The Penguin Recap: Episode 7 - Top Hat

Ash Walker • 04 Nov 2024 Features

“I keep trying on all these faces, but none of them feel quite right.”

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Wow, that episode really flew by. Just like this whole series, really - how is there only one episode left?!

The penultimate episode opens with another flashback, this time finally going back to Oz’s troubled childhood. In a few short scenes we get more of his unhealthy relationship with his mother, plus we meet his ill-fated brothers, Jack and Benny, and get a sense of just how much Oz doesn’t fit in with the rest of his family.

Speaking of those brothers, we also learn the truth about what happened to them. Last week, Oz (Colin Farrell) told Victor (Rhenzy Feliz) that ‘the city took them’ which, it turns out, is sort of true.. after a fashion. More accurately, Oz himself killed them for belittling him, by locking them in a storm drain and leaving them to drown.

You can see why he might leave that part out.

Look, maybe you could argue that Jack and Benny’s deaths were accidental - maybe Oz didn’t know that they would be trapped down there with no way out, or that there was a huge storm coming - but the kid certainly did nothing to help his brothers, and there doesn’t seem to be a shred of remorse in him.

Oz can be so funny and charming that it’s easy to overlook some of his more troubling behaviour, but this scene really hammers home how much of a monster he really is. How much of a monster he’s always been. And it’s totally chilling.

Back in the present day, Oz discovers the apartment broken into, Victor unconscious on the floor and his mother missing. She’s been taken by Sofia (Cristin Milioti), and Oz himself is quickly scooped up by Sal Maroni (Clancy Brown) and his goons, who force him to share the location of his Bliss operation. After getting a few kicks in, of course.

Down in the sewers, Oz once again manages to claw his way out of a slippery situation. Sal winds up dead of a heart attack - and shot several times for good measure - and Oz thinks the tables are beginning to turn. He calls Sofia and offers her the Bliss operation in exchange for his mother, safe and sound.

It’s clearly a trap - as psycho psychiatrist Julian Rush (Theo Rossi) helpfully points out - but Oz has once again underestimated Sofia.

She’s had something of an existential crisis, kicked off by comments made by Francis Cobb (Deirdre O'Connell). Sofia realises that she’s just perpetuating her father’s ambitions - playing her father’s game, as she puts it.

He wanted her to run the Falcone family after his death, which is exactly what she’s doing, and no amount of rebranding will change that. And so Sofia decides that she must throw all of that aside and become her own thing.

Which, as it turns out, is a full-on super villain. As she says: people assumed she would die in Arkham, but instead she learned a few things.

She sends a car bomb to the meet-up with Oz, destroying his Bliss operation and all of his men - not to mention a big chunk of Crown Point. Oz survives by hiding in the same storm drain that his brothers drowned in (some nice poetic symbolism there), but is quickly picked up by Sofia’s pet cop, Detective Wise (Craig Walker).

The episode ends with another bookending flashback, this time showing the story that Oz told Sofia way back in Episode 2, about how his mother clawed her way out of grief after the deaths of her sons and took the two of them dancing. But, we learn, he left out the part where she made him promise to give her everything she wants, everything she deserves.

Oz’s reply? “I ain’t gonna quit ‘til I do.”

Easter Eggs & Comic Connections:

• Oz’s brothers, Jack and Benny, previously appeared in the comic miniseries Penguin: Pain & Prejudice by Gregg Hurwitz and Szymon Kudranski, where they were also unceremoniously bumped off - although in much more brutal and direct fashion.
• The scene of Oz gloating over a dying Sal Maroni - “I got you! I got you!” - echoes his reaction to seemingly killing the Caped Crusader in The Batman. He just can’t help but take credit, even if he had little to do with his own victory, as in both of these cases.

Shout-Outs:

• The tension in the drowning scene is just unbearable - cutting back and forth between Oz and his mother, warm and cosy and watching Top Hat, and the cold, dark, immovable hatch on that storm drain, filling with water. It just fills you with dread. Great stuff.
• The actor playing young Francis Cobb - Emily Meade - got the older version’s mannerisms down perfectly, and she looks so much like Deirdre O'Connell that they could be related.

Verdict: Another barnstorming episode, full of chilling revelations, explosive action and shock character deaths - par for the course at this point. Bring on the series finale!

The Penguin airs every Monday at 9pm on Sky Atlantic, and can be streamed from 2am the same day.