The Penguin Finale Episode “A Great or Little Thing” brought the gang war between Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) and Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) to a violent end – but more surprising than all the mob violence and bloodshed was the emotional damage the series ends up dealing out. Episode 8 forced Oz, Sofia, and Oz’s mom Franics Cobb (Deirdre O’Connell) into the same room, where Sofia applied a sadistic amount of pressure to get the Cobb family tensions to finally bubble over and explode. And, thanks to the flashback sequences in both Episodes 7 and 8 of The Penguin, we found out there were indeed several terrible secrets between mother and son, just waiting to be ignited.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW!
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The Penguin Finale once again takes us back to into the past, weeks after a young Oz (Ryder Allen) left his brothers Jack and Benny to die in a sewer tunnel that overflowed during a rainstorm. We find out that Franchis found out that Oz lied to her – that he was responsible for locking his brothers in the tunnel in order to have her all to himself. Francis doesn’t think she can live with turning a blind eye to how evil Oz truly is, so she calls local gangster Rex Calabrese (Louis Cancelmi) over and works out a plan to lure Oz out on a nice mother-son date, and then have him killed.
Francis takes Oz out to the local nightclub where they dine and dance all night – only Oz doesn’t realize it’s a final supper, and that Rex is hovering nearby to give him the “treat” of a fatal ride in his car. However, when Oz makes an impassioned speech to his mom, praising the woman she is and promising to give her the life she deserves, Francis decides to heed Rex’s earlier advice, and use Oz as her dedicated soldier in the crime world. Francis ulitmately waves Rex off, deciding to keep Oz by her side, with Rex providing him tutelage on the gangster life.
Why The Penguin Finale’s Flashback Changes Everything
There was a lot of deabt after The Penguin Episode 7 flashback about whether Oz knowingly killed his brothers, and whether or not Francis knew about it. The Episode 8 flashback answers both those questions, and adds the new twist of revealing dimensions of how Francis feels about Oz that we never knew before. By the time that Sofia has Francis’s finger in a cigar cutter, and Oz still refuses to confess the truth about his brothers, the full impact of Francis’s breakdown and her ultimate confession to Oz (that she’s always known he’s an emotionally-weak monster, and should have let Rex kill him) hits that much harder.
The ripples of impact don’t stop there: by revealing that Francis conspired with Rex to kill Oz, the show firmly establishes the sick irony of Oz’s life: that his most treasured emotional connection (his mom) and the rolemodel for his life as a gangster (Rex Calabrese) are all based on lies, from people who didn’t love him, but saw ways to use him. As much as Penugin is a mastermind, he’s also been a mark since he was just a boy, adding a layer of twisted dark humor to the fact that this series begins with Oz killing Alberto Falcone, over his self-deluded impression of Rex.
It’s also wonderfully complicated that the knot of blame between Oz being a monster by nature, and Francis being a mother who nutured that monster, is one that may never be fully untangled…
The Penguin is streaming on Max.