With The Penguin Finale, DC Just Beat Marvel At Its Own Game

Holy spoilers, Batman! This article discusses major events from the season finale of "The Penguin."

The flood waters have receded, the dust has settled, and Oswald Cobb's power-hungry Penguin is now exactly where we thought he'd be following his final scene in "The Batman" — left with nothing standing in his way for control of the city's criminal underworld. The eight-episode run of HBO's "The Penguin" lived up to its billing as "The Sopranos" in Gotham, adding all sorts of complexity and deeper layers to the one-dimensional, yet always entertaining mobster played by Colin Farrell in director Matt Reeves' 2022 blockbuster. Viewers who tuned into the spinoff series have been given a satisfying character study, detailing how an overambitious mama's boy turned into an insecure man hellbent on proving everyone wrong throughout his murderous rise to power. But for those who'll only ever end up watching the original movie and its planned sequel without any expanded material whatsoever — in other words, the vast majority of general audiences — "The Penguin" represents something altogether more impressive than that.

With its thrilling finale, showrunner Lauren LeFranc and her writers have now pulled off the trickiest balancing act of any superhero franchise. For years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been chasing the idea of #ItsAllConnected, turning its ever-increasing stable of Disney+ shows into required homework just to understand the plot of the movies. (Imagine trying to make sense of "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" without having seen "WandaVision," for instance.) Instead of taking that same approach here, the creative team simply resisted the temptation to include major twists or reveals that would affect the bigger picture. The end result is that "The Batman" and "The Penguin" have refined what a shared universe ought to look like.

Somehow both vital to the emotional journey of Oz Cobb and a completely optional viewing experience for anyone who'd rather just stick to the movies, "The Penguin" proves that DC just beat Marvel at its own game.

When "The Batman: Part II" finally arrives after its latest delay and audiences sit down at their local theater for the next installment of Robert Pattinson's masked vigilante, do you know what the most refreshing thing about it will be? How about the fact that the only pre-existing piece of media anyone will need to have watched will be 2022's "The Batman." That's it! It might seem like an obvious statement, but that hasn't been Hollywood's conventional thinking when it comes to superhero sequels in recent years. When "The Marvels" released last year to disappointing reviews, at least part of its underperformance could be attributed to the plot forcing audiences to keep track of both 2019's "Captain Marvel" and the Disney+ series "Ms. Marvel" to know who two-thirds of the main leads were supposed to be. When "Thunderbolts*" hits theaters next year, well, just consider the laundry list of items that fans will be required to have working knowledge of: "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," "Ant-Man and the Wasp," "Black Widow," "Hawkeye," the various "Avengers" movies, and more.

Thankfully, "The Penguin" couldn't be more diametrically opposed to this mindset. Granted, the DC spinoff series never came with the cachet of headline-grabbing plot developments that hyped up its own importance to viewers (like when the marketing for "The Marvels" became truly desperate and began teasing a moment that "changes everything" which, uh, wasn't quite the case). No, HBO instead placed their bets on built-in interest among fans who enjoyed seeing Farrell's take on the Penguin the first time around and naturally wanted more of it. Likewise, the writing team remained on the same page and simply prioritized a character-building story, rather than working backwards and using the plot to establish massive amounts of connective tissue with "The Batman: Part II." The results, frankly, speak for themselves.

But wait! I can already hear readers crying foul at the entire thesis of this article, pointing to how "The Penguin" includes so many game-changing events and introduces so many important characters that will undoubtedly need to be acknowledged in "The Batman: Part II." To an extent, that's true. After all, Gotham did just survive a ruthless gang war that destroyed an entire neighborhood with an underground car bomb, left both the Maroni and Falcone crime families in ruins and introduced a pair of character-defining relationships with rival Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) and Oz's Robin-like sidekick Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz). It'd be downright weird if none of that merited so much as a passing reference in the next "The Batman" sequel, right?

Well, not really. A closer look at how painstakingly precise the events of "The Penguin" unfolded reveals that, plot-wise, everything ends pretty much exactly where "The Batman" left off with no further explanation needed. In the broadest of strokes, the only "significant" event that needed to occur in the entire series was Oz stepping up and filling the power vacuum left by the death of Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Everything else — from Oz's Oedipal relationship with his mom Francis (Deirdre O'Connell) and the killing of his brothers to his bitter rivalry with Sofia to his mentoring of young Vic — amounts to little more than background details nudging the Penguin on the path from the glorified henchman he ended "The Batman" as to the full-fledged crime lord he'll likely be when "Part II" begins.

But make no mistake: all those little details were what made this season so compelling and worthwhile every step of the way. For viewers who invested the time and effort into this series, they were rewarded with some of the best character work Marvel or DC have ever delivered. And when Oz shows up again, as ruthless and powerful as ever, we'll be able to appreciate every detail and every tragic choice (like murdering poor Vic in cold blood) that made him that way. Yet, at the same time, the true magic trick here is that casual viewers won't feel like they're missing a single beat. Like Oswald Cobb himself, underestimate "The Penguin" at your own peril.

Every episode of "The Penguin" is now streaming on Max.