This post contains spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux and the final of The penguin.

This year we have the Batman Cinematic Universe expands with two new entries: the movie Joker: Folie à Deux and the TV series The penguin. While Joker 2—Todd Phillips’ musical sequel to his hit 2019 film, joker– bombed at the box office and panned by seemingly everyone from critics to even (if online lip readers are to be believed) its own star, The penguin has increased. The HBO limited series sees heartthrob Colin Farrell once again transform into the titular DC villain he first embodied in Matt Reeves’ 2022 film The Batmantouts a favorable Metacritic score of 72 and strong viewership.

Joker 2 And The penguin actually have quite a bit in common, at least on paper. Both play with the line between antihero and villain, with Farrell’s Oz Cobb, an underrated mafia capo trying to monopolize Gotham’s drug trade, and Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, a repressed incel turned murderous edgelor. Joker 2regardless of Phillips’ intentions – after all, was this film intended as a response to the phenomenon of toxic fandoms? – ultimately fails to successfully break toxic masculinity or create any of those villains that you favor even though you know you shouldn’t. But where that film stumbled, The penguin has proven to be a good example of how to paint a trajectory from sympathetic antihero to villain. No episode makes this clearer than Sunday night’s skillful finale, “Big or small thing.”

In the episode, Oz becomes a more tragic antihero than even Shakespeare could have imagined. After his main enemy, Sofia Falcone (an exceptional Cristin Milioti), successfully kidnaps his mother, highlighting Oz’s small areas of personal weakness, some shocking events ensue. The first and biggest: Oz wins in the end – he outsmarts and defeats the remaining heads of ‘The Three Families’, who, outside of the Falcones, own the drug trade in Gotham. After quickly attacking them all, Oz smartly decides to enlist one of his trusted contacts, Councilman Hady, to talk his way into the more legitimate realm of working with the bigwigs. He brandishes this by offering up Sofia as the Fall Man for all the disruptive events that have occurred during the show’s runtime, from the bomb that decimated Crown Point’s underground tunnels to the gang violence that results from a gang war between the Falcones and a other family (a conflict Oz created, mind you). This deal also benefits the council member, who, following the arrest of the last Falcone, will be seen as responsible for ending the “drug war that has plagued the streets of this city for decades.” For the first time since the show began, Oz finally becomes what he always wanted to be: the last man standing – and in good company with the local government.

But to secure this outcome, everything else in his life must first fall apart. Oz’s mother suffers a stroke and becomes vegetative, rendering her unable to give him the “I’m so proud of you” moment he always craved. His only other desire is to be someone his mother is not ashamed of, and despite his best – now incredibly fruitful – attempts, he will never get that satisfaction. Having loved ones, as he has learned, can only be a weakness. So his next assignment is to kill his own sidekick, Victor, whom he has slowly corrupted into a dutiful, loyal right-hand man. As Victor sits on a park bench at night, after the dust settles on Oz’s master plans, Victor thanks Oz for believing in him and says they are family. Oz agrees, just before wrapping his hand around the young man’s neck and squeezing until his body goes limp.

What makes The penguin so convincing is its subversion. Oz is a protagonist you can’t help but root for – he’s an oft-derided underdog who has been underrated and underestimated all his life, whose mother berates and condescends to him, who seems dedicated to lifting up those he loves – but then he does something , such as killing his faithful sidekick, by making a sharp left turn from the hero or anti-hero area. Like the infamous one Sopranos episode “College”, this is the moment when the series, through Victor’s death, makes it clear that Oz is a villain. Over the last few episodes, we come to understand that the worst crime Oz ever committed was accidentally causing the deaths of his older brothers when he was a child. With his backstory, you realize that everything in his life led up to Victor’s blood on his hands – that he sought absolution for the crimes of his youth, but found greed more attractive. As a result of his murderous moves, he is finally at the top of the underworld, but ironically he now has no one to share it with, and not even a single person to say “I told you so” to. In many ways, the victory made him an even more tragic figure, ultimately still plagued by mistakes he made in his youth.

Joker 2 tried to teach the same final lesson, chastising us for foolishly supporting a deeply flawed antihero, but it completely missed the point. Aside from other reasons to dislike the movie – the plot barely made sense, the song choice was disappointing, some hated that it was a musical at all – the ending of the movie blew up spectacularly. As Slate’s Sam Adams notes, it merely serves up the same fodder that the previous film’s “drooling idiots” (who idolize the main character) craved, rather than turned against them. When Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur exposes his supposed identity as the Joker and proves the fantasy is instead a fallacy, he loses not only his girlfriend, but his life, when a fellow inmate at Arkham Asylum stabs Arthur to death before taking a Glasgow smile in his own face to presumably take up the mantle of maniacal clown. But Arthur’s death resonates as nothing more than the embodiment of two and a half hours of wasted time. It doesn’t undermine the idea of ​​hero or villain, nor does it complicate whether Arthur is worth rooting for. The penguin expertly does with Oz. It amounts to an empty shock value.

On the other hand, all developments are in The penguin‘s last episode bigsurprising moments – and they even pay off. The final twists undermine both the hero and villain roles while successfully complicating the audience’s desire to see Oz win. Oz may be oppressed like Arthur, but he doesn’t campaign to be Best Victim, he just campaigns to win. The penguin It took eight episodes to paint a nuanced picture of a villain with noble goals and a heart simultaneously in both the completely right and wrong places, who has both endured trauma and created countless ripples of the same across Gotham. After this finale, it’s clear that he has no fans, or rather, that being a fan of his wouldn’t save you from a six-foot hole in the ground. In the end, The penguin‘s Oz Cobb becomes someone not to argue for or against, but to watch, in more ways than one An.