The Penguin would take place only a few weeks before the events of Suicide Squad. It was a loose adaptation of Gotham Underground and War Games, with some influence from Batman Eternal, but we had reworked the material into an eight-episode crime drama centered almost entirely on Oswald Cobblepot.
There were some major differences from the comics. Stephanie Brown would not accidentally set off one of Batman's contingency plans, and Batman himself would not go undercover inside Gotham's criminal world as he had in Gotham Underground. Instead, Penguin would be the central point-of-view character, allowing the audience to experience Gotham's criminal ecosystem through someone who had survived inside it for years and understood exactly how dangerous the city became whenever its usual balance disappeared.
Black Mask would be the main opposing force, but the series would also use Scarface, Firefly, Victor Zsasz, Professor Pyg, Killer Moth, Mad Hatter, and several smaller criminals to make Gotham feel much larger than the handful of villains who normally appeared in Batman's films.
The first episode began with a simple fact.
Batman had not been seen for three weeks.
At first, Oswald considered this excellent news.
Business at the Iceberg Lounge improved almost immediately. Men who normally disappeared before midnight stayed until closing. Illegal shipments moved through the harbor without suddenly being intercepted by Batman. Protection payments arrived on time because nobody was losing half their operation to Batman every other week, and even some of Gotham's wealthier criminals began appearing in public again.
For perhaps the first week, Oz enjoyed it.
Then he began noticing other things.
People were becoming brave.
Stupidly brave.
Low-level crews started robbing businesses outside their territory. Two young idiots held up a jewelry store three blocks from GCPD headquarters because, apparently, the absence of Batman had convinced them that ordinary police officers no longer existed either.
Oz understood something most of them did not.
Batman was not merely Gotham's greatest enemy.
He was part of Gotham's criminal ecosystem.
Everyone understood the boundaries because there was always something waiting beyond them. You could steal, extort, smuggle, and sometimes even kill if you were careful enough, but there were certain lines you did not cross unless you wanted Batman tearing through your operation before sunrise. Even the most unstable criminals accounted for him in their planning.
Without Batman, those boundaries were disappearing.
Oz quietly contacted several people he had inside the GCPD. None of them knew where Batman was. The Bat-Signal had gone unanswered for weeks, Gordon refused to discuss the matter publicly, and rumors were already spreading through both the police and criminal communities that perhaps something had finally happened to him.
Before Oz could learn more, Black Mask made his move.
Black Mask's men attacked one of Penguin's harbor shipments in the middle of the night, killing several guards and stealing an entire shipment of weapons. They deliberately allowed three survivors to escape so there would be no confusion over who had done it.
Black Mask wanted a war.
Penguin refused to give him one.
Instead, he called a gathering of Gotham's major criminal interests at the Iceberg Lounge, bringing together bosses, brokers, and representatives from organizations that normally would not have sat in the same room without weapons drawn.
Black Mask arrived with half a dozen armed men and behaved from the moment he entered as though the building already belonged to him.
Oz did not rise to the provocation.
He explained that Batman would return. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe in a month, but eventually he would return, and whoever turned Gotham into an open war zone before that happened would become the first person Batman came looking for.
Black Mask laughed him off.
He accused Oz of spending so many years surviving Batman that he had become incapable of imagining Gotham without him. According to Black Mask, the entire city had spent too long behaving as though Batman were some natural law that could never be challenged.
Oz told him there was a difference between fear and understanding consequences.
Black Mask did not care.
"Gotham belongs to whoever takes it."
Several of the smaller bosses clearly liked what they heard.
By the end of the meeting, Oz knew he had already lost some of them. Within hours, multiple crews abandoned agreements they had maintained with Penguin for years and began approaching Black Mask instead.
Black Mask made sure there was no possibility of repairing things quietly.
One of Oz's captains was dragged from his home, taken into the street, and publicly executed by Black Mask's men. The killing was recorded, and the video was sent to nearly every criminal organization operating in Gotham.
Oz watched it alone in his office.
His lieutenant stood nearby, barely able to contain his anger.
"What are we going to do?"
Oz poured himself a drink.
"Nothing."
The lieutenant stared at him.
"Nothing?"
Oz watched the final seconds of the recording again before turning off the screen. "Not yet."
That was where the first episode ended.
The second episode expanded the conflict and finally brought Nightwing and Robin into the story.
