Oz let his brothers drown, and then he spent the evening on the couch with his mom watching an old movie they both love.

That’s where The Penguin Episode 7 starts, and I’m just amazed at how much this series keeps raising the bar. It’s impressive in a way that, in my opinion, only a penultimate episode can be. For a comic book adaptation, this show is doing something we usually only get on the page, in the Vertigo and Black Label kind of books, for those of you who are into that. It’s a very mature way of handing you the content and the context of a story, and I’m all the way behind it.

The Night at the Trolley Station

Like a lot of shows lately, and I’m looking at Agatha All Along here, the penultimate episode takes us back in time. We get the flashback, and it’s not a bad or a misplaced one. We go back to Oz as a kid. We’ve heard the stories about him and his brothers and his mother all season, and now we see how those relationships actually worked, and what actually happened.

I don’t know how many of you called it, but Oz was involved in his brothers’ deaths. It was obvious, at least to me.

Even at that age he’s a mama’s boy, so to speak, and there are some clearly Oedipal overtones on it. We finally meet the cigar-smoking mobster he talked about earlier in the season, the one he looks up to, or at least wants to become. His mother works for that guy, and she gets paid about 50 bucks for it. That’s terrible.

So the brothers go off to have some fun at a spot they know, an old trolley station, and they start a game of hide-and-seek with flashlights. It’s raining. The two of them go down into a drainage tunnel to hide from him, he tries to follow them down, he nearly slips, and he gets angry.

We’ve been shown this all season. When Oz gets upset, he acts irrationally. It started with Sophia’s brother and it runs through a whole series of events where he gets offended or hurt, does something irrational, and a moment later you can see him thinking, maybe I made a mistake.

This time there’s no moment later. He shuts them in, goes home, and watches a movie with his mom while his brothers drown. That’s incredible.

Get Me an Army, Kid

Back in the present, Oz walks in and finds Vic hurt on the floor. He tells him he needs him to get up and asks where his mom is, and Vic doesn’t know. It was Sophia. She came in and took her.

Then Maroni shows up, and Oz tells Vic to take his car and get out. He has to face this one himself. Vic’s job is to go up the chain, tell everybody what’s happening, and get him an army.

It’s a great moment for Vic and for us, because Oz has never been the guy who just charges ahead. He waits until things get bad and he has no choice, and then he’s all the way in.

Maroni takes him and forces Oz to lead him to where the operation is.

Sophia Sits Down With His Mother

Sophia has big plans. She sits down across from Oz’s mother, and Oz’s mom is something else. Sophia tells her that Oz said his mother died years ago, that he was so torn up about it she actually felt sorry for him. And his mom tells her some people are just easy marks.

She’s reading Sophia the whole time, and I’m sitting there going, wow. Sophia even likes it. She respects it.

Then the dementia hits. His mom starts talking about her boys and how old they are, like they’re still kids, like they’re in the next room. It’s a specific type of dementia (the name went up on screen in the video because I couldn’t pull it in the moment), and when an episode comes on she loses her bearings instantly. Sophia catches it and asks her where she thinks she is. That’s what sends Sophia to her friend from Arkham to help her work out what she’s looking at.

The Hospital Visit

While she’s with him, he tells her there’s a call she needs to return. The girl who survived, the one member of that family Sophia spared, has been trying to reach somebody. She wants to say she saw something.

Sophia goes to see her, and this is probably the most moving scene in the episode for me.

Sophia asks what she saw. The girl says she saw a mask, meaning the gas mask. And then she asks Sophia straight out whether she killed them. Sophia plays it off. What are you talking about, why would I do that, no.

And then, holding the girl’s hand, she sees the marks. The girl’s been hurting herself.

It’s a very sobering moment for Sophia. She starts to realize she’s turning into every person who ever did this to her, and she consciously decides she’s not going to be that. I listened to the podcast after the episode, where they sit down with the people who wrote it, and they said yes, that’s the moment Sophia decides she doesn’t want to be like them. So she tells the truth. She tells that girl her mom and dad and everybody in the family were bad people who deserved it, that she’s glad they’re gone, and that the girl is going to find a home and a family and a normal life.

