‘The Penguin’s’ Clancy Brown on the death of Salvatore Maroni, the torture of Oz

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “The Penguin” Episode 7, “Top Hat”

In episode 7 of ‘The Penguin’, things spiral out of control, putting Oz’s drug operation, hidden in the abandoned trolley tunnels, in jeopardy along with his mother.

But first…

This week’s penultimate episode of HBO’s DC series opens with a flashback of Oz and his brothers as children, the first time in the series that we see his brothers alive. They live with Francis, their mother, in an apartment, while their mother makes a living doing the books for Rex Calabrese, the local gangster that Oz had spoken so enthusiastically about in episode 1.

Their mother sends them out one afternoon, where the children encounter Rex. He gives them $50 to give to their mother when they get home. The boys decide to play flashlight tag in the abandoned trolley tunnels. Oz is the first to be tagged ‘it’, while his brothers climb down a ladder in one of the tunnels. Due to Oz’s bad leg, he cannot climb down the ladder. They apologize, but Oz’s feelings are hurt, so he locks them in one of the tunnels and goes home. He lies and tells their mother that they went to the movies with the money Rex gave them. In reality, they drowned in the tunnel after it flooded during a heavy rainstorm.

In the present, Oz returns to the abandoned apartment he shares with his mother and Victor, only to find his mother gone and Vic unconscious. He hears Sal Maroni and Sofia’s henchmen coming, so he sends Vic to get reinforcements. Sal, still furious over the way Oz killed his wife and son in episode 5, begins brutally beating Oz with a golf club.

“Right now, Sal has tunnel vision,” says Clancy Brown, who plays Sal Maroni, in an interview with Variety. “All he wants is to kill Oz. If he could shoot Oz in the head, and then someone would shoot [Sal] in his mind he would die a happy man. He’s just so full of anger and hatred for Oz Cobb at that moment that I don’t think anything else exists. I don’t think he has any plans to take out Sofia, and he doesn’t care about the Gigante/Maroni alliance at all. I don’t think he cares. He’s just using that to get to Oz and kill him.”

Brown also said that both he and Colin Farrell wanted to make the beating as real as possible, but things may have gotten a little too real.

“At first Colin and I thought, ‘Well, you know, [Colin’s] It went pretty well,” so Colin said, “Just go for it.” So I did. And you know, a few takes after that he pulled me aside and said, ‘Okay, don’t go for it like that,'” Brown said, laughing. “I really tried to break the club.”

Sal is ready to kill Oz, but one of Sofia’s men intervenes. Oz taunts Sal and says that Sofia has him on a tight leash, but Sal taunts Oz right back and reminds him that Sofia took Oz’s mother with her. We then see Sofia preparing breakfast for Francis before talking to her about her son. Francis stands strong and mocks Sofia and her family, firmly believing that her son will get her out of her current situation. However, things change when Francis begins to suffer the effects of her dementia, causing her to lose all sense of where and when she is.

Back in Crown Point, Sal forces Oz to take him to the trolley tunnels and the Bliss operation. Sal tells everyone that they are now working for him and Sofia, but Oz provokes him by talking about the murder of his wife and son. Sal grabs a can of gasoline before one of Sofia’s men intervenes again, causing one of Oz’s workers to turn off the lights and cause chaos.

According to Brown, Sal had plenty of plans for how Oz would die.

“He wanted to burn it,” he said. “He would burn it slowly. He would cut him up and burn him. He would definitely pour gasoline on him and make him smell his own burning flesh. The most painful thing he could imagine.”

Brown said there were plans to go further than ultimately was the case, albeit for practical rather than moral reasons.

“I think it was scripted for a while that he was going to douse Oz with gasoline after talking about Nadia and how Nadia smelled, but it became impractical to do because of the makeup,” Brown said. ‘Of course you can’t pour gasoline on make-up. You can really mess it up by even pouring water on it because it would absorb all the water and end up being flooded, which would be even more miserable for Colin to carry.

Sal and Oz start fighting and end up fighting in an old trolley. Things don’t look good for Oz, but then Sal starts clutching his left arm and gasping for breath. It wasn’t long before Sal died of a heart attack.

“I thought it was a great joke,” Brown said of his character’s demise. ‘That’s to add another layer of frustration to Oz. Oz is a beast like Sal, and he has to kill in a way that is satisfying to him. And that was very unsatisfactory.”

Later, Sofia speaks with Dr. Rush, who tells her that her niece, Gia, is trying to talk to the police. Sofia visits Gia, who reveals that she saw a gas mask in Sofia’s bag the night everyone in the Falcone mansion died when Sofia filled the house with gas. Sofia tells Gia that “everyone in our family were bad people who deserved it”, but ultimately leaves the meeting visibly shaken at what she did to Gia.

But before Sofia can process that, Oz calls to say Sal is dead. He tricks her into coming to the tunnels to exchange his mother for the Bliss.

Oz and his men lie in wait armed for Sofia’s arrival. A car comes through the tunnel while Sofia is on the phone with Oz. She and Oz talk, during which she makes Oz believe that his mother is dead in the back of the car. He opens the trunk and instead finds a bomb with a timer close to zero. Oz runs towards it, but the bomb explodes, collapsing much of Crown Point above them. Sofia was last seen escorting Francis to a seedy club called Monroe’s.

In another flashback we see Oz and his mother after his brothers died. She dresses in her best dress and takes him to Monroe’s, a lively jazz club at the time. There she tells Oz that he should grow up and give her everything she deserves and make her happy, to which he eagerly agrees. In the present, Oz stumbles through the wreckage of Crown Point, where he finds Det. Marcus Wise, the corrupt cop on Sofia’s payroll. He tells Oz that he is taking him to Sofia, before knocking Oz unconscious.