Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for episode eight of “The Penguin.”

CNN
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After our interview was over, it was Colin Farrell’s turn to ask questions. He stood up and led me to one side of a busy junket room. Farrell wanted my take on the finale of “The Penguin.” “I know it was dark,” he said, a hint of concern on his famous eyebrows. “But was it? at dark?”

We spoke in September, after the first episode aired, when few people had seen or anticipated how pitch-black HBO’s spinoff “The Batman” would become (HBO, like CNN, is part of Warner Bros. Discovery ).

Sure, life was cheap, Arkham Asylum was miserable, and Gotham’s institutions were corrupt. So far, so normal for a story set in the Batman universe. But the series that followed Oz Cobb’s rise from the gutter to crime kingpin dove headfirst into the darkness in its home segment. The audience saw fratricide, attempted infanticide, and a kink involving Oz’s mother (somehow worse than it sounds). Then there was the murder of Oz’s right-hand man Victor Aguilar, which provided episode eight’s most heartbreaking scene.

Many months after filming, Farrell still appears cut to pieces. That day on set, he recalled, was the toughest of a long shoot, interrupted by the SAG attack.

“Honestly… I know it’s just acting, and gosh, I’ve been doing it long enough. You go home, take off your costume and go back to your life. But some scenes go deeper than others,” he recalled.

To recap: Victor, played by Rhenzy Feliz, became entangled in the world of Oz when he was caught trying to steal Oz’s Maserati in episode one. Orphaned by the events of ‘The Batman’, the naive teen was taken under Oz’s wing and pushed to increasingly higher tasks by his new boss, proving his loyalty. Theirs was one of the few relationships in “The Penguin” that didn’t turn from loyalty to betrayal every half episode. But once Oz defeated the Falcones and Maronis to become Gotham’s top dog, Victor became a dangling wire, connecting Oz back to his past life and his beloved mother. Victor had to go. And at the moment of their victory, Oz strangled him on a park bench overlooking the city, leaving his body in the mud and making the death look like a robbery.

“We had a lot of time to prepare and think about it. There was a lot away between (Oz) and Victor and the friendship we had,” Farrell said.

“The crew was really invested in the story – we had spent a year together – and the atmosphere on set that night was quite somber,” he said. “Everyone, the focus pullers, the camera operators, the boom operators, the craft service… it was really not pleasant. We all knew what had to be done; it was just fiction. But it was so dark and it was so ugly and so unjustifiable.

“We went through it as quickly as we could,” Farrell added. “Everyone was very clear and we flew through it. But it was really ugly.”

The scene, which begins with Victor thanking Oz “for taking a chance on me” and calling him family, ends with him pleading as he takes his last breaths. It’s brutal and unflinching, with a shock factor up there with some of the biggest TV deaths of this century – like Christopher Moltisanti, euthanized by his ‘uncle’ (actually his cousin) Tony in ‘The Sopranos’, or Hank, Walter White’s brother-in-law , in the middle of a punch gone sideways in “Breaking Bad.”

Like Moltisanti’s death, Victor’s murder is motivated by a similar self-interest. “Family: it is your strength. It drives you. Fk, if it doesn’t make you weak too,’ Oz thinks, putting his hand against Victor’s throat. “And I can’t have that anymore.”

For all his disgust, Farrell said he could see how Oz justified himself. “One of the greatest pains of loving is being more vulnerable and possibly more tenacious than you could ever be,” the actor said.

‘If you have a child, you may realize that you are capable of murder to protect your child. And you are also capable of being hurt in ways that you as an individual could never have imagined because of the love you have for that child of yours.”

Oz makes the disturbing choice to kill a weak spot rather than protect it (while keeping his other weak spot, his mother, on life support in appalling conditions, despite being brain dead). In doing so, he loses any claim to being the Robin Hood or Pablo Escobar-esque character he thinks he is, according to Farrell.

“He says to Victor in episode five or six, ‘Imagine you’re the guy helping people, and the people watching are making a difference in people’s lives.’ So it’s very important to (him) and I think this is probably where he exists at his most beneficent self. I think it is very sincere that he wants to help people; that he knows what it is like to live under the blessing of poverty.

But Farrell added: “If there is a choice between serving himself and serving others, he would always put himself first.”

By the end of the series, Oz had proven as much. Alone at the top of the world, without rising any further, The Penguin can only go one way. We’ll have to wait until “The Batman Part II” in 2026 to see how far he can fall.