Review: The Penguin, “A Great or Little Thing” | Season 1, Episode 8
Time to look clean
“Oswald Cobb…man of the people.”
By now, it’s old hat for various online outlets to speak to the showrunners of big TV shows once their seasons conclude. So it’s not surprising that in the minutes after the end of The Penguin, there have been a handful of interviews with Lauren LaFranc, who’s also credited with writing “A Great or Little Thing.” The one that caught my eye most was from Sam Adams at Slate, because he starts not just with the vicious, cold-blooded murder that serves as the grim period on this eight-episode limited series, but by also boiling it down into a very simple question with a very not-simple answer: “Why?”
Within the climactic moment, the answer to “Why would Oswald Cobb strangle his closest associate and confidant, Victor?” is meant to be that the sociopathic Oz believes that his real or assumed family can only drag him down on his quest for power. He’s gotten to see what his actual family thinks of him, as his mother has her last fully lucid moment at the same time that she’s being threatened with losing a pinky finger, and calls him the devil for having killed his two brothers when he was still a kid. And while Victor—sweet, kindly, and naïve to the very last moment—sees Oz as some kind of perverse father figure, Oz sees Victor as an albatross that he needs to remove from his neck. It is a testament to the power of Colin Farrell as an actor that Oz seems to show even a whit of hesitation or bitter sadness at the act he performs, but it is still immensely cruel and unnecessary, not only within Oz’s journey, but within the show as a whole. (I don’t know Sam Adams well, I should note, but I find it telling that he keeps noting—correctly—that there is “no need” for Victor’s death.)