‘The Penguin’ Episode Three Recap: “Bliss”

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

As I stated last week, things would heat up in The Penguin now that the table setting has been laid out. Of course, that doesn’t mean director Craig Zobel and writer Noelle Valdivia won’t subvert expectations in its third episode, Bliss, particularly regarding the conclusion. However, we’re now laser-focused on developing not only the relationship between Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) and Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) but Victor Aguilar’s (Rhenzy Feliz) arc as a lost teenager sadly being led into a path of darkness. 

The episode begins with a flashback set during the events of The Batman, where Victor and his girlfriend, Graciela (Anire Kim Amoda), watch The Riddler’s (Paul Dano) plan unfold in front of their eyes. However, the seawall flooding the streets of Gotham also causes Victor’s house to drown, with his parents inside it. It’s a tragic sequence that’s further exacerbated during a scene where Victor has an anxiety attack in the middle of a drug drop and sees flashes of the explosion killing his family, thinking if what he’s doing is sending him in the right direction.

The episode devotes most of its focus on Vic, who grapples with the moral responsibility of working with one of Gotham’s most ruthless gangsters, which introduces him to the criminal underworld, or leaving this life behind before it’s too late and starting anew with Graciela. Early in the episode, as Sofia introduces Oz to a new drug called “Bliss,” Graciela visits Victor in Oz’s apartment. She tells him of her plan to leave Gotham first thing tomorrow evening and asks her to join him. Initially scared that Oz will kill him for having seen far too much, he refuses but changes his heart when she proposes to buy his ticket away from here. 

The challenge now is to either tell Oz, who is now doing business with the Chinese triads to sell his new drug, or leave at an opportune time. He chooses the latter but is subconsciously being drawn into the life of crime, reaping the rewards of corruption at a level he didn’t imagine before being coerced into partnering with Oz. The perfect representation of this occurs when he is pulled over by a police officer, with the car he’s driving illegally parked in front of Feng Zhao’s (François Chau) club. Frisking him, the cop finds over $1,000 in his pocket, to which he says, “That’s a lot of money for a kid to be carrying around.”

Thinking for a second, Victor replies, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any money.” The police officer then says, “Guess not.” This scene is an integral moment of Victor’s shift into criminality, and he’s now fully reached a point of no return. Even when Oz finds out about his plans to leave with Graciela, he allows him to leave because he thinks he deserves a chance to start fresh. But after Victor tells him of his stint with the police officer, he knows that he’s made for a life of crime, which is why it feels more like a test of allegiance than fully respecting Victor’s wishes to leave Gotham behind.

However, when Victor arrives at the bus station and sees Graciela waiting for him before boarding, he has no courage to leave the vehicle and take the ultimate step toward a better life. He’s “in it now,” as expressed by Oz later during the episode’s climax, and cannot go back to the life he had, even if his heart tells him to. It’s a heart-wrenching shift that occurs in sixty brilliant minutes, anchored by another terrific portrayal in the comic book universe from Rhenzy Feliz after previously leading Marvel’s Runaways for three seasons.

As far as Sofia and Oz’s relationship goes, it seems to have primarily improved itself, even though there are holes in their arc longing to be revealed. One of those is a pivotal point that led Sofia to be imprisoned at Arkham, which will likely be developed in subsequent episodes. The other plot thread could change who we think the identity of the ‘Hangman’ is, especially after Oz tells Victor “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.” Regardless, the Oz/Falcone partnership may be short-lived since the episode ends with an attack by Nadia Maroni (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who has been watching Oz the entire time and knows he’s been playing both families all along. Oz escapes with Victor but leaves Sofia behind.

In fact, Victor is the one who rescued Oz after ramming his car into the Maronis’ armored truck. His transition is complete. He will likely never see his past life behind. Whether this will reward him in any way remains to be seen, but it certainly won’t end well for someone…

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