(Ed. remark: This post contains spoilers for the end of The penguin episode 7.)
Although it seems unlikely that Batman didn’t hear about that explosion by the end of the movie The penguin episode 7, the show has made a case for his absence here: he’s not very high on Oz’s list of problems. In this episode alone, Oswald has to deal with his mother’s kidnapping, his own kidnapping – twice! – and his underground drug trade is blown up.
In the grounded, gritty world of The penguinthis was more than a shot across the bow. It was confirmation that the loser in this war cannot expect to come out unscathed due to a stake in Gotham’s underworld. Pour one out for the blissful drug operation that just went wrong. After all, Penguin‘s production designers grew real mushrooms for this purpose.
“We literally grew real mushrooms and painted the blood dots on them,” says Kalina Ivanov, Penguin‘s production designer, says. “It was quite a mushroom operation.”
Of course, the whole thing about making a real drug lord – male or female; fictional or not – is that it takes a lot of work. Ivanov suspects that they created several “hundreds and hundreds of fake mushrooms” to complete the sets. It is clear that none of the mushrooms grown were actually drugs, nor were they very real type of bleeding mushroom (which, it should be noted, is not medicine either).
“We have all become experts in bleeding mushrooms and how to grow them, and what the bags should be like, and what the conditions should be, and what the rooms should be like,” Ivanov laughs. “That’s the reality; you go deep into the research and you can figure it out.
“We showed the writers some options – how we can bake them and how we can crush them, and it’s put in little bottles. (…) There were a lot of drug meetings.”
Ultimately, the bottles won out over small medicine bags, simply because they were “more interesting” as a means of administration. But in the end, it’s all a fluke in the Falcone/Gigante/Maroni/Cobb drug war: first, Oz kneecaps Sofia’s operation at the creamery and moves it to the trolley depot that Sofia blows up in episode 7. , apparently, no longer in the world of The penguin.
There is also symbolism in the fact that Oz’s hidden mushroom factory gets so out of control. Throughout the show, Ivanov chose locations with arches and vaulted ceilings, always looking for “cathedral-like spaces.”
“And when we got to the trolley depot, I had vaulted ceilings and called it a ‘cathedral for the working man,’” she says. “With the vaulted ceilings and the tunnels, it really felt like this was at one point a place where everyone who went to work felt like they were entering the church and enjoying the work they were doing.”
Whatever the glory days of Oz’s chapter in the trolley depot were, they are certainly over now. Yet, as episode 7 shows, you can never completely ignore him. He will take out his captor; climb out of the bowels of the earth; let his brothers die. This man will crawl through hell because of his higher power – and unfortunately, Sofia is holding her hostage.