Dick Grayson had already received significant development throughout the DCU, but Jason Todd had barely been given enough screen time to establish who he actually was beyond being the new Robin. The show gave us a chance to correct that by showing the two of them trying to hold Gotham together without Bruce.
Black Mask continued expanding through the East End. Businesses that had paid Penguin for years suddenly began paying Black Mask instead. Trucks carrying Oz's merchandise disappeared before reaching their destinations, while several smaller crews changed sides after Black Mask made brutal examples of those who refused him.
Oz still would not give Black Mask the open war he wanted.
Instead, he started dismantling pieces of Black Mask's organization quietly.
Then he noticed something useful.
Nightwing and Robin were trying to cover Gotham in Batman's absence.
They were stretched thin, responding to robberies, gang violence, weapons trafficking, and all the other crimes that had increased since Batman disappeared. Dick understood how badly the city was beginning to slip, while Jason was becoming increasingly frustrated by what he saw as everyone taking advantage of Bruce being gone.
Oz decided to use them.
He anonymously leaked the location of a major Black Mask weapons depot to the police, knowing the information would eventually reach Nightwing.
The resulting raid became one of the major action sequences of the episode.
Nightwing and Robin attacked the depot. Dick moved almost effortlessly between opponents, redirecting attacks and controlling the fight, while Jason was more direct and much angrier.
The weapons were seized.
Several of Black Mask's senior men were arrested.
Millions of dollars in equipment disappeared from his organization overnight.
Oz watched the news coverage from his office at the Iceberg Lounge.
For the first time since the conflict began, he smiled.
There was something deeply satisfying about using Batman's own people to destroy one of his competitors without ever needing to put his own men in danger.
Unfortunately, Black Mask was not stupid.
Black Mask immediately realized that somebody had known exactly where the shipment was, when it would arrive, and how many people would be guarding it. He began searching his organization for informants, and several of his own men disappeared over the following days as paranoia spread through the group.
Meanwhile, Oz encountered someone he had barely considered important before.
Arnold Wesker.
Wesker appeared at the Iceberg Lounge looking like an anxious little accountant who had accidentally wandered into the wrong building. He carried a wooden ventriloquist dummy called Scarface and claimed to represent a neighborhood protection racket operating across several smaller sections of Gotham.
Oz barely paid attention at first.
Then Scarface started talking.
The change in Wesker was immediate enough to catch even Oz off guard. The nervous little man who had barely been able to maintain eye contact suddenly became threatening, arrogant, and openly insulting while speaking through the puppet. Scarface mocked Penguin's appearance, questioned his ability to control his own territory, and threatened consequences if Oz attempted to interfere with his organization.
Oz looked into Wesker afterward and discovered that the man had spent years staying just small enough to remain beneath Batman's attention while still building something significant in the neighborhoods nobody else cared about.
The episode ended with Black Mask escalating the conflict again. He publicly announced rewards for information concerning Penguin's businesses, shipments, safe houses, employees, and personal movements. The amount offered was large enough that it immediately attracted attention throughout Gotham's criminal world.
Within hours, reports began reaching Oz that several of his own men were quietly asking how much Black Mask was paying.
That was the moment he understood that the war was no longer happening outside his organization.
It had entered it.
Episode Three was where Oz stopped treating Black Mask as a territorial problem and began treating him as a business problem.
Black Mask's greatest vulnerability was not manpower. He could always recruit more gunmen, buy another crew, or frighten smaller gangs into working for him. What he actually needed was money, and money in Gotham required an enormous support system.
Oz had spent decades building relationships with the people who made all of that possible.
So he began closing doors.
Cargo companies that had previously accepted Black Mask's shipments suddenly claimed they had no available capacity. Officials who had once taken reasonable bribes began demanding twice as much. Several suspicious transfers were flagged before they could clear. One nightclub Black Mask used to launder money unexpectedly lost its license after an inspection found enough violations to shut it down indefinitely.
For several days, the strategy worked beautifully. Black Mask's expansion slowed.
Oz was beginning to enjoy himself when people connected to his own financial network started dying.
The first was an accountant.
Then a businessman.
Then a union representative who had helped move cargo through the docks for years.
A lawyer was found dead in his car two nights later.
Oz immediately understood what Black Mask had done.
The killer made another attempt against one of Oz's accountants, but this time Penguin's men were waiting.
