There are not many times in life anymore when somebody approaches you and asks for an actual conversation.
That is the thing I do most on this channel, and you all know it. I like to talk. I like to talk in depth. I like to hear conflicting viewpoints. Because back in the day, that is what you did with your friends. You went out, you saw something, and maybe you agreed and maybe you did not. You might walk away going, “oh my goodness, you are a jerk.” But you walked away agreeing to disagree, and then you said, “all right, let’s go watch the next thing.”
So when the folks over at Novvice Renaissance came to me wanting to dig into HBO’s The Penguin, I said yes immediately.
They are the people behind the Doradorverse, the lost legends and gods of pre-flood Earth, a supernatural sci-fi and fantasy saga whose first volume covers the great war in heaven, the rebellious angels, the faithful battalions, and the clash across the realms before creation. They dedicated that first book to C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard, which tells you exactly what shelf they are reaching for. And their whole stated mission is creating and defending great stories.
Which makes them the right people to ask the question they brought me.
The Question Underneath the Show
Here is what they put on the table, and it is a better question than it sounds at first.
The Penguin is a Batman show without the Batman. He might be out there in the shadows somewhere, but he is not in this story. So without him, is there any element of morality left in the crime syndicate? Is there any force for good in Sophia, in Oz, in Victor?
And then Novvice Renaissance sharpened it further: not just is good represented here, but can good even exist here at all?
I will back up for a second, because I get ahead of myself. When this show was announced, everybody assumed it was going to be a standard origin story with a standard counterweight. A cop. A prosecutor. Somebody carrying the flashlight. And you figure out very quickly that this does not exist.
There is no force for good in this show. What there is, is the lesser of known evils.
That is a different thing entirely, and the show knows it is a different thing.
What Goodfellas Had That Gotham Does Not
This is where the comparison got interesting to me, because the obvious lineage for The Penguin is The Sopranos, Goodfellas, The Godfather. Shows and films that hand you a horrible world and then make the story inside it fascinating to follow. Very true crime in that way.
But Novvice Renaissance made the point that even those stories have a floor. The guys in Goodfellas go to mass. They are Catholic. They kill people, and they still believe there is a final line somewhere. In The Godfather, Don Corleone comes back from the hospital, sits down over the drug conversation, and says if we are going to do this, we control it, we keep it out of the schools, we keep it away from the kids. That is a silver lining of morality. It is thin, and it is self-serving, and it is still a floor.
Gotham does not have one.
Even The Dark Knight trilogy, which is the classic version of this argument, gives you a Harvey Dent and a Commissioner Gordon who are trying. Here you get to city hall and the best you can say is that it is neutral. When Oz is standing in front of that city official laying out how it is going to be, and it is plainly the best of the worst options available, you realize there is no justice at that level either. Not any level you can see from here.
So the show is piling on. Artfully, wonderfully, but piling on. And what starts happening in the pile is that you notice a weirdly parallel thought process running through it: salvation, saviors, devils. All the old vocabulary, showing up in a crime drama.
The Show Is Building the Case for Batman
Here is the angle I keep landing on. Are we actually serving the story of Batman better by this being what it is?
I tend to take the Matt Reeves material as one piece, an elseworld running on its own logic. And in that logic, the Batman we met in the movie was a response to what happened to Bruce Wayne as a child. Everybody accepts that. But the next Batman we get is going to be a response to the revelation at the end of that movie, plus how much worse Gotham has gotten in the meantime. Reeves has said we are going to see Bruce in a place we have never seen him before, essentially asking whether he should be Batman at all. Looking for reasons to be Batman, because the revenge trip did not go the way he planned and ended up seeding worse things.
This show amps up exactly how dark Gotham is by refusing to give you a single glimmer of light.
Then Novvice Renaissance raised something I had not considered. When the bat-signal goes up at the end of the final episode, is that the first time in this chronology that the signal has ever been turned on? Not Bruce in a mask hunting people, but the actual signal, the actual arrangement, Gotham finally calling for him. If so, that is the first light entering an exceedingly dark place, and it could surge straight into the next movie and into a second season.
