In fact, “A Great Or Little Thing” goes so far as to suggest that Oz can’t truly understand why anyone would blame him—for anything. The episode finalizes the show’s thesis, which it’s sold us on again and again, that Oz Cobb’s greatest gift isn’t for deceiving others but himself. That his endless unwillingness to give up, and his seemingly inexhaustible font of bullshit, both stem from the same place: a constant reshaping of reality to fit the narrative endlessly running in his head. He can’t confess to killing his brothers when Sofia is threatening to cut off his mom’s finger—in the bloody “family therapy session” that kicks off the episode, once we’re through the cold open—because he’s told himself the story where he’s blameless (“City took ’em”) so many times that there’s no room left for guilt or regret. Much later in this finale, Sofia will tell him she’s saving a spot for him in hell, and he’ll scoff. It reads in the moment as the arrogance of the victorious schemer, but the deranged thing is that he’sright to dismiss the idea: As we’ll see, there is no purgatory so horrifying or grotesque that Oswald Cobb can’t tell himself is heaven.

I’ve complained in the past about the deformities that an endless gift for lying can impose on a character at the center of a story—about how having a protagonist who will say and doanything to survive, with complete conviction, robs both Cobb’s story, and Colin Farrell’s performance, of anything solid for the viewer to grasp on to. (To put it another way: Farrellcan’tproject depth when his character is pathologically incapable of possessing it.) The cleverness of “Great Or Little Thing,” then, is in how it deploys these traits as horror rather than asking us to identify with what Cobb is doing. It’s horrifying to see Oz worm his way into respectable society by spinning a (shockingly plausible) lie about the Falcone/Maroni “drug war” to his pet councilman. It’s horrifying to see the lieutenants of the various crime families fall prey to his self-serving rhetoric about the rise of the underdogs. It’s horrifying to see him do The Most Predictable Thing Ever to Vic before literally discarding him without a single glance back. And it’s especially horrifying to see what “victory” ends up looking like for the monster who would be king.

Before I get tothathorror show, though, let me circle around and say farewell to the rest of our cast before I bidThe Penguinfarewell for good. I’ve given Sofia shorter shrift than usual tonight, because she’s mostly in “overconfident antagonist” mode, doing a lot of things that donot involve shooting her nemesis in the head, in hopes of working out her Papa Falcone issues. (That’s not subtext, by the way; she pretty much says it.) Cristin Milioti gives one last gift to this show in her final sequences, though, projecting sheer joy as she finally burns the Falcone mansion to the ground. (That shot of her with three cigarettes in her mouth, getting ready to burn Carmine’s birthday watch, feels tailor-made for memes.) I’ve gushed pretty endlessly about Milioti’s work on this series, but that’s just because it’s been the textbook definition of understanding the assignment: It is not easy to play a character who’s deliberately running her manic side as hard as it can go while also keeping in touch with her humanity, but Milioti has managed it at basically every turn. I can only hope this series will take her on to bigger and better things, because she’s proved she has the chops for the big leagues.

As for Rhenzy Feliz and Vic, well…he did his best with what he was given, right? Vic has had a nice little arc throughout this season, which even gets some nice payoffs as he comes to Oz’s rescue multiple times tonight. But the fact is that this character was introduced as an adjunct to Oz, has existed only in relation to his story every step of the way, and dies tonight to demonstrate the apex of that tale. He was always going to go like this, becauseThe Penguin is not a show that can let its Symbol Of Innocence survive to the endgame. In a series that has a terrible tendency to just have characters say the point of the scene so that nobody’s confused—see Rex hamf-istedly laying out his manipulation tactics in the cold open, or Oz just begging his comatose mom to tell him she’s proud of him later on tonight—few have clunked harder than Vic telling a man who has destroyed every person he’s ever loved that he thinks of him as family and then not anticipating what happens next. He might as well have died of subtlety deficiency, instead of having his uncle-boss’ hands wrapped tightly around his throat.

Which leaves us, inevitably, with our last man waddling. In eight weeks of critiquing this show, I’ve often bemoaned the fact thatThe Penguin operates more as a collection of references to other, better shows, unwilling to be truly bold enough to do anything original. Sometimes it was an okayGotham, or a pretty lazy Sopranos, or a fitfully entertaining Breaking Bad. But it hits a genuine note that’s all its own in its final sequence tonight, as Oz—all enemies defeated, all accounts settled—comes home to his new penthouse apartment to slay that old bugbear subtext at last. He checks in on his now-comatose mother, brimming with pride at having subjected her to what he’ll never understand is a fate worse than death. Then he goes downstairs to his best girl Eve—and boy howdy, were those comments I madetwo weeks ago about the show playing up the resemblance between Carmen Ejogo and Deirdre O’Connell prescient, huh?—who’s dressed up in his mother’s old dress, dancing to his mother’s old music, and smiling as she tells mother’s old son that he’s a very good boy (while he happily calls her “Ma”). We don’t get Eve’s perspective on this latest weird and humiliating gig in what’s presumably been a long line of them, outside a few pained expressions over Oz’s shoulder. But the honest, awful truth is that we don’t need to: Oswald Cobb is the king of Gotham now, and that means what he says—andbelieves—is true. God help us all…at least, as a flickering spotlight in the sky reminds us, untilThe Batman 2.

