The Penguin’s Oswald Cobb, who first appeared in The Batman, is not a hero. He’s an opportunistic murderer building a criminal empire by flooding Gotham’s streets with a highly addictive drug. And yet, he’s far from the city’s biggest villain. Not because he pays his people well and looks after his neighborhood, though. Politicians and oligarchs were redirecting energy from its most vulnerable citizens in Crown Point to the richest parts of town. It took Oz brow-beating a corrupt councilman in the show’s sixth episode “Gold Summit” to fix that gross injustice.
That disgusting behavior by city leaders is the latest evidence of the kind of hero Gotham really needs. Gotham doesn’t need a masked figure to fight foot soldiers or costumed villains. It needs someone who can stop the people truly destroying the city. It needs Bruce Wayne to go after his own people, the kind of hero we might get in The Batman 2.
In The Batman director Matt Reeves showed his Gotham is truly rotten to the core. Every iteration of that legendary locale has bad cops and unethical political leaders. But this iteration’s Carmine Falcone was the de facto king of the city. He controlled everyone and everything with impunity. Yet, he wasn’t the the villain Batman took down in the movie. Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne wasn’t interested in Falcone at all. The Riddler made it his life mission to shine a light on the city’s mass corruption. Without Edward Nashton a crooked mayor, a crooked police commissioner, and a crooked district attorney would have continued to sell out the citizens of Gotham for an amoral mobster forever.
However, like the Penguin, the Riddler was no hero. He killed and tortured people before flooding the city, harming the very same people he’d claimed he wanted to help free. Both criminal masterminds were/have been able to amass loyal followings in the first place, though, because of Gotham’s leaders. The city’s elites, both at city hall and its wealthiest citizens, took and took and took until everyone else had almost nothing. The people trusted to look after people left nothing. Opportunists like Nashton and Cobb thrived by filling in that void, the way criminals always can when people lack basic life necessities.
That’s especially true in this Gotham because the famous figures who will make up Batman’s rogues gallery are not this city’s biggest villains. Its biggest villains are corrupt government officials, the uber wealthy, and shady police. People like the Riddler, the Penguin, and even Sofia Gigante are merely symptoms of the real disease that has long infected Gotham: greed.
That greed—greed for money, status, sex, power, and control—made it possible for a ruthless but smart monster like Carmine Falcone to control Gotham. An anonymous nobody like The Riddler understood that even when Bruce Wayne, a man who grew up in that privileged world, didn’t. And he was too busy beating up low level street thugs to notice while Edward Nashton was investigating the mayor.
If Batman wants to make good on his promise from the end of his first film and bring hope to Gotham, he needs to start fighting the root cause of the city’s corruption. You don’t get better by treating symptoms, you get better by treating the cause of them. He won’t be able to heal Gotham by fighting people in places like Crown Point. Batman will have to start fighting the enemies in his own neighborhood, the kind of place where the city was sending electricity.
Even without Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne being a part of HBO’s show, that realization might be exactly where The Penguin is leading him in The Batman 2. The spinoff series has expanded—in deep, personal ways—the kind of harm done by people like Carmine Falcone and his powerful enablers. Vic lost his family because a madman was the only one who cared to stop mass corruption. Whole neighborhoods, already neglected, were then abandoned so the rich wouldn’t have to make any sacrifices. And who made that decision? Who has always stepped on the downtrodden to climb higher? The exact people Batman could fight in his next film.
Reeves has said his sequel is “going to dig into the epic story about deeper corruption.” The movie will go to places Batman “couldn’t even anticipate in the first one.” That sounds a lot like the Court of Owls, a secret cabal of the city’s most powerful and richest elites who control everything from the shadows. Those are exactly the people Batman needs to stop if he wants to stop Oz Cobb and whomever would replace him anyway. The Penguin only thrives, like a mushroom, in darkness. Suffering in Gotham grows like a fungus because the terrible city, run by terrible people, lives in darkness.
The city’s poorest citizens are hopeless and eager to forget their miseries with Bliss. They’re happy to follow Edward Nashton’s plans to murder mayoral candidates. They’re happy to work for a monster like Oz Cobb because he’ll put money in their pocket. They’ll do those terrible things because at least those criminals offering something. Something is better than the nothing the rich have given them.
There will be nothing until a hero can offer them something better. In Gotham the only way to do that is to get rid of the disease that has long made the city sick. The Penguin has shown Gotham needs Batman to realize who its true villains really are. They aren’t villains with memorable names and costumes; they’re the rich and powerful, Bruce Wayne’s own kind.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. He thinks Oz Cobb made a pretty good point at the Gold Summit. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.