I do not know that there is a yes or no on it. I like that there is not.
What I do know is that Cristin Milioti has been said to be out of The Batman Part II, mostly because the scripts were already moving in another direction before she became the phenomenon she became, and Reeves was not going to backtrack and pigeonhole her in. I think that is the smart move. You bring those characters back later, at a point in a second season, and maybe by then you can seed in something like Robin. They have talked about the possibility of this Batman getting a Robin, and I think he should.
Which got us both going, admittedly off the rails: where are the Graysons in this timeline? Are they working a Chicago-type city? Are they making their way toward Gotham on the circuit? You could end The Batman Part II with the circus coming to town and then let a second season of The Penguin unfold that entire situation. Maybe you get a Pattinson cameo without getting a Batman cameo. Just him, there, witnessing it.
Even the Joel Schumacher era at least gave us the Graysons, and that scene was shot well, collapsing net and all. Give me that at DC Black Label level and it would be gripping.
Honor Among Thieves Does Not Survive Contact
The second question they brought was whether honor among thieves can exist between the Falcones, the Maronis, and their syndicates. Because we watched what happened to the number twos, the made men. Senior leadership got taken out by their own.
My answer is that you can get something like honor, but not the way we know it.
In the real world you have the families, the Cosa Nostra structure, everybody with a type of arrangement, and the show sets that up early. Oz even has his own little fief for a while, that corner he built out of everything he worked for. So the simple answer is no. The harder answer is that honor only holds with an iron fist.
Because look at the tiers. You have the street level mob types who stay exactly what they are. Then you have the tier above them, and Oz has just stepped into it, and that tier eventually becomes Batman’s rogues gallery. This is the escalated version of villainy. And among that tier it is not honor so much as a cold war. We can all destroy each other in our own ways, so let us not cross that line. That is the respect you see in something like The Long Halloween, where Gotham gets carved into segments and everybody takes their piece. Realms of empire. Watch Oz in that building at the end and it is obvious you are looking at the capital of his little corner of the world.
But on any real level, no. Go back to Batman ‘89. The Joker ends his own right-hand man because he is crazy, which tells you there is nothing that crazy does not put you at risk for. Throughout the entire lore, there is no job security. There is no honor. There is only whoever is strongest, and everybody else deals with it.
Sophia understands this better than anybody, which is why she does not ask for loyalty. She buys it. She hands the men money because nobody ever paid them and nobody ever appreciated them. Respect is the currency, so she gives all of it away, thinking she is going to walk out and fly to Italy.
That did not happen.
Did Oz Ever Have a Chance?
Once you start talking about the natural order, you have to ask where a person gets their sense of it. Where the balance comes from. Where morality comes from at all.
So: was there ever any good in Oz, or was he always no good?
Go back to his mother, back to the childhood, back to the incident with his brothers. Because you find yourself wondering. There is nothing about her that struck me as intrinsically evil.
Novvice Renaissance walked the timeline out, and I think they are right. Hold the assumption that up to six or seven, he could not have truly known good from evil. By eight, nine, ten, he is a young man forming his thoughts, and what is forming them is a mother who keeps telling him he is going to take care of his mother, over and over, while she is also plotting his handoff to the local gangster. Two faces at once. So you can carry sympathy for him a good while.
Right up until the storm drain.
Watch that scene again. He pauses. He is thinking about it. Even from his own perspective, he knows this is probably not a good idea, and he pauses before he slams that door. And then he goes and sits and watches a movie with his mother and enjoys it, brothers completely discarded.
That is the point where the good starts to dry up.
The way I would put it is that we spend a lot of time debating whether morality is a community law or something handed down from above, whether there is any moral sense left when nobody is watching over your shoulder. And what the show does in that scene is show you a boy with a compass that reads horribly wrong. Novvice Renaissance put it better than I did: he throws the compass away. Of his own free will. Just throws it away.
I am not calling him an allegory for the devil. I am saying the scene solidifies the inherent evil that is there, and it does it by choice rather than by circumstance.
