Can you make a character truly irredeemable? Penguin takes us way, way back, and asks us to answer that question. Spoilers follow for The Penguin Season 1, Episode 7, "Top Hat."

"Top Hat"

Oz Cobb is charming. He's so charming that it makes some people suspicious, and even then, those people are charmed by him all the same. He betrayed Sofia and sent her packing to Arkham, and she still let herself get close enough to him that she nearly died at the end of a Maroni gun. We know everything he's done to this point since the beginning of The Batman, and yet we're still charmed by him.

This episode completely changes that. I'm deadly serious about spoilers.

We left off last week with Sofia standing in Oz's doorway, watching Vic and Francis dance in the kitchen. This week starts off with a flashback to Oswald Cobb as a child, and we see how he relates to his mother.

The first really upsetting aspect of child Oswald is seeing how the two characters interact. They talk to each other more like husband and wife despite the fact that he's maybe 12 years old at that point. That's more coming from him to start with, but the relationship takes on this mutually pseudo-incestuous tone where he's wining and dining her as a child.

The truly haunting sequence comes after Oz locks his brothers behind a door in a sewer and leaves them there. As rain pours down, he cuddles with his mother on the couch watching a movie. She'd worried about the other two kids, but Oz persuades her that they'll be home any minute. As they watch the movie, he looks out the window at the rain, taking small secret joy in what he knows is happening.

Oswald Cobb is a monster, and nothing should be able to redeem him.

Some credit goes to Ryder Allen, the young actor who plays young Oswald (hey, HBO, don't make a Young Oswald show, please). Colin Farrell has imbued Penguin with all of these little tics--the way he says "Ma," certain ways he moves his head or cocks his eyebrow, and Allen captures all of these with incredible accuracy. He really feels like a young version of this character in a way that they rarely do. Each time he looks at the window and smiles with satisfaction, it's nauseating in the best possible way.

Another major player in this episode is Francis Cobb, both in the present day (Dierdre O'Connell) and in those flashbacks (Emily Meade). I had fully expected her to be dead in the opening moments of the episode, but Sofia is smart enough to know that Oz would be uncontrollable if she killed Francis. Instead, it gives Francis and Sofia some really good scenes together. Francis goes in and out of lucidity while in captivity (which is to say that she's in a gorgeous bedroom in the Falcone mansion), and it's suggested that she might know that Oswald is responsible for the deaths of her other sons.

While she's lucid though, Francis is cruelly aggressive with Sofia, letting her know exactly what she thinks of her. It leaves