If you haven’t been watching The Penguin, you should get on that. The show has been doing a stellar job of showing a comic book crime boss on the rise and doing so in a much more grounded fashion than the larger tapestry of DC Comics and Batman would suggest. For the most part, the show requires zero knowledge of events from the 2022 Matt Reeves film the show is based on. However, the show’s third episode, “Bliss,” was greatly rewarding for those in the know.
Episode three began with us learning more about Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), the teenager who we’ve seen slowly becoming Oz’s (Colin Farrell) right hand man. Victor is home with his family, his friends, we get to see a little bit of what makes him human. At a certain point, Victor and his girlfriend are looking out at Gotham City and talking about how beautiful it is. She suggests, though, that people in Gotham don’t feel the same about their neighborhood of Crown Point. At about this moment, they hear what they expect to be fireworks only…it’s not fireworks. It’s explosions. One after the other and that’s when it all clicks into place if you’ve seen The Batman.
What we’re seeing is The Riddler’s plan to blow up the sea wall but from the point of view of the damage path. The water begins flooding Victor’s street and we see it rise up and smash into his apartment building, killing his entire family.
Things move on from there but we just wanted to marvel (pun intended) at the storytelling here. First of all, there’s the reveal that you’re watching a flashback. It’s wholly possible at the start that Victor just has the night off from working with Oz. But, once we realize this is happening in the timeline of the film – set a few months before the show – things change. If you’ve seen the movie, you absolutely get a sense of the destruction Riddler created. But here, in the third episode of The Penguin, we feel it on a whole other level.
Victor may not be the lead on The Penguin, but he’s the audience. The newcomer with a front row seat as a gangster lies, cheats, and steals his way to the top of Gotham. We like him, feel for him, and feel huge emotional impacts from his choices. And here, because of what the Riddler did to his family, we better understand the situation he’s in. We have a greater grasp on why he’s latching on to Oz and, we’d imagine, it’ll have repercussions for the rest of the show.
These are all things that, if you’re just watching The Penguin as a casual viewer, you get to an extent. All you really need to grasp is “explosions killed Victor’s family.” But, if you’ve seen The Batman, you know who did it and why they did it—and everything is that much more tragic. It’s phenomenal use of the show’s franchise status without really flaunting it.
The Penguin is now streaming on Max.
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