‘The Penguin’ Episode Two Recap: “Inside Man”

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for episode two of The Penguin.

Episode two of The Penguin opens at Arkham Asylum during a flashback sequence where Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) receives a visit from her brother, Alberto (Michael Zegen). But Alberto gets shot by a shadowy figure, prompting Sofia to wake up from the perpetual nightmare she has been undergoing ever since she discovered what happened to him. The clue director Craig Zobel gives us in Inside Man’s dream sequence is Alberto’s cut finger, a primer that it’s all in Sofia’s tormented head, which she realizes when suddenly being brought back to reality by her therapist, Julian Rush (Theo Rossi).

As the title card appears, one quickly realizes that episode two of The Penguin will be more about Sofia attempting to discover who killed Alberto than Oz Cobb’s (Colin Farrell) plan to bring down the Falcone Crime Family by way of working with Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown) and his wife, Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who has taken over the family’s criminal operation while her husband is in prison. Oz tells Maroni that a shipment of drops about to be transported to a secure location is ripe for the taking and is giving him the key to helping them retrieve all of the drugs, which will put the Falcones in a far more vulnerable position than in the wake of Alberto’s death.

Maroni accepts taking responsibility for Alberto’s death, provided he gets all of the drops within the FEMA truck en route to Robbinsville. The action sequence itself is a spectacular display of Oz’s manipulation, forced inside the truck by Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly), because he is supervising the operation. However, he can still put his plan in motion, albeit a few minor setbacks that almost exposed Oz as a traitor for the Falcones. With the Maronis now having taken the entire supply of Drops, Sofia asks Johnny and her uncle, Luca (Scott Cohen), to find the person responsible for allowing the shipment of drugs to be stolen. She believes a rat is working for both families to bring them down and is adamant about finding out who it exactly is.

Suspecting an inside man (hence the episode’s title), Luca tells Sofia that “the when and the how” will ultimately be up to them, and her focus should be on burying her brother. However, she thinks this will take an incredible amount of time, and her mental state is so disturbed that Sofia immediately wants to know who caused this. Hiring a corrupt police detective (Craig Walker), he finds one of the men who were severely wounded in the truck heist, Ervad (Fajer Al-Kaisi), whom he kidnaps and brings to the Falcone residence for interrogation.

Meanwhile, Oz believes he will be able to get Ervad to say Johnny Viti is responsible for the heist if he can get Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) to frame him with the jewels he stole in the first episode by hiding them in his car and delivering a slew of pictures that sees him having an affair with Luca’s wife. But when Vic is unable to complete the task, he has Ervad killed and frames one of Sofia’s bodyguards, Castillo (Berto Colón), instead by planting his knife in Castillo’s pocket. This gets him immediately shot by Luca, who considers this matter resolved.

Oz and Sofia now promise to work together, but it’s clear this is not the last time we will see this plot thread, even if it could be laid to rest for a few episodes. Oz is incredibly meticulous in his plotting, regardless if he has to improvise occasionally and adapt to the curveballs thrown at him. He’s not thinking as ahead as he says he is, which makes him a weakness for the Falcones and Maronis. But he will eventually get sloppy or make one mistake that will ultimately cost him the trust he has built with Sofia, who is deeply unwell. We never see any of the elements that are insinuated about the character’s psychopathic nature, but it is bound to be revealed at some point down the line.

Some have criticized Inside Men for being too slow in its story development, but it’s probably one of The Penguin’s most essential episodes and will likely pay off in more thrilling ways than one. It not only solidifies Oz’s plan to control Gotham’s criminal underworld, playing both the Falcones and the Maronis, who seemingly fall into his traps with minute doubt lingering in their mind, but interestingly develops Sofia as the show’s primary and most menacing antagonist. It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves in subsequent episodes, but this could not be possible without Inside Men truly setting the tables for Oz, eventually coming out on top as the crime lord we have known from the comics and iterations of the character in the movies.

The second episode of The Penguin is now available to stream on Max.