They captured Victor Zsasz.
Oz had heard of him, of course. Everybody in Gotham's criminal world had heard stories about Zsasz, though most of them contradicted one another. What was clear was that the man was a professional killer with very little concern for who paid him, provided the work interested him.
Oz could have killed him.
Instead, he offered him more money.
Zsasz listened to the number, smiled, and accepted without hesitation.
Elsewhere, Black Mask approached Scarface with an offer of his own.
Scarface refused.
Black Mask responded by murdering several of Wesker's men.
That pushed Scarface toward Oz, and the two formed an alliance. Oz needed bodies, territory, and someone whose organization had not yet been compromised by Black Mask. Scarface needed protection and access to Penguin's infrastructure.
The deal made sense.
That was where Episode Three ended.
Episode Four introduced another problem spreading through Black Mask's territory.
At first, Oz heard stories about men taking some new drug that suppressed fear almost completely. A group of users opened fire on police officers in broad daylight without even attempting to escape. Another gang stormed a rival building without cover or planning and lost almost everyone involved.
The drug did not simply remove fear.
With repeated use, it also produced paranoia, aggression, and eventually psychotic violence.
Oz banned it immediately from every territory connected to him.
Black Mask did the opposite.
He kept selling it.
Oz's people eventually traced the drug back to Jervis Tetch, who had been modifying old research connected to Jonathan Crane. Black Mask had been financing the experiments because he wanted soldiers who could not be intimidated by Batman, Nightwing, or Robin whenever Gotham's vigilantes eventually came for him.
Oz's first instinct was obvious.
Leak the laboratory to Nightwing.
Let Batman's sidekicks tear another hole in Black Mask's organization for him.
Then he stopped himself.
He had already used that trick once.
Instead, Oz sent his own people into Tetch's laboratory with orders to steal the research before Black Mask could stabilize the formula. If Penguin possessed the formula, he could destroy it, sell it, or simply hold it over Black Mask depending on what became useful later.
The operation went badly almost immediately.
Nightwing and Robin arrived independently after tracking the drug through their own investigation. Oz's men found themselves trapped between Tetch's armed guards and two vigilantes who assumed everyone inside the laboratory belonged to the same operation.
Several of Penguin's men were arrested.
The research vanished during the chaos.
Tetch escaped.
Oz gained absolutely nothing.
Later that night, Oz received a message from Black Mask.
It contained only a photograph.
One of the men arrested at Tetch's laboratory had been released on bail earlier that evening.
Black Mask's people had reached him first.
There was no accompanying threat because none was necessary.
Black Mask now knew Penguin had attempted to steal the research.
For the first time since the war began, Oz looked genuinely worried.
Episode Five was where Black Mask stopped attacking Penguin's empire and started attacking Oswald Cobblepot personally.
People began disappearing.
Drivers.
Couriers.
A bartender from the Iceberg Lounge.
At first, Oz assumed Black Mask was interrogating them and disposing of anyone who refused to cooperate.
Then one of them came back.
The man had been mutilated so badly that several of Oz's people could not remain in the room while doctors treated him. Between drugs, pain, and terror, he managed to tell them who had done it.
Professor Pyg.
Black Mask had been using Pyg to extract information from captured members of Penguin's organization, allowing him to indulge himself provided he obtained something useful first.
The problem was that Pyg had stopped following instructions.
He was no longer restricting himself to criminals who possessed valuable information. He had begun taking anyone who interested him.
Oz was furious, though not because he had suddenly discovered some heroic concern for Gotham's civilians. Pyg represented chaos without purpose, just like that fool Joker.
Oz sent Zsasz to kill him.
That became one of Penguin's most important mistakes because Oz believed he understood Zsasz.
He believed money and professional self-interest would keep him predictable.
Zsasz did not kill Pyg.
Soon afterward, one of the oldest employees at the Iceberg Lounge was abducted. The employee had appeared throughout the series and had worked for Oz long before the current war began.
Oz's men eventually found the body mutilated.
Black Mask struck again before Oz had time to recover.
Using information extracted through Pyg, his men raided one of Penguin's financial safe houses and obtained records connecting Oz to politicians, police officers, union officials, legitimate businesses, and shell companies across Gotham.
Black Mask did not release everything.
That would have been wasteful.
He leaked selected pieces instead.
