The Penguin Succeeded Where Breaking Bad Failed

Key Takeaways

• The Penguin sets a new standard for superhero spin-offs, likened to The Sopranos and surpassing Breaking Bad.
• Oz and Walter White’s character arcs are compared, with Oz being deliberately villainized unlike Walter.
• The show ensures audiences hate Oz, setting up his role in The Batman Part 2 for the audience to root against him.

HBO’s The Penguin has practically set the benchmark for every other superhero spin-off show that’s coming out in the near or distant future. The DC villain’s spin-off story set in Matt Reeves’ universe has drawn comparisons to cult classic TV shows like The Sopranos and has even done things that legendary shows like Breaking Bad fell short of achieving.

Breaking Bad is arguably the greatest TV show of all time, and gets a place in any top five or ten list without question. The Penguin, on the other hand, is a fairly new but acclaimed entry. However, there are some things that are already clear about the show, especially in terms of how it deals with its main character’s arc. Created by Lauren LeFranc, the series achieves what it really wants to become – a cautionary tale of a man’s unchecked greed for power.

Connecting The Penguin’s Oz And Breaking Bad’s Walter White

Two Drug Kingpin Anti-Heroes With Different Origins

Comparing Oswald Cobb from The Penguin and Walter White from Breaking Bad might seem unfair to many, especially given how contrasting their general character traits are. However, both of them, being the anti-heroes of their respective shows, almost get led down similar paths of evil, where they end up becoming the kingpins of their respective cities: Gotham and Albuquerque, New Mexico. But the question here is about how their character arcs are perceived by the people watching them, and what their impact on the audience is, long after the shows have ended. This is where The Penguin sort of gets an edge over Breaking Bad, in the way that it fully and unapologetically villainizes its character.

Walter White Starts From A Place Of Relatability

The main difference here lies in how exactly the audience roots for a particular character. In Breaking Bad, we start with complete empathy for Walter White as we learn he is just a high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with cancer – someone who wants to do whatever it takes to keep his family safe. However, he slowly turns to a path of evil as a consequence. Over time, he lets his Heisenberg persona take control of him. Even after his cancer is gone, Walter actually starts to enjoy cooking crystal meth with his partner Jesse Pinkman, and goes to some extreme lengths that the audience would never have expected him to go to.

Oz Is An Established DC Villain

On the other hand, the audience is already quite familiar with Colin Farrell’s Oz, a.k.a. the Penguin, from Matt Reeves’ The Batman. So, we know the character is pretty despicable, and he starts out as an outright villain rather than someone relatable. But over time, the show humanizes him, even though he does some detestable things just to achieve what he wants. This includes inadvertently sending Sophia Falcone to Arkham, going back on his word against everyone he negotiates with, and even murdering the Maronis to bring them to the ground.

How Oz And Walter Betray Their Protégés

The Victor Aguilar Moment Changed The Penguin

The interesting thing here is that both Oz and Walter act as mentors to two youngsters, Victor Aguilar and Jesse Pinkman, respectively. Each duo builds a sort of father-son bond, only for it to end badly, but in different ways. In Walter’s case, he wrongs him by letting Jesse’s girlfriend Jane overdose and die, and Jesse later learns about it but can do nothing about it.

On the other hand, Oz wins in the end, but he still strangles Victor with his bare hands, simply because he considers family or true relationships to be a weakness and doesn’t want anything pulling him down. This is practically the ultimate moment of the show, where his character arc reaches its peak, and we see what he really is. Oz Cobb is someone incapable of any human connection and solely focused on being at the top of Gotham’s crime world.

Walter White Got A Shot At Redeeming Himself

In a way, by letting Walter White succumb to death at the end of Breaking Bad‘s final season while allowing Jesse to escape and survive, the show gave Walter an opportunity to redeem himself. Even though it ends fatally for Walter, it provides a cathartic correction to his actions for the audience. However, in The Penguin, the show makes it easy to hate Oz, as it offers a dark mirror image of how Walter saved Jesse. This approach makes Oz truly irredeemable to the audience. Most importantly, even if someone rooted for him during certain moments of the show, they ultimately felt sick about doing so by the end.

Walter White’s Problematic Place In Pop Culture

A Dangerous “Literally Me” Character

Letting a character arc take its own course is not a point of criticism by any means. Walter White has joined the ranks of characters like Michael Corleone from The Godfather, Tony Montana from Scarface, Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders, and Patrick Bateman from American Psycho – iconic figures that shouldn’t be looked up to, but still are. Fans who idolize them are missing the entire point of their archetype and journey. Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan expressed his contempt for Walter in an August 2022 interview with The New Yorker:

He was really sanctimonious, and he was really full of himself. He had an ego the size of California. And he always saw himself as a victim. He was constantly griping about how the world short-changed him, how his brilliance was never given its due. When you take all of that into consideration, you wind up saying, ‘Why was I rooting for this guy?’

Brushing aside the “literally-me” section of Heisenberg fans, Bryan Cranston’s performance will continue to endure and probably earn the chemistry teacher-turned-drug-kingpin a little more empathy than he really deserves. The Penguin avoids this entirely, making it clear that Oz is meant to be hated, feared, and disliked.

The Penguin Sets Up Oz For The Batman Part 2

The best part here is that these two creative decisions have actually worked in favor of both shows and their impact. Breaking Bad was a standalone show with six legendary seasons. Even though it had a spin-off in Better Call Saul shortly after, it was a prequel and did not largely affect the events of Breaking Bad in any way. The Penguin, on the other hand, is a superhero-villain origin story with just one season for now. The series was an exercise in setting him up to be someone who should be absolutely hated. The show makes sure that the next time he appears in The Batman Part 2, the audience will be rooting for the Caped Crusader to knock the living hell out of him.