I don’t know about you, but I actually paused it, looked at Mrs. Know-It-All and said, they could turn that girl into the Huntress.

For those of you playing at home, the Huntress is a character with a pretty tangled history. There are universes where she’s Bruce Wayne’s daughter. There are others where she comes out of a mob family that got wiped out, and she goes looking for revenge as the Huntress. So there’s a world where this girl ends up exactly there. I don’t know if they’ll have the time in this universe to make it happen, but it’s nice to watch the pieces come together.

Oz Yells at a Dead Man

The episode is called “Top Hat.” I was a little disappointed we didn’t get Oz in a top hat. I’ve seen a leaked photo and he looks incredible in it, so hopefully that’s next week.

When Maroni walks Oz into the operation, everybody working down there stops. Maroni throws Oz on the floor like he’s telling the room he’s the boss here now. Then one of Oz’s guys kills the lights and a fight breaks out.

Oz chases Maroni to the trolley car, and they’re in there fighting when Maroni has a heart attack.

And Oz is so angry about it. He’s standing over him yelling that Maroni was supposed to take him on, supposed to show him what a big man he is. He’s chewing out a corpse to the point where it gets funny, because by the end he’s yelling “I got you” at a dead man. I got you.

It took me straight back to The Batman, where he’s screaming the same thing at the end of that car chase. I love seeing that level of consistency in a character. It’s a nice little reference that gives you something familiar, and it’s one more detail tying this universe together in a very pretty knot.

He’s that angry because Maroni checking out on his own gave him nothing. There’s no satisfaction in it, so he does whatever he can to squeeze some out of it anyway.

And look at where all of this is happening. Oz chose to set up shop in the exact place his brothers died. That says a lot about the trauma he’s carrying, and about how much he had to close himself off from the world to carry it.

I keep thinking about last week too. Vic has to do what he does, he owns it, and Oz hugs him and tells him it gets easier from here. Knowing what we know now about that kid in the tunnel, the context of the past makes that hit very differently.

Did You Find My Gift

The visit with that girl hit Sophia hard enough that she decides she’s not going to be her father.

She tries to call Maroni and finds out he’s done. Oz has him. And Oz is feeling it. He owns the kingdom now. He calls her down there to draw her in, thanks his people, hands out the weapons, and they’re ready to do their thing.

Sophia doesn’t show. She asks him whether he found her gift.

He goes back, and I swear I thought she was about to do what she told her therapist she wanted, which was for him to feel pain, real pain, the kind she felt.

It’s a bomb. She blows up his entire operation. There’s literally a giant crater where that place used to be, and Oz has to climb, metaphorically, from the dark up into the light. It’s got real echoes of what Batman had to do in the movie.

Then she goes to the club, the same club Oz told her about, the one where he danced with his mother. And we get that scene.

The kid who plays young Oz is such a good-looking young man, which is funny, and probably about right when you’re still that young. You’ve got those soft kid features, and then later they turn into the harsh lines Oz has.

Where This Is Going

It’s definitely going somewhere. I firmly believe that before it’s all over, either Oz is going to be directly responsible for his mother’s death, or she’s going to sacrifice herself. Something has to give, because the episode ends with his mother putting all of it on him.

She tells him she needs him to work as hard as he can and try his very best, because doesn’t mommy deserve the best. He has to promise her he’ll become somebody and give her everything she deserves. That’s where the whole Oedipal thing comes from, and I’m just amazed by it.

A penultimate episode usually does one of two jobs. Sometimes all the action and the climax happen right there, and the finale is the aftermath, where you see what life looks like once it’s over. The other job is getting everything in place for the climax. This one’s doing the second job, which means we’ve got a crazy ride waiting for us next week, and I’m so excited for it.

Tell me in the comments on the video above how you think this ends for Oz and his mother: does he cause it, or does she choose it? And tell me whether you see the Huntress in that hospital room too.