WARNING: Major spoilers for episode eight ahead.

Dr Julian Rush is putting Francis through therapy, which sends her into a flashback, where a man named Rex comes to the door to talk to her.

Rex offers to pay for her sons’ funeral but she refuses, and then admits she knows Oz killed his brothers, having found a torch in his coat. She adds he did it so he could have her to himself. The man encourages her that, if true, she can twist him into someone great, but she resists, asking what kind of mother he could be. But she also can’t bring herself to hand him to the police.

That night, she takes him to jazz bar Monroe’s for the evening – something he’s noted as his favourite memory.

Back in present day, Victor, the Triads and the gang members he works with drive up to see the aftermath of the explosion. Victor encourages them to go and find Oz, but with the product now obliterated, they have no interest so he’s forced to go it alone.

Oz is taken to a now defunct Monroe’s bar, where Sofia is waiting for them. She tells him to confess what happened to her brothers, and for Francis to confess she had asked Rex to kill him. While the elephant in the room has been addressed, both continue to deny it.

When the team decide to get violent, they threaten to remove Francis’s finger, and she eventually furiously tells her she already knows what he did, and had spent her life hating him for it. She even admits to wishing she killed him when she had the chance, and stabs him with a bottle in the stomach.

Sofia is more stunned that Oz was willing to let his mother lose a finger rather than tell the truth. But when Francis envisions Benny and Jack and collapses, he seeks his opportunity to escape, taking his Ma to the hospital.

He then reconnects with Victor, who finds him in a storage closet stapling his stomach. He blames the injury on Sofia. He seems defeated, Victor riles him up, crediting him for helping his neighbourhood by giving them jobs and electricity.

Sofia returns to the Falcone family home, where the gang leaders are waiting for her. She tells them she’s leaving Gotham, offering them her home, businesses and territory in exchange for Oz.

Oz heads to City Hall, where he speaks to a councilman and offers him a sweet deal to make him look good on the political circuit. He blames the explosion on Sofia, the drugs operation on Maroni, and tells him that helping bring them down would make him look good.

The congressman warns Oz that an anti-corruption unit will be soon pulling him in for his connection to Carmine, and he promises to look cleaner in his business pursuits. When he leaves, Zao is there and tells Oz to get in as they need to talk.

Sofia then gets a phone call informing her Oz has been found, and as she prepares to meet them, she sets fire to the Falcone mansion and watches it burn to the ground. When she arrives to meet Zao, Victor enacts a coup, killing all of Zao’s men and Sofia’s.

Oz then takes Sofia for a drive. As he explains that there are people getting angry at those who don’t realise what they have, we find every major mob boss has been killed by one of their underlings, now under Oz’s command.

Driving her to the water, the pair promise to see each other in hell, as Sofia accepts her fate, and waits to be shot and killed. Instead, the police arrive and arrest her.

Going to visit his Ma, his celebration quickly turns to frustration when his mother doesn’t respond at all. He’s told she’s had a serious stroke, leaving her in a vegetative state. He refuses to believe it, and begs for her to tell him she’s proud.

Oz and Victor head to the river, where Oz reflects on who he’s become and if his mother would forgive her. He tells Victor he did good, and the teen thanks him in response for taking a chance on him. The pair hug, and as they do so, Oz strangles Victor to death, knowing he’s become a weakness for him that he can’t afford.

Now back at Arkham, Sofia is catatonic, although takes solace in the fact Julian Rush is now working there again. He gives her a letter from a woman claiming to be Sofia’s half-sister in a black envelope.

At the top of his game, Oz is suited and booted and living in a huge penthouse apartment overlooking the city. His mother, Francis, has her own room, though is still bound to her hospital bed. When she cries, he believes it’s not out of sadness, but pride.

He then spends the evening with Eve, who is wearing his mother’s dress and a wig, saying the words he never got from Francis: “I’m proud of you.”

The Penguin has always been billed as an eight-episode limited series, and with this in mind the season finale somewhat completed the story arc.

Colin Farrell, who plays the sociopathic gangster, has also cast doubt on the idea that he could ever go back to the costume – which takes over three hours to get into.

Speaking to TotalFilm, the star admitted the dark character took its toll on his psyche, and as such it would take something special to return.

He said: “I was still grateful, and still honoured – I grew up watching Burgess Meredith [who played The Penguin in the 1960s TV series], and then Danny DeVito [from Tim Burton’s Batman Returns in 1992] was my Penguin – so being a part of the lineage of that storytelling, I really did feel privileged. But by the end of it…

“It’s not like I didn’t know who I was and I was going out and burning cars and s**t, but…”

However, Farrell also added a ‘never say never addendum to his comment.

“If you take what Matt Reeves created and then what Lauren [LeFranc, The Penguin showrunner] did and what Mike [Marino, prosthetics and make-up designer] did and put them all together, it was a really powerful experience,” he said.

“Lauren said, ‘Look, if I could find a way that makes sense, would you talk about it?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And maybe in a year I would.”

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