for which he serves as a double agent. He’s already pinned his impetuous murder of Alberto Falcone on incarcerated boss Sal Maroni to force his family’s hand. He then facilitates a lucrative, and viscerally exciting, truck hijacking to take out one of the Falcones’ drug shipments, nearly getting killed himself in the process.

But he doesn’t seem to count on Alberto’s insane sister Sofia. In this episode we learn she was a serial killer dubbed the Hangman, who murdered seven young women that they know about before her incarceration and rehabilitation (lol) at Arkham Asylum. The fact that she’s plagued by nightmares that have her self-mutilating in her sleep doesn’t make her any less canny a gangster, however. Of all the members of the family’s braintrust — including its newly minted boss, her uncle Luca (Scott Cohen) — she’s only one who recognizes the work of an inside man.

To take the heat off himself, Oz attempts to give her provide her with just such a traitor. Using blackmail photos of underboss Johnny Vitti in flagrante with Luca’s wife and diamonds he himself heisted, he plans to pin the crime on Johnny, who’s been freezing him out of the family business. But when Oz’s (for lack of a better a better term) intern Vic botches his attempt to plant the jewels in Vitti’s car, Oz is forced to go with plan B: personally murder the Maroni cap that Sofia captured to interrogate, then figure out a way to pin the crime on someone else. Whether by design or dumb luck, he plants the incriminating murder weapon on Castillo (Berto Colon), Sofia’s lieutenant…who just so happened to personally torture Oz in the series premiere.

Buoyed by his success, Oz chooses to make this a teachable moment for Vic. Having gotten the assignment from Vitti to dispose of the corpses of Castillo and the Maroni guy, the Penguin makes his assistant do all the work — then forces him to lie down in the grave with the bodies to demonstrate how close both of them came to death because of his failure.

Success awaits Oz in the end, however. Now Sofia, who mistrusted his overtures of friendship earlier in the episode, believes him to be the only person in the family she can trust. Together, she says, they’ll take the old men down and reign in their place.

So what kind of villain is the Penguin, then? The lying kind. Like Sauron on the current season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power , he’s a master manipulator, prone to bald-faced falsehoods said straight into another person’s eyes — like the sob story he tells Sofia about his dead mother, who’s not only alive but wandering around with dementia when she’s not browbeating Oz about becoming a big shot. Is he embarrassed by the truth? Cautious about divulging too much of his past? Or is it simply easier for him, psychologically, to make things up than it is to chain himself down to something so limiting as the truth?

But unlike Rings ’s Sauron, The Penguin ’s Penguin is not lying from a position of superior strength and supreme confidence. He’s a hustler, a con man, a sweaty vaudeville performer frantically spinning plates. The fact that he always manages to pull himself out of his various jams — at least twice now, we’ve seen him completely at the mercy of women gangsters whose minions could cut his throat in two seconds if ordered and live to tell the tale — shouldn’t disguise the fact that he winds up in those jams in the first place. Yet from Castillo’s death to Sofia’s allegiance, he does always seem to get what he wants in the end, doesn’t he?

With these characteristics, The Penguin does an excellent job conveying why an S-tier liar and killer like Oz Cobb isn’t running Gotham City already. Thus far, his gifts have all been expended in a desperate scramble from the bottom to the, let’s say, lower middle. If he were to try and get any higher, his penchant for overreach and his personal unpleasantness — as well as his disability, since these are not very understanding people — would form a glass ceiling over his head like, well, an umbrella.

But now the order of things has been overturned. In The Batman , a trio of unpredictable outsiders — the terrorist Riddler on one side, vigilantes Catwoman and the Batman himself on the other — first expose and then (this is the Riddler’s work) kill boss Carmine Falcone. The Riddler also floods and destroys much of the city, unleashing widespread deprivation and a massive crime wave. The chaos resulting from all this is the right time, maybe the only time, a man with the skills and flaws possessed by Oz Cobb could successfully make a play for the top. Which is where I’m assuming we’ll find him by the time the next Bat-movie rolls around.

Sean T. Collins ( @theseantcollins ) writes about TV for Rolling Stone , Vulture , The New York Times , and anyplace that will have him , really. He and his family live on Long Island.

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