[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of The Penguin episode 7.]
Whereas it appears unlikely that the Batman didn’t hear of that explosion on the finish of The Penguin episode 7, the present has made its case for his absence right here: He’s not very excessive on Oz’s checklist of issues. On this episode alone, Oswald offers together with his mom being kidnapped, his personal abduction — twice! — and his underground drug enterprise getting blown up.
Within the grounded, gritty world of The Penguin, this was greater than a shot throughout the bow. It was affirmation that the loser on this battle for some stake within the Gotham underworld shouldn’t anticipate to return out unscathed. Nonetheless, pour one out for the bliss drug operation that simply obtained wrecked within the course of. In spite of everything, Penguin’s manufacturing designers grew actual mushrooms for that.
“We actually grew some actual mushrooms and painted the blood dots on them,” Kalina Ivanov, Penguin’s manufacturing designer, says. “It was fairly the mushroom operation.”
In fact, the entire thing about molding a correct drug kingpin — male or feminine; fictional or no — is that it takes plenty of work. Ivanov guesses they made some “tons of and tons of of pretend mushrooms” to spherical out the units. Clearly not one of the mushrooms grown had been really medication, nor had been they the very actual sort of bleeding mushroom (which is, it ought to be stated, additionally not a drug).
Photograph: Macall Polay/HBO
“All of us grew to become consultants on bleeding mushrooms and the way you develop them, and the way the luggage ought to be, and what the situations are, and what the rooms ought to be,” Ivanov laughs. “That’s the fact; you go deep into the analysis, and you’ll determine it out.
“We confirmed the writers a bunch of choices — of how we may bake them, and the way we may crush them, and it will get put in little vials. […] It was plenty of drug conferences.”
Finally, the vials received out over little drug baggies just by being “extra attention-grabbing” as a way of supply. However ultimately, it’s all sort of a wash within the Falcone/Gigante/Maroni/Cobb drug battle: First, Oz kneecapped Sofia’s operation within the milk manufacturing facility, shifting it to the trolley depot that Sofia blows up in episode 7. Bliss is, seemingly, no extra on the planet of The Penguin.
There’s symbolism, too, to Oz’s hidden mushroom manufacturing facility going out like that. All through the present, Ivanov picked areas with arches and vaulted ceilings, all the time trying to find “cathedral-like areas.”
“And once we get to the trolley depot, I pitched vaulted ceilings, and I referred to as it a ‘cathedral for the working man,’” she says. “With the vaulted ceilings, with the tunnels, it actually felt like at one level, this was a spot the place all people who went to work felt like they had been getting into church and cherished the work that they did.”
No matter heyday Oz’s chapter within the trolley depot had, it’s definitely over now. Nonetheless, as episode 7 exhibits us, you may by no means totally rely him out. He’ll take out his kidnapper; climb out from the bowels of the earth; depart his brothers to die. This man will crawl by hell for his larger energy — and sadly, Sofia is holding her hostage.