The Penguin series finale, Episode 8 “A Great or Little Thing,” opens with aspiring crime lord Oswald Cobb (Colin Farrell) seemingly beat. Last week’s episode of the HBO hit ended with Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) blowing up his entire underground lair, ruining his lucrative drug-dealing operation. Not only that, but Sofia is holding Oz’s mother Francis (Deirdre O’Connell) hostage. With the help of boy toy psychiatrist Dr. Julian Rush (Theo Rossi), Sofia has been able to push the senile Francis back to her memories of her other two sons’ deaths, revealing her hatred for Oz in the process.
**Spoilers for The Penguin Episode 8 “A Great or Little Thing,” now streaming on Max**
Somehow, though, the HBO limited series still ends with Oz on top. Through various gambits, tricks, and betrayals, Oz Cobb has won the war to rule over Gotham’s underworld. He has officially adopted the comic book trappings of The Penguin, living it up in a penthouse and wearing his iconic tuxedo.
However, just as Oz celebrates victory, the final shot of the series reveals that he has a new enemy to worry about: none other than Robert Pattinson’s Batman. As Penguin surveys all that he has conquered, the Bat-Signal lights up the night sky, promising that a reckoning is nigh.
We knew before we even started watching HBO’s The Penguin that the plan was for the Matt Reeves and Dylan Clark-produced series to fit narratively between 2021’s The Batman and its sequel, which is currently in pre-production. It would explain how the lowly Oz Cobb we meet in the first film manages to claw his way to the top of Gotham’s crime scene. But how exactly does The Penguin set up The Batman Part 2? And what plans do Reeves and Clark have for Sofia Falcone, who ends the series receiving a letter penned by her secret half sister, Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz)?
Here’s everything you need to know about how the end of The Penguin sets up the start of The Batman 2….
The Penguin Ending Explained: Does Robert Pattinson’s Batman Appear in the HBO Show?
Hoping to see Robert Pattinson cameo in the final episode of The Penguin on HBO? Sadly, we have to disappoint you. Batman never makes a physical appearance in The Penguin. However, the final shot of the series is of the Bat-Signal, promising that Batman is on the way.
Matt Reeves told Decider that he specifically looped The Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc in on where he and The Batman sequel co-writer Mattson Tomlin hoped to introduce Oz Cobb in the next film.
“There are events — Oz will be coming into the movie in a certain realm — and so some of the things that seem narrative, those are the beginnings of threads that are going to be playing out in some sort of way. Because it is meant to connect.”
“So I was letting Lauren know what we’re doing in the movie,” Reeves said. “What that entry point is and what we’re doing. So she was, in certain ways, setting that kind of stuff up.”
What sort of “realm” could that be? We’ve not only gotten a glimpse of Gotham’s new mayor, Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson), but also confirmation that Oz is in bed with a corrupt politician with eyes on taking her place.
That said, Lauren LeFranc told Decider that by revealing Oz is now paying girlfriend Eve Karlo (Carmen Ejogo) to dress in basically drag as his mother, all while Francis withers away against her wishes on life support, we’re seeing how “delusional Oz is.”
“He’s created this narrative for himself. And to me, there’s no value in Oz achieving power without seeing the sacrifice that has also come from that and what he’s actively chosen to take away from himself,” LeFranc said. “He really loses his humanity by the end or any inkling that he had of it.”
“So technically, he has everything he said he ever wanted, but we quite literally see that it’s very far from the truth.”
A delusional villain accruing power in Gotham? Sounds like a Batman villain to me.
Will Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone Team Up With Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle in The Batman Sequel?
At the end of The Penguin, Oz Cobb doesn’t kill his main adversary, Sofia Falcone. Rather he sets up her tragic return to Arkham. The last Sofia scene of the series sees Dr. Julian Rush telling her she should read a letter from a woman named Selina Kyle who claims to be her half-sister. While we don’t get to read the contents of the letter, it offers up the possibility that the two half-sisters — both of whom had their mothers strangled to death by their villainous father Carmine Falcone (John Turturro in The Batman, Mark Strong in The Penguin) — could meet?!?
“I mean, I can only like hope,” Penguin star Cristin Milioti told Decider. “I hope they team up and like really wreck everything, you know? Like, I really hope they burn it all to the ground.”
Not so fast, though. Matt Reeves told Decider that the Selina Kyle Easter egg in The Penguin finale is “something entirely different” from the other groundwork Lauren LeFranc was doing to set up key parts of The Batman Part 2.
“We absolutely do want to do more with Selina Kyle. We are planning to do that, but what what’s in the show is really meant to be something that’s much more emotional,” Reeves said.
“That final beat, as it is in the show, is not so much about like going, ‘Hey, look, she’s coming again!’ Like you already know she’s coming in again at some point; that’s the end of Batman. Like, you know that [Bruce and Selina are] going to meet again. They have to meet again. That’s just too delicious not to do that.”
“But in this moment, it’s really about Sofia and her experience and everything she’s gone through,” he continued. “Finding her in that moment where she’s left totally alone and suddenly realizing, ‘Wait, I have a familial connection to someone else.’ There’s a resonance to that.”
Milioti concurred that it was powerful for Sofia to discover a connection to Selina in that rock bottom moment, but she’s curious how they would even get along.
“Like, yes, they share this horrible thing and there’s beauty in finding some someone who has gone through what you have gone through and that understands your pain,” Milioti said. “But also, like, they are very different.”
“I’m so interested in, well, what will that look like? You know?”
Hopefully Milioti’s work on The Penguin inspires Matt Reeves and company to bring Sofia into The Batman films so we can find out.
