REVIEW: The Penguin – Episode 6, “Gold Summit”

Television Reviews

The war for Gotham’s underworld heats up in “Gold Summit,” yet another fantastic episode of The Penguin that manages to add layers to some already well-drawn characters, humanizing the show’s array of monsters and graying conflicts that were beginning to look fairly straightforward.

Sofia and Sal put their heads together to stop Oz’s proliferation of Bliss, forcing Oz to find a workaround to their new roadblock. Victor gets his hands dirty when he takes to the streets for Oz. Francis adjusts to life in the slums, which forces her to contemplate the future her dementia has in store for her.

After ending last week’s “Homecoming” scraping together what resources he could find, Oz begins “Gold Summit” in a much better position. He’s got his Bliss operation running, and he’s flooding the streets of Gotham with the new drug, utilizing smaller crews that were mostly forgotten by the Falcones and the Maronis. But, as with his initial foray into the Bliss business with Sofia, the key to success lies with the Triad, the prize marlin of the underworld. The Triad is the biggest outfit underneath the big two – who are now one – and without them, Oz’s gang confederacy will ultimately be brought to heel by his enemies. Sofia and Sal impress this upon Oz early on when they make examples of some of the criminals dealing his Bliss; Oz can talk about class warfare and make all the Bluto Blutarsky speeches he wants, but if the real bosses start piling up bodies and all he has are a few disparate street crews, he’s going to lose what little control he has.

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But this is only part of the give-and-take in “Gold Summit.” Last week, Oz made some huge mistakes that cost him ground in his war. Now, it’s Sofia’s turn to make a miscalculation, and it’s both frustrating (mostly because I really love Sofia) and in keeping with her character. When she claimed the Falcone family as her own and turned it into the Gigante family, Sofia’s masterstroke was appealing to the soldiers’ sense of neglect from the old bosses, assuring them that she’d share the wealth with them in ways Carmine and Luca Falcone never did. And when the last of the old guard, Johnny Vitti, tried to stop her, she splattered his brains all over the conference table to let her men know she was on the level. She should have done the same thing with the other gangs: tell them she’d let them have a bigger seat at the table than they had and keep more of the Bliss profits than they were used to under Carmine as long as they gave up Oz and let her and Sal take control. But she didn’t; at Sal’s behest, she had a few members of the Irish gang hanged with their pinkies cut off.

In killing the dealers, Sofia undermined her sales pitch. She’s no longer trying to bring people into her fold but threatening them not to go anywhere else. The former Falcone soldiers and Sal Maroni genuinely seem to like her because of how she treated them from the outset, but now, the other gangs will hate her, and that leaves an opening for Oz, which he immediately takes advantage of. Why did Sofia do this? Part of it was that she listened to Maroni, who she seems to like as well, maybe even regarding him as a surrogate father, one who loved his wife and children instead of murdering one and sending the other to the nut house. However, as much as she sees the differences between Maroni and her father, she misses the similarities. Maroni is an old-school mobster like Carmine, and his solution to a problem like Oz is not going to be offering benefits to the people who side with him; he’s going to leave horses’ heads in their beds. There’s also her hatred of Oz; she now knows the full extent of his treachery, particularly that Oz killed Alberto. And just as Oz gives in to his baser instincts when someone mocks him, Sofia sees red when she thinks of her dead brother.

Oz, meanwhile, pulls a Sofia and becomes magnanimous in his drug distribution when he decides to counter the fear other gangs now have of buying Bliss by giving it away for free. (Actually, forget Sofia; he cribbed this from Live and Let Die.) The idea is that getting a drug as potent as Bliss for free is simply too good an offer to pass up, even with the added danger of being hanged and losing your pinkie. It also means that Gotham’s druggies will get hooked on Bliss and demand more, meaning that once he puts this war behind him, Oz will have a huge market for his product. He even manages to convince the Triad boss (François Chau, one of those great, reliable character actors who pops up in virtually every TV show eventually) to join his team, and he does it by being honest, like Sofia was when she admitted to the Falcone soldiers that she killed the heads of the family. What makes this even better is that Oz isn’t consciously doing what Sofia would do; the two characters are cut from the same cloth, thinking similarly in their approach to organized crime. Even their weakness is the same, with both having a sore spot that makes them lose their head – and it’s cost them both big time. Two sides of the same coin are vying for control of Gotham, and it’s hard to say what will ensure the victory: which can hold on to their humanity or which can extinguish it.