By the time he is an adult he is the driver. He is running his own show. And even the relationship with his mother at the end reads like use, because she is the only person left who gives him any kind of affirmation. He is not honoring her. He is extracting validation from her.
There is no good left in him by the end of the season.
Sophia Is the Other Half of the Experiment
And then there is Sophia, who starts as an incidental character and becomes a focal one shockingly fast.
The trick of these two is that you keep swapping who you hate more. Oh my god, I hate her, she is terrible. Oh my god, I hate him more, he is worse. And somehow both of them feel justified at various points along the way. That is the thing that got me from a moral standpoint. I had to ask myself why I was enjoying this.
Where the two of them differ, and Novvice Renaissance nailed this, is the shape of the damage. Oz got manipulation. Sophia got direct family betrayal. She was imprisoned by force, and that changed everything, and we watch her struggling with it in real time.
So when Sophia makes her cold calculated decisions to take people out, she is driven by revenge rather than empire. And there is at least the shape of a redemption arc in her, because at the end of the show she is giving everything away. She wants no more part of it. She wants to go her own way. Oz is all in on building an empire and Sophia is liquidating one. That is the cleanest distinction between them, and Oz gets the last word.
She also spares the niece. She does not kill the whole family. So there is some morality shining through the dark.
Not much, though. And it is a weird morality. Are we supposed to award points for sparing one girl when she has exterminated the rest of that household single-handedly? How do you weigh that one pearl against all of it? I think that balancing act is one more thing the show is deliberately handing us and refusing to resolve.
Her ending is the cruelest one in the show, by the way. It is not that she gets arrested. It is not that she gets held for trial. She goes back to Arkham. Back into the institution that made her what she is out of circumstances she did not choose.
Victor and the Point of No Return
The show starts with Vic and Oz sitting there together over a drink, and it essentially ends with Vic and Oz, and then it moves on to the next chapter with Oz fully realized in his most Penguin form, paying a woman to play the part of the person he can no longer have.
So the last question we hit was the point of no return. Could Oz, Sophia, or Victor have come back from the brink?
Victor had one and missed it. He should have left with his girlfriend. If he leaves with her, the trajectory of his entire life changes, and I do not think Oz succeeds without him. Victor saves that man at least twice.
Oz has no point of return. He is on his way to the frozen hell of the Penguin we know. Sophia actually started to make the turn, and then Arkham. Victor is the bittersweet one, because we will never know whether he had a return in him. He gets snuffed out before the question can be asked.
He is cut off right before his wings can take flight. He was at the exact point where the villain’s version of the hero’s journey begins, and he does not get to walk it.
And that is what makes the death land, unlike a certain other kind of show where the deaths pile up until they stop meaning anything. It has weight not just because you love the kid but because he had already sacrificed so much of his soul to get there, and then the man who made him is the one who takes him out. He was a made man, and his own godfather ended him.
Look at the whole thing and Oz’s logic is horrible and airtight. He trained this kid. He watched him learn. And he realized that Vic now has every tool he has, which means Vic can eventually hurt him the way he has hurt everyone else. He is trapped by the intelligence of the situation and by his own superstition about it: I can trust him, and my love for him will get me killed.
I hate saying this, but it is Ben Solo having to kill Han. It is Anakin in the temple. It is the final push that turns a villain fully into the thing they are going to be. Vic was Oz’s last chance, and Oz ended it for both of them.
Novvice Renaissance threw out the old-school version of the same beat, which is Legend, the Ridley Scott movie with a very young Tom Cruise. The moment where the unicorn is on the table and the choice is right there. Tim Curry in full demonic glory, delighted, best day he has had in a thousand years. That movie does not get enough respect.
Not Morality. Currency.
Here is where the whole discussion landed, and it is the thesis of the show as far as I am concerned.
The Penguin does not have morality. It has currency. And the currency is whatever you can do, or whatever you could do. Your commodity. Humans as commodities.
