This year, we've seen the Batman Cinematic Universe expand with two new entries: the film Joker: Folie à Deux and the TV series The Penguin. While Joker 2 -- Todd Phillips' musical follow-up to his hit 2019 film, Joker -- bombed at the box office and has been panned by seemingly everyone, from critics to even (if we are to believe online lip-readers) its own star, The Penguin has soared. The HBO limited series that sees heartthrob Colin Farrell transform, once again, into the titular DC villain he first embodied in Matt Reeves' 2022 movie The Batman, touts a favorable Metacritic score of 72 and a strong viewership.
Joker 2 and The Penguin actually share quite a bit in common, at least on paper. Both play with the line between antihero and villain, with Farrell's Oz Cobb an undervalued mafia capo who tries to monopolize Gotham's drug trade, and Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck a downtrodden incel turned murderous edgelord. Joker 2, regardless of Phillips' intent -- was this film meant to be a response to the phenomenon of toxic fandoms, after all? -- ultimately fails to successfully skewer toxic masculinity or craft one of those villains you champion even though you know you shouldn't. But where that movie stumbled, The Penguin has proved to be a great example of how to paint a trajectory from sympathetic antihero to villain. No episode makes this clearer than Sunday night's skillful finale, "Great or Little Thing."
In the episode, Oz becomes a more tragic antihero than even Shakespeare could have dreamed. After his main enemy, Sofia Falcone (an exceptional Cristin Milioti), successfully kidnaps his mother, thus highlighting Oz's scant points of personal weakness, a few shocking turns of events ensue. The first and biggest: Oz finally wins -- he outsmarts and defeats the remaining heads of "The Three Families," who, outside of the Falcones, own the drug trade in Gotham. After pulling a fast one on all of them, Oz smartly decides to call on one of his aboveboard contacts, Councilman Hady, to eke his way into the more legitimate realm of rubbing shoulders with the bigwigs. He swings this by offering Sofia up as the fall guy for all of the disruptive events that have taken place throughout the show's run, from the bomb that decimated the underground tunnels of Crown Point to the gang violence born of a turf war between the Falcones and another family (a conflict that Oz created, mind you). This deal also benefits the councilman, who, upon arresting the last Falcone, will be seen as responsible for ending the "drug war that's plagued this city's streets for decades." For the first time since the show started, Oz finally becomes what he has always desired to be: the last man standing -- and in good, local-government company, to boot.
But in order to secure this outcome, everything else in his life has to first fall to shit. Oz's mother suffers a stroke and becomes vegetative, rendering her incapable of giving him the "I'm so proud of you" moment he has always craved. His only other wish has been to be someone his mother isn't ashamed of, and despite his best -- now incredibly fruitful -- attempts, he will never get that satisfaction. Having loved ones, as he has learned, can only be a weakness. Thus, his next order of business is to murder his own sidekick, Victor, whom he had slowly corrupted into a dutiful, loyal, right-hand man. While sitting on a park bench at night, after the dust has settled on Oz's master plans, Victor thanks Oz for believing in him and states that they are family. Oz agrees, just before he wraps his hand around the young man's neck and squeezes until his body goes limp.
What makes The Penguin so compelling is its subversion. Oz is a protagonist that you can't help but want to root for -- he's an oft-mocked underdog who has been undervalued and underestimated his entire life, whose mother berates and condescends to him, who seems dedicated to lifting his loved ones up -- but then he goes and does something like killing his loyal sidekick, taking a sharp left turn from hero or antihero territory. Like the infamous Sopranos episode "College," this is the moment when the series makes it clear, through Victor's death, that Oz is a villain. Throughout the final couple of episodes, we come to understand that the worst crime Oz ever committed was accidentally causing the deaths of his older brothers when he was a child. With his backstory, you realize that everything in his life has been leading to Victor's blood on his hands -- that he had been seeking absolution for the crimes of his youth, but found greed more enticing. As a result of his cutthroat moves, he is finally on top of the underworld, but ironically, now he has no one to share it with, and not even a single person left to say "I told you so" to. In many ways, winning made him an even more tragic figure, still ultimately plagued by mistakes he made in his youth.
Joker 2 tried to impart the same final lesson, chastising us for foolishly supporting a deeply flawed antihero, but it missed the mark in a big way. Other reasons to dislike the film aside -- the plot barely made sense, the song choices were disappointing, some hated that it was even a musical at all -- the film's ending blew up spectacularly. As Slate's Sam Adams points out, it only serves up the same fodder that the previous film's "slobbering loons" -- who idolize the protagonist -- had been craving, rather than twisting against them. When Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur denounces his put-on identity as the Joker and proves the fantasy is, instead, fallacy, he not only loses his girlfriend but also his life, when a fellow inmate at Arkham Asylum stabs Arthur to death before slashing a Glasgow smile into his own face to, presumably, take up the Maniacal Clown mantle. But Arthur's death doesn't resonate as anything but the embodiment of two and a half hours of wasted time. It doesn't subvert the notion of hero or villain, it doesn't complicate whether Arthur is worth rooting for, the way The Penguin expertly does with Oz. It amounts to empty shock value.
In contrast, all of the developments in The Penguin's final episode are big, startling moments -- and they actually pay off. The final twists and turns subvert both the hero and villain tropes while successfully complicating the audience's desire to see Oz win. Oz, like Arthur, may be downtrodden, but he's not campaigning to win Best Victim, he's merely campaigning to win. The Penguin took eight episodes to craft a nuanced picture of a villain with noble causes and a heart in both the utterly right and wrong places at the same time, who has both withstood trauma and caused innumerable ripples of the same throughout Gotham. After this finale, it's clear that he doesn't have fans -- or, rather, that being a fan of his wouldn't save you from a six-foot hole in the ground. In the end, The Penguin's Oz Cobb becomes someone not to root for or against, but to watch, in more ways than one.