Police raids began almost immediately. Several politicians stopped taking Oz's calls, banks froze accounts, and respectable businesses that had worked with him quietly for years began distancing themselves.
For the first time, the legitimate infrastructure surrounding Penguin's criminal empire started collapsing.
Oz eventually located one of Pyg's facilities himself, and in the ensuing confrontation, Pyg was killed.
Black Mask called afterward.
He told Oz that Penguin had spent years pretending he was somehow better than Gotham's lunatics. Now Black Mask had finally dragged him down into the dirt with everyone else.
The episode ended back at the Iceberg Lounge.
It was closed.
The tables were empty, the music was gone, and no customers filled the room. Half of Oz's accounts were inaccessible, politicians who had spent years accepting his money were suddenly refusing to answer their phones, and several of his lieutenants were quietly discussing whether remaining loyal to Penguin was still the safest option.
Oz sat alone inside the darkened Lounge and listened to them.
For the first time in the series, he had no immediate answer.
This was his lowest point yet.
The final three episodes were where Oz started taking his share of Gotham back.
Episode Six opened with the consequences of everything Black Mask had done to him.
One of the strangest people helping Black Mask's expansion was Drury Walker, who had begun calling himself Killer Moth.
At first, Oz had dismissed him as another costumed idiot trying to make a name for himself in a city already filled with them. Then the reports started coming in.
Killer Moth had built a business around protecting criminals from vigilantes.
If a crew expected Nightwing or Robin to interfere with a shipment, they could hire Killer Moth. He studied how the vigilantes operated, supplied specialized weapons, prepared escape routes, placed spotters around operations, and occasionally appeared personally when things went wrong.
Several Black Mask operations that should have been easy targets survived encounters with Robin because Killer Moth had prepared specifically for him. Jason became increasingly frustrated as criminals kept escaping his grasp.
Then Oz discovered what had happened with Zsasz.
Oz had purchased Zsasz's loyalty, and Black Mask had simply purchased it back.
With the city becoming more violent every night, Oz finally did something he would have considered unthinkable at the beginning of the season.
He approached Nightwing and Robin directly.
The meeting was tense from the first second.
Oz made them an offer.
A temporary alliance.
He told them that Black Mask had grown too large for either side to remove efficiently on its own. Penguin had information, informants, and people inside Black Mask's organization. Nightwing and Robin had the ability to hit places Oz could not touch without triggering another open gang war.
For once, their interests aligned.
End Black Mask's war.
Then they could go back to hating each other.
They accepted.
Oz did not suddenly start sharing everything. He gave them just enough information to make themselves useful.
At the same time, Black Mask decided that he now controlled enough of Gotham's criminal world that his next proposal no longer sounded completely ridiculous.
A meeting was called involving the remaining major organizations, and Black Mask presented his vision for Gotham.
Batman had been gone for weeks.
Nobody knew when he would return.
For the first time in years, Gotham's underworld had a chance to organize itself before Batman could stop it.
One army.
One organization.
One king.
Black Mask expected Oz to object.
He did.
Just not for the reason everyone expected.
Oz told the room that Black Mask had misunderstood Gotham. Falcone had tried to be king. Maroni had tried. Rex had tried. Others before them had attempted the same thing under different names, and every one of them had eventually created something so large that Batman, the police, or the people beneath them decided it had to die.
Black Mask laughed and accused Penguin of objecting only because he would not be the one sitting on the throne.
Oz smiled.
"Of course I'd rather it were me."
Several people laughed.
Then Oz leaned forward.
"But I'd still be wrong."
Oz did not argue that Black Mask was too weak to rule Gotham. He argued that the idea itself was stupid. Gotham's criminal world survived because it was fragmented. Black Mask wanted to take everything that made Gotham's underworld resilient and place it beneath one man.
Tempers began rising exactly as Oz hoped they would. Smaller bosses started questioning what Black Mask's "unity" actually meant for their own territories. Some wanted guarantees. Others wanted percentages. One openly asked why Black Mask should be king rather than anyone else.
Black Mask realized too late that Oz had not come to stop the meeting.
He had come to poison it.
The order went out to kill him.
Gunfire erupted across the room.
Oz survived only because several of Black Mask's own men had quietly been taking Penguin's money for weeks.
Oz lost several men and barely reached the street alive.
Then Scarface's men appeared.