That is grim dark in the truest sense. The weak get wiped out in floods and explosions and nobody cares. The justice system is neutral at absolute best, managing chaos, cleaning up messes, never actually able to do anything. And here is the detail that got me: the criminals cannot even unite. They cannot form a grand empire. You do not even get the crime syndicate opposite of the Justice League. It is so bad that the bad guys cannot organize.
Look at what Oz built underground in that first lair of his. When the boss’s men show up and he has to end them, everybody backs him. That is what he had built, and he built it on the backs of people so desperate that the only currency they had left was their own loyalty. And we find out exactly what that is worth. It is worth enough to keep you around until you are no longer of service.
It is junk money.
I will tell you a real story, because it is the version of this I grew up with. My grandfather in the late sixties was a driver for some well-connected people in Connecticut, and he had earned real respect there. My mother had just been born, and he wanted to take the family back to Puerto Rico for a while so she could be raised there. So he went to the head of the family and asked. The old man was happy for him and told him to go take care of his kids. The son was not happy about it. While my grandfather is in Puerto Rico, he finds out the old man passed away and the son is running everything now. On the way home they stop in New York first, he calls somebody, and he is told his building burned down. So he said, you know what, we are staying here in New York.
That is why I was born in New York.
That is Vic’s family, is what that is. We are staying. We are not leaving the city. And what else do you do? There is no loyalty to lean on, because your loyalty to one person can be the exact thing that makes you a problem to another. It is a dark ouroboros of a scenario.
The Show Is a Cautionary Tale, Not a Commercial
I would push back on anybody who says this glorifies the lifestyle.
Heist movies do that. Heist movies make the bad guys fun and make that life look alluring. This is down and dirty and gritty, and there is no redeeming value to anybody in it. Nobody can watch this show and not feel sorry for someone on screen and then, moments later, say out loud, “oh no, you deserve that.” Because they are the worst kind of people regardless of the circumstances.
And that is the moral engine of the whole thing. Yes, I can sit here and say the abuse was terrible, the childhood was terrible, all the negatives were real. But at some point the baton of responsibility gets handed to you regardless of where it came from, and now you have to own your stuff.
That is why I think this show connects the way it does. We are living in a moment where fewer and fewer people want to take responsibility for the harm they cause. This is one of those times where fiction mirrors life closely enough that it makes you flinch. It is classic typology rather than strict allegory, which is exactly why everybody can relate to it. That is what makes it powerful.
Comic Books Are American Mythology
That is really where we ended up, and it is why I wanted to have this conversation with these guys in the first place.
People do not understand that fiction comes from somewhere. I joke that every Hollywood writer, whatever you think of them, understands good and evil, because they watch the same movies we do. But they understand it from a dramatic place. When you stop and look at these stories philosophically, you realize that is what the old myths were doing too. The story of Zeus is, among other things, the story of a man with enormous power who cannot control his appetites. Those ideas keep getting told in new costumes.
The Penguin takes that subject matter and elevates it. Not just in performance, but in the story being told. It is a crime drama layered with American mythology, because that is what these characters are. Bob Kane and Bill Finger and everybody after them were building the same thing Stan Lee was building out of established literature: good and evil personified, colorful on the page and deeply earnest when you look at them through the right filter. Everywhere you go you see an S shield, or a bat, or a lightning bolt. Those are our Zeuses.
Which is why the ending matters. There is a single strain of light in that bat-signal. Somewhere in this parallel story, before it or during it, Bruce Wayne becomes the Batman. There is a young Commissioner Gordon out there. There are heroes. We are just watching a very narrow, very dark slice of the city.
And it puts me right back in that scene in The Dark Knight, the one where Gordon lays it out. The Joker took the best of us and tore him down, and people will lose hope. They must never know what he did. You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I can be the thing Gotham needs me to be, because I am not the hero. And then he rides off into the night. Not the sunset. The night.
Right now, The Penguin is midnight in the garden of evil. Whether season two lets any light in is the whole reason to keep watching.
If you want more conversations like this one, say so in the comments on the video above. Novvice Renaissance and I have a list of topics we would love to keep digging into, and I want to hear which morality questions you would put in front of us next. Their links are in the video description.