Stray observations

• • I kept trying to place what Sofia’s black dress/red scarf combo in the jazz club scenes was evoking; it felt very Liza.
• • Serious question: Can anyone remember Theo Rossi changing his facial expression even once in this entire series?
• • Ryder White gives a nice performance as young Oz; it’s the right level of obsequious and ridiculous. Can’t quite manage Oz’s very silly “Won’t you be my prom date, Mommy?” speech, though.
• • Robert Lee Leng gets a few good moments tonight as Triad deputy Link, including socking Vic in the gut as a way to save his life when he confronts the crime bosses for abandoning Oz.
• • Poor Sofia: You can tell she worked so hard on that baby bird allegory, but she’s delivering it to a guy whose brain can’t even receive it.
• • Did they give Farrell a lighter version of his make-up in the jazz club scenes? It’s one of the only times in this show he actually looks like Colin Farrell. (Maybe it’s just the un-greased hair.)
• •Milioti is clearly having a blast playing Evil Therapist for the Cobbs.
• • There’s a fun cut to Sofia’s drops-loving detective enjoying a nice day outside…for like a second, before Oz shoots him in the head.
• • Oz’s “man of the people” schtick is 99 percent bullshit, but it is interesting to contrast his Gold Summit with Sofia’s meeting with the minor crime bosses tonight—including the fact that she pours a drink for no one but herself.
• • “You look—it’s good! No blood!”
• • I can critique the character, but it’s still fun to watch Farrell spin a compelling line of bullshit, as he does with his big speech to the councilman. “It is what it looks like.”
• • Eight episodes in, you’d be forgiven (at least until the very last second of the episode) for forgetting that this show has any connections toThe Batman, but the series’ love for needle drops does incorporate a cover of Nirvana’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”
• • Boy, the Bliss plot-line never really went anywhere, huh? Considering I was seeing online speculation that went far enough afield to suggest it meant one of our charactersmust be Batman-verse versions of Poison Ivy or Scarecrow, it turns out it really was just a more potent party drug all along.
• • A genuinely clever camera trick as Sofia prepares to get a bullet in the back of the head: the distorted lights in the background tracing a trajectory for a shot that never comes.
• • It’s not really Farrell’s fault, but having our main character just scream “Tell me you’re proud of me! Tell me I did good!” at his comatose mother has made me laugh both times I’ve watched this episode. “Ohhh, that’s what this was about. Thanks, TV!”
• • On the other hand, he has some of his finest moments of the whole show as he murders Vic. You actually believe the things Cobb’s saying—because, on some level,he does. Farrell’s complete commitment to making everything this character says sound plausible has been a double-edged sword, but once he goes as mask-off as Oswald Cobb can, it’s utterly chilling.
• • Sofia’s personal hell is, of course, a return to Arkham—complete with Dr. Rush back in charge of her care. But there is a silver lining: Amidst the usual “rants, poems, marriage proposals,” she gets a letter from Selina Kyle. We don’t see the contents—presumably they include the line “Sorry, Warner Bros. wouldn’t shell out for a Zoe Kravitz cameo”—but hearing from the only other person on the planet who truly understands what a monster her father was seems to give Sofia some measure of hope.
• • I spent way too long trying to find a deeper meaning or Easter egg behind Oz’s new apartment being in the “La Couronne” building, before realizing it’s just French for “the crown.”
• • “I know. It’s everything you wanted.” And just like that…one more promise in the trash.
• • And that’s a wrap on The Penguin! I know I’ve been hard on this series, but it’s the kind of critique mostly predicated on obvious potential in clear danger of being squandered. Three great performers at the top of the cost, lots of source material to work from, and a fine creative pedigree, and the end result was a show with some very dull lows to counterpoint the very high highs. In the final sum, Sofia Falcone wasprobably worth the price of admission, and the quality of tonight’s finale bumps my estimation up a notch. But that doesn’t mean it’s not hard to imagine sitting through a hypothetical season two.

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