They’ve also got family issues holding them back. Sofia lost her father not to an assassin’s bullet but to betrayal. When Carmine cast her out, he took her life and her sanity, but he also took the notion that she had a loving father. She’s done pretty well for herself since then – recently, at least – but she’s still got a hole that will never be filled, a place where what she thought was her father’s love once resided. While she doesn’t say so out loud, she seems to hope that Sal Maroni can be the father Carmine never could. That excellent scene in Sofia’s kitchen where Sal cooks his wife’s favorite dish mirrors the scene from “Cent’Anni” where she had dinner with Carmine and he told her he wanted her to succeed him. When she sees the lengths to which Sal will go to honor his wife and the sorrow he still feels when remembering her and his son, Sofia sees the man she thought her father was and puts her trust in him… too much. Carmine’s intentions are good (to the extent that he’s trying to help her; he still wants her to kill people), but Sofia should’ve trusted her own instincts, and she pays for it.

Meanwhile, Oz has his mother, Francis, with him, continuing to take care of her no matter how bad his circumstances get. But Francis recognizes that things are getting bad for her, that she can’t live without someone to care for her, and she makes Oz promise to kill her if she ever gets to the point where she’s essentially a vegetable. This scene is phenomenal, and Colin Farrell and Deirdre O’Connell are fantastic, stopping the crime story to slap the viewer in the face with all-too-real human drama. This conversation is every son’s nightmare, and you can see the horror in Oz’s eyes as he digests what his mother is telling him. He would gladly endure whatever tortures Sofia has in store for him before he hurt his mom, but what is the more loving thing to do when she asks this of him? This was so important because Sofia has been wonderfully humanized since the beginning, and it really came to a head in “Cent’Anni.” Oz has certainly been humanized, but we needed something to make him sympathetic, and this was perfect, putting us in his shoes as he’s forced to make peace with his mother’s mortality. And, as the final shot of the episode illuminates, Oz’s love for his mother may be his undoing. The Oz/Francis scenes didn’t do much for me in previous episodes, but the one in “Gold Summit” makes them all worth it.

Oz’s other relationships develop further in “Gold Summit,” one deepening and the other coming to a head. Victor hits the streets to distribute Bliss and runs into Squid, the dealer he used to try to avoid before the flood. Squid is the same violent thug he always was, and he wants to be a part of Victor’s business, even threatening Francis to get in. And try as Victor might to pay him off, the only way Squid is going to leave it alone is if he’s dead, so Victor shoots him. This is Victor’s first murder (unless some of the Maroni guys he hit with the car died, but there was an urgency and detachment in that instance that he doesn’t have here), and he now has a mark on his soul because of his association with Oz. When Oz finds out, he comforts Victor by telling him killing will get easier, and as much as he’s trying to help, his words solidify for Victor that this is who he is now; he’s a violent criminal, and there’s no escape for him anymore. He’s tied to Oz, who has replaced the family he lost in the way Sal has replaced Carmine for Sofia, but the circumstances are inverted; Sal has the moral decency Sofia was denied, but Oz is leading Victor into the hell his parents tried to keep him from.

Then, there’s Eve, the hooker with a heart of gold that Oz fancies as the love of his life. If Victor is the cold, hard reality of Oz’s influence, Eve is the fantasy he built in his head. Oz treats Eve like his girlfriend, showing her affection, asking her for favors outside of her trade, keeping love notes from her that he makes himself believe are genuine. But in the end, she’s just a hooker, and when push comes to shove, Oz treats her that way. He promised her no one would hurt her, yet Sofia comes knocking on her door with a gun. And in another great scene, the two women Oz abandoned connect on a level neither of them expected, breaking down the manipulative monster Oz really is at his core. He can paint himself as the scrappy champion of the people all he wants, but he’ll sell out anyone in a heartbeat, with the possible exception of his mother. And when faced with Oz’s callousness, Sofia once again shows compassion, deciding not to kill Eve even when she discovers that she helped Oz cover up Alberto’s murder. She has another chance to choose the old ways or her own, and this time, she trusts her instincts, and she’s rewarded for it. She also manages to avoid succumbing to her anger at her brother’s murder, similar to how Oz swallows the Triad boss’ use of the term “Penguin” when he rallies his troops. Both are learning from their mistakes and becoming better criminals and more dangerous adversaries. (The scene with Eve is also amazing because, once again, I had no idea what Sofia would do at any point; this character is turning into an all-timer for me.)

Now, Sofia’s got Francis and Victor, or so it appears. So, what instincts will the two main adversaries choose? Will Sofia threaten or maybe hurt an innocent woman to take down Oz? Will Oz let his mother die to save himself? I have no idea, and that makes me happy.

Let us know what you thought of Gold Summit in the comments!

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