The Penguin was never going to be a redemption story. Showrunner Lauren LeFranc knew that when she signed on to helm the HBO spinoff of The Batman centered around Colin Farrell’s low-level mob enforcer, Oz Cobb. Oz was grasping, he was ambitious, and he was more than a little pathetic — but he was never an anti-hero, despite the obvious influences of anti-hero crime dramas like The Sopranos.

“That was really appealing to me that he was more of an underdog,” LeFranc tells Inverse. “I started to ask myself what that actually looked like and how we could empathize and connect with a guy like Oz. I've never wanted to pull punches. I don't want you necessarily to think that he's a good man and he's certainly no hero.”

With the bleak finale of The Penguin, which saw Oz finally become the powerful figure in Gotham that he always dreamed of being, the show finally realizes the Batman rogue in all his terrible, complex glory. He’s closer than ever to being the top-hat-wearing villain that we recognize, setting him up to be one of the main antagonistic forces for Batman in The Batman II.

Inverse sat down with LeFranc to talk about the finale, Oz’s unforgivable actions, and what the future holds for our beloved Sofia Gigante.

When The Force Awakens dropped its first trailer on Nov. 28, 2014, it promised a return to a version of the Star Wars galaxy that had been largely absent for nine years. Although the prequels seem like a long time ago, in an era, far, far away, by the time Episode VII entered pre-production in 2013, it had only been eight years since the debut of Revenge of the Sith in 2005. That gap is only one year longer than the same gap we’ll have between Star Wars films in the “modern” era. In 2026 when The Mandalorian & Grogu hits theaters, it will have been seven years since the debut of The Rise of Skywalker.

The larger point is that Star Wars tends to course-correct in a shorter time than we tend to remember. And now it seems another course correction is coming. With the unofficial announcement that a new trilogy is in development from Simon Kinberg — and that trilogy will likely comprise Episodes X, XI, and XII — the Star Wars franchise is poised to repeat the mistake of the sequel trilogy. Because what this possible sequel-sequel trilogy can’t afford to do is the one thing The Force Awakens relied on: be just like the old movies.