(Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for the end of The Penguin episode 7.)

Although it seems unlikely that Batman hadn’t heard about that explosion at the end of The Penguin In episode 7, the show made a point of his absence here: he’s not very high on the list of Oz’s problems. In this episode alone, Oswald deals with his mother’s kidnapping, his own kidnapping – twice! – and its underground drug trade explodes.

In the down-to-earth, gritty world of The Penguinit was more than a shot across the arc. It was confirmation that the loser of this war for stake in Gotham’s underworld should not expect to emerge unscathed. Still, pour one out for the Bliss drug operation that just got wrecked in the process. After all, PenguinThe decorators grew real mushrooms for this.

“We literally grew real mushrooms and painted blood dots on them,” Kalina Ivanov said. Penguin“, says the decorator. “It was quite a mushroom operation.”

Of course, it’s about training a real drug lord – male or female; fictional or not, it takes a lot of work. Ivanov guesses they made “hundreds and hundreds of fake mushrooms” to complete the decorations. Obviously, none of the mushrooms grown were actually drugs, nor were they the very real type of bleeding mushroom (which, it must be said, is not a medicine either).

“We all became experts on bleeding mushrooms, how they are grown, how the bags should be, the conditions and the parts,” Ivanov laughs. “This is reality; you dig deeper and you can figure it out.

“We showed the writers a number of options – how to bake them and how to crush them, and it all goes into little bottles. (…) There were a lot of meetings on drugs.”

Ultimately, vials took over from small sachets of medication simply by being “more interesting” as a means of administration. But ultimately, it’s kind of a failure in the Falcone/Gigante/Maroni/Cobb drug war: First, Oz brought Sofia’s dairy factory operations to their knees, moving them to the tram depot that Sofia blows up in episode 7. Bliss is, apparently, no longer in the world of The Penguin.

There’s also symbolism in Oz’s hidden mushroom factory disappearing like that. Throughout the exhibition, Ivanov chose locations with arches and vaulted ceilings, always seeking “cathedral-like spaces.”

“And when we got to the streetcar depot, I installed vaulted ceilings and called it a ‘cathedral for workers,’” she says. “With the vaulted ceilings and the tunnels, it really felt like at one point it was a place where everyone who went to work felt like they were walking into a church and loved the work they loved. were doing.”

Whatever chapter of Oz’s climax was in the wagon depot, it’s certainly over now. Yet, as Episode 7 shows us, you can never rule it out completely. He will eliminate his captor; come out of the bowels of the earth; let his brothers die. This man will crawl through hell in search of his higher power – and unfortunately, Sofia is holding her hostage.