The following review contains spoilers for the sixth episode of The Penguin, “Gold Summit”
The Penguin has been a show flush with setup. Characters both new and old, storylines, and new bits of Gotham lore all had to be introduced to make the series fit within the newly minted Batman Epic Crime Saga. And that’s what long-form television is good for; it allows those smaller moments that wouldn’t have made it into a two hour movie to survive the cutting room floor. But I can only take so much “putting the pieces into place” before I start to get a little impatient. There are a lot of storytelling moments in “Gold Summit” that needed a place to fit into the larger story of The Penguin, and some outstanding character moments for Eve and Victor come out of it. But when there’s a cliffhanger ending to every episode that makes the promise of wild things to come next week, it can start to feel like we’re never actually going to get there.
At least this cliffhanger is a solid one. It finally feels like the tensions between Oz and Sofia will reach its boiling point in the penultimate episode next week, with Sofia, having discovered that Oz still has somebody to lose, can finally pay him back for what he did to Alberto. And if she really does go through with it, that final clash will be rife with emotion on both sides, and I’ll be looking forward to watching it all play out. For now, though, it’s an exciting moment, and one of The Penguin’s better unresolved endings, even if it’s dulled a bit by the show’s overreliance on the device.
Eve finally gets her time to shine in episode 6, with the long-awaited confrontation between her and Sofia (that she kept telling Oz would happen) arriving in one of the most tense and well written scenes of The Penguin so far. It just shows how smart and capable Eve is, making Sofia reevaluate her initial analysis of the sex worker. The way Eve navigates the situation adds so much to the character, and the respect the two women end up having for one another after their “not so different, you and I” moment is really satisfying to watch.
The time focused on Victor is well spent this week, too. While it doesn’t amount to much, plot-wise, his storyline with Squid is an important one for his character. He’s been itching to get in on the action, and instead Oz has relegated him to daycare for Francis. Since the time jump this episode, though, his role has expanded. The first half of “Gold Summit” does a good job of showing how much Victor is enjoying his new responsibilities, juxtaposing that with how he looks and feels at the end. The “action” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and being a gangster might not be for him. We knew Victor was too good of a person for this life, but now that he’s seen what this life will make of him (and boy was Squid’s death scene brutal), maybe he’ll have second thoughts going forward. If he even makes it out of this show alive.
The focus isn’t really on Oz for most of “Gold Summit,” but he’s a busy guy lately. The time jump sees the Bliss business booming, and the winter weather looming, which not only gives reason for elements of both Oz and Sofia’s plans to have moved along, but it also gives Oz a great excuse to wear a very comics-inspired pea coat. But with everything moving along nicely, Oz knows that without help, he’ll never be able to move on the joined powers of the Maronis and the Gigantes. So in maybe the biggest scheme of his career – and just to show once more that communicative manipulation is his superpower – Oz pulls together the various other gangs of Gotham, and schmoozes them with a few cans of the fictitious Tricorner Gold Ale. The Penguin has gone out of its way to show off Oz’s ability to talk himself into or out of anything he wants, but this is quite the accomplishment. The execution of the scene isn’t totally convincing – it’s hard to see how or why Feng Zhao was convinced by Oz’s plan – but the series has set the precedent that people are susceptible to his manipulative ways, so I guess it can be chalked up to that.