Wesker had understood the same thing Oz had. If Black Mask killed Penguin and completed his consolidation of Gotham, Scarface would be next. His people attacked Black Mask's crews from the side and created enough confusion for Oz to escape.
Back at the Iceberg Lounge, Oz finally accepted that rebuilding his old empire was impossible.
Black Mask had damaged too much of it.
So Oz stopped trying.
Instead of approaching bosses, he began approaching the people underneath them.
The people who actually made Gotham's criminal organizations function every day.
His message to them was simple.
No more kings.
Oz did not promise them morality or peace. He promised that once Black Mask was gone, nobody would be allowed to consolidate enough power to treat everyone else as disposable employees again.
It was self-serving.
It was also convincing.
Nightwing and Robin continued attacking Black Mask's operations wherever Oz directed them, though Dick increasingly understood that Penguin was building something behind the scenes.
Killer Moth became their most immediate obstacle, and they eventually took him down.
By the end of the episode, Black Mask still controlled more territory than Penguin.
He still had more gunmen.
He still had more visible power.
But the organization beneath him was beginning to rot.
The finale opened with Black Mask finally deciding to end the war in one night.
He attacked everywhere at once.
Firefly struck several positions with incendiary weapons, while Zsasz openly joined Black Mask's side and began hunting people connected to Oz. Scarface's crews fought beside Penguin's men, turning several neighborhoods into active battlefields.
At first, Oz appeared overwhelmed.
Then Black Mask's empire began to collapse as its foundations gave way. The alliances Oz had spent the previous episodes building finally came into play, and many of the people Black Mask believed were loyal to him turned against him.
Nightwing and Robin intervened once the fighting began spilling heavily into civilian areas, but the finale continued to show most of the conflict through Penguin's perspective.
"Robin is pursuing Black Mask."
That last report made Oz stop. He knew where Black Mask was going.
Penguin left immediately.
He reached the abandoned safe house before Robin did.
Black Mask was wounded, furious, and still unable to understand how he had lost.
Black Mask accused Oz of wanting the throne all along.
Oz shook his head.
That had been Black Mask's mistake from the beginning.
"You wanted everybody to know you owned Gotham."
Oz looked through the broken windows at smoke rising over the city.
"I just wanted them to owe me."
Black Mask attacked him.
The fight was ugly. They struck each other with whatever remained nearby, crashing through furniture and broken glass until Oz finally managed to bring Black Mask down.
Penguin had the opportunity to kill him.
He did not.
Black Mask laughed through the blood on his face and accused Oz of becoming weak.
Oz told him killing him would be too generous.
Black Mask had spent the entire war trying to become the man who conquered Gotham. If Oz killed him now, people would remember him as the criminal who nearly did it, someone important enough that Penguin had needed to personally execute him.
Oz preferred something worse.
Black Mask would disappear into a prison cell.
His lieutenants would find new employers.
His businesses would be divided.
His soldiers would return to work for whoever paid them next.
Gotham would move on without him.
That was when Nightwing arrived.
For several seconds, Dick and Oz stood across from each other with Black Mask between them.
Oz stepped aside.
Nightwing restrained Black Mask.
Before leaving, Dick looked at Penguin and told him their alliance was over. Batman would come back eventually.
"Oh... I know."
Several days passed.
Gotham became quieter.
The open war ended, and the criminal world settled back into something resembling the balance that had existed before Batman disappeared.
The Iceberg Lounge reopened.
Oz had won.
One of his men approached while he stood overlooking the Lounge.
"There was an attack on an A.R.G.U.S. convoy outside Gotham."
Oz barely looked at him.
"Not our problem."
"They're saying it was Joker. He's at Arkham now with his gang."
That got Oz's attention.
He turned.
"What?"
Oz walked outside.
Something strange was happening above Gotham.
A pale glow moved through the clouds in the distance, somewhere over Arkham Island.
The Bat-Signal ignited.
Oz stopped.
Batman was back.
For a moment, he felt something dangerously close to relief.
Then he noticed the signal was not coming from GCPD headquarters.
It was coming from Arkham.
Oz stared toward it as distant alarms began spreading across the city. Even from where he stood, something appeared to be happening on the island. Searchlights moved wildly across the sky, followed by flashes of light.
Then, somewhere beneath it all, Oz could have sworn he heard laughter.
His expression fell.
"Fuck."
Cut to black.