The Penguin Episode 8 - The Penguin 1x08 Inside A Great Or Little Thing Season Finale The Batman spinoff series
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00:00I'm going to get you out of the Eastside, Ma, put you up somewhere real nice.
00:07In a penthouse, like you want, with a view of the whole friggin' city.
00:19Colin sent me The Ballad of Reading JL by Oscar Wilde, and in it, one of the quotes
00:24is a greater little thing, and it's about how each man destroys the thing he loves.
00:29And so, given what happens in the finale, I thought it was an apt title for it.
00:35The top of episode eight is Frances' entree, and we finally see some of Frances' backstory
00:42and the fact that she knew what Oswald did to her sons the whole time.
00:46I've got the devil in my house, Rex.
00:49Well, then maybe you let him go.
00:51What Oz doesn't know is that she's asked Rex to kill him for her.
00:55And so she says, we're going out, and then they go to a jazz club.
00:59But what Oz sees that as is a celebration of, he has his mom back.
01:03Oz sits with Frances in a booth, and he tells her, I know you miss her, Ma.
01:09And then he turns around, and he's so happy to be with his mom.
01:14That moment is meant to be just a gut punch, like something's wrong with this kid.
01:20I think it's always a question of nature versus nurture.
01:24I know Frances has shaped him, but I also know Oz shaped Frances, too.
01:29She made a choice when she chose to keep him alive.
01:32And so she made a deal with the devil.
01:34So there was a darkening by Frances because of Oz as well.
01:39Don't give up on me.
01:40She's just like, I don't have to do this tonight.
01:43And she just takes one step at a time.
01:46And then we find them in this knot all those years later.
01:52One of the things that Lauren did so brilliantly was the idea of the way that Oz understands
01:56the story versus the way that we come to understand.
01:59And this, of course, becomes a key aspect that Sophia ends up being able to exploit.
02:05Sophia brings Frances back to this rundown jazz club that has a darkness that we haven't
02:13really seen in any other instance.
02:16It's decayed, and the chandelier's fallen from the riddler's palms from the shaking.
02:20It's almost like an earthquake hit it.
02:22I pitched Lauren the theme of the jungle.
02:25Gotham is like a jungle.
02:27It's a dangerous place.
02:28And I felt that the club could play with that theme, but in an offensive way.
02:33So it's a very evocative place.
02:36Sophia has this very sophisticated group therapy session where all he has to do is this one
02:41thing and he doesn't have the cojones to do it.
02:44Just say it, tell her.
02:45It's just your disease talking, ma.
02:48I hate you.
02:49I hate you for what you did.
02:50I never stopped hating you.
02:52All these years, the sound has never come out.
02:55It's like, my baby's are dead sound.
02:58I shouldn't have let Rex kill you when I had the chance.
03:00Colin and Dee Dee are both such beasts, and what they had to do and say to each other,
03:05it's like this ultimate unmasking.
03:07But that Sophia is witnessing him hearing things from his mother that he can never unhear.
03:12You're the goddamn devil.
03:15Is enormously satisfying.
03:16There's nothing better.
03:19Up until it all sort of goes haywire.
03:26Sophia decides to leave Gotham behind, but first, before she goes anywhere, she needs
03:34to hurt Oz.
03:35It all seems great until everything goes to hell.
03:39In thinking about where that scene should be, we ended up landing on the idea of an
03:43airport because it was so great to see Sophia almost get away with it.
03:48I have always said this show is a tragedy, and so that's where you really start to feel
03:52it.
03:54What we wanted to do is Oz drive her towards the water under a bridge.
04:00It's the Elliott Bridge that's very emblematic of our class disparity in Gotham.
04:05I always knew Sophia would end up back in Arkham and that there would be a final Oz
04:09and Sophia showdown.
04:11This is a show about Oz.
04:12It's called The Penguin, and you know in some form he's going to rise above in some way.
04:20It is a fate worse than death for her to go back to that place.
04:25He really turns the tables, and there is no worse thing to happen to her.
04:29Oz wants to hurt her in the way that she has hurt him, and in his mind, once you mess with
04:34his mom, there's no going back.
04:37He's going to make sure Sophia's punished.
04:44Towards the end of the show, Victor has seen Oz at his most vulnerable.
04:48The two of those guys have been through everything together.
04:52Someone seeing his vulnerability feels like a weakness, and in Oz's opinion, he cannot
04:57achieve what he needs to achieve if he has those weaknesses around.
05:01For him to be betrayed by the person that he considers family now, after we have finally
05:06done this thing, we got to the top of the game.
05:10It made me, reading the scripts, go, wow, this guy's worse than I thought.
05:19It wasn't for nothing.
05:22The fact that he goes to such extremes because he's so broken, that's the tragedy of the story.
05:27It's Oz really in that moment when he kills Victor, killing his own heart and becoming a monster.
05:36Oz at the end of this show, he's not the Oz we left in the movie.
05:39He's progressed in his criminality.
05:42For me, it was always Oz and his mother.
05:44Oz needs his mother's love.
05:45He will get to the top, but he will not have his mother's love.
05:49She ends up in a state she never wanted to be in, that he knew she never wanted to be in.
05:53But he cannot let go of her.
05:56The story's about having to fully stare into what that desire actually gets you, which
06:04is less than nothing.
06:05It all plays out through this transactional relationship where he's getting people to
06:10play the roles in the story the way he needs them to be.
06:14And you realize just how broken he is.
06:18And Eve is an incredibly key aspect to that.
06:22Eve and Oz have a very transactional relationship.
06:26But I think they understand each other.
06:27They're both survivors.
06:29She is in this ultimate role play for him.
06:32She's really taking on the energy of his mother.
06:35She's literally taking on the wardrobe, the look.
06:39In another situation, it would have been a romantic moment.
06:42But in this series, it's a very dark moment.
06:45Now the woman who Oz pays to sleep with, he's made her into his mother by wearing his mother's dress.
06:52It was always having Eve dress up like his mother in that dress, which we established
06:57early, and see that Oz is delusional, that there is something darker in him than you
07:02might suspect.
07:05I knew that the goal of the series by the end was to have him rise to the top or get
07:11closer to that goal.
07:13But when he achieves power, that he's lost a lot of himself as well.
07:23I've always sought to make it feel operatic in ways, to have it feel very tragic in the end.
07:28So even when Oz succeeds and even when Oz gets everything he wants, I wanted it to feel tragic.
07:32And he created his own delusion in that way.
07:35It's a very twisted, twisted way to end.
07:44Gotham's yours, sweetheart.
07:48Nothing's standing in your way now.