[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of The Penguin episode 7.]
Although it’s unlikely that Batman didn’t hear about that explosion in the end The penguin In episode 7, the series justified his absence here: he’s not at the top of Oz’s problem list. In this episode alone, Oswald deals with his mother’s kidnapping and his own kidnapping – twice! – and his illegal drug business is blown up.
In the grounded, dark world of The penguinthat was more than a shot across the bow. It was an acknowledgment that the loser of this war for a share of Gotham’s underworld should not expect to emerge unscathed. Still spend some on the Bliss drug operation that just failed. Finally, penguin
“We literally grew real mushrooms and painted the blood spots on them,” says Kalina Ivanov, penguin‘s production designer, says. “It was quite a mushroom operation.”
Of course it’s about training a real drug lord – whether male or female; Fictional or not, the fact is that it requires a lot of work. Ivanov suspects they made some “hundreds and hundreds of fake mushrooms” to round out the sets. Apparently none of the mushrooms grown were actually drugs, nor were they very real type of bleeding fungus (Which, by the way, is not a medication either).
Photo: Macall Polay/HBO
“We’ve all become experts when it comes to bleeding mushrooms and how to grow them, what the bags should be, what the conditions should be and what the rooms should be,” laughs Ivanov. “That’s the reality; They go deep into research and can find out.
“We showed the authors a number of ways – how we can bake it and how we can crush it and then put it into little bottles. […] There were a lot of drug meetings.”
Ultimately, the bottles prevailed over the small medication bags because they were simply more “interesting” as a method of administration. But in the end, everything in the drug war between Falcone/Gigante/Maroni/Cobb is, so to speak, a disaster: First, Oz brought Sofia’s operation at the milk factory to its knees and moved it to the trolley depot, which Sofia blows up in episode 7. Bliss is that, apparently no longer in the world of The penguin.
It also has a symbolic meaning that Oz’s hidden mushroom factory fails like this. Throughout the show, Ivanov chose locations with arches and vaulted ceilings, always looking for “cathedral-like spaces.”
“And when we got to the tram depot, I put in 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 once a place where everyone who went to work felt like they were walking into a church and loved the work they did. “
Whatever heyday Oz’s chapter had at the Trolley Depot is surely over now. Nevertheless, as episode 7 shows us, you can never completely rule him out. He will take down his captor; Rise from the bowels of the earth; lets his brothers die. This man will crawl through hell for his higher power – and unfortunately, Sofia is holding her hostage.
