The Penguin presents Frances’s final fate as a EC Comics style twist of fate. According to Oz, he did everything he did for her, including all of the backstabbing and murder and manipulation that we see throughout the series. Thus, she earns an ironic punishment, comatose and trapped in Oz’s penthouse, for her callous power grabbing.
Of course, Oz didn’t really want to do anything to Frances. Instead, he wanted a woman he could control, and Frances was the only one available. There’s something haunting in the final scene, when Oz walks out of his mother’s room and into the great room of his new digs to find Eve Karlo dressed as younger Francis (she really is Clayface, it turns out). As the two dance together, she says again and again that she loves him and is proud of him. The real Frances would never say those words, so Oz forced Eve to become a version of Frances he could mold.
“A Great or Little Thing” elegantly brings the two storylines together and pairs their themes. But not everything works so well. The episode doesn’t really resolve the wreckage of Sofia’s bombing the Bliss plant, an explosion small enough that Oz and others survive, despite being right next to it, but large enough to blow a giant hole in the center of Gotham. The explosion does give one last chance for Oz to show off his ability to manipulate, but it feels more like a narrative cul-de-sac that preserves the wreckage of Riddler’s attack. By not dealing with the explosion, The Penguin lets those who go into The Batman 2 having only seen the previous movie think that they’re just dealing with another Riddler bomb.
Speaking of cul-de-sacs, Vic’s storyline proves to be a big nothing, as he’s strangled by Oz just when he thinks that the two have bonded. The show set up Vic as Oz’s foil, another boy forced into a violent system that wouldn’t give him a fair shake otherwise. But when Oz suffocates the kid, he proves that he was never like Vic at all. He wasn’t a good kid forced into a bad situation. He was just evil.
Getzinger holds on the shot of Oz’s disgusting, twisted face as he strangles the life out of Vic, making sure everyone knows that he’s a monster. But here’s the thing: we never really doubted that he was a monster. He never seemed sympathetic, even when the show wanted so badly for Vic to add shades to what was clearly a one-note character.
In the end, Victor best represents what The Penguin could have been — the show, not the person. The series could have been just more Batman content, devoting way too much time to a character who doesn’t have enough depth to carry it. And, to be clear, The Penguin sometimes was that empty series. The entire sequence of Oz’s men killing the heads of Gotham families feels like a poor cover of the baptism scene from The Godfather.