Let's Dive Into that Shocking Death in the Season Finale of 'The Penguin'

The season finale of The Penguin did plenty to lay the groundwork for a potential second season of the show and for the sequel to The Batman, but perhaps the finale's most final moments involved a certain surprising death. If you watched the finale and are still reeling, or simply want to know what happened, we've got you covered.

Warning: The rest of this post contains spoilers for The Penguin season 1

In the finale, Oz kills Victor, his right-hand man, in brutal and surprising fashion. Given how much affection both the audience and Oz himself seemed to have for Victor, many wanted to know why Oz made that decision. Here's what we know.

Oz's decision to kill Victor is essentially the moment he finally becomes the heartless supervillain that he believes he needs to be. Victor made him soft, and so Oz decided to kill him to ensure that he could never be made vulnerable.

In an interview with Slate, Lauren LeFranc, the show's creator and showrunner, says that killing Victor was always a core part of the pitch for the series.

"From the very beginning, when I first came up with every character’s emotional arcs, my early pitches to [The Batman director] Matt [Reeves] always involved, one, this kid Victor, who would become the heart of the series in many ways, and two, that Oz essentially rips his heart out by the end to become the monster that he feels he needs to be in order to succeed," she explained.

Lauren added that, while Oz may feel he needs to do this, it was important to her that it not feel inevitable.

"It was really important for me that we do not justify what Oz does to Victor, and that it feels appalling and terrible and unnecessary," she explained.

The moment is genuinely surprising in the context of the episode, but Victor's suggestion that Oz is like "family" to him seems to have the wrong effect.

"Oz almost lost the sort of, quote, unquote, 'game' to Sofia because he loves his mother, and he can’t let that happen again, in his mind. The tragedy of it is how terrible it is that to Oz, that’s the wrong word," she explained.

One of the overarching goals of The Penguin was to transform Oz from the kind of lovable doofus that he was in The Batman into the kind of foe that would make Batman take notice.

It's unclear whether the show will be back for a second season, but it seems clear that The Batman 2 will come before that season is released. Wherever the story picks up, though, it's clear that Oz has become a much more menacing villain in the time since the show premiered.

All it cost him to achieve that villainy was every ounce of humanity he still had left. Killing Victor turns Oz into The Penguin, whether we like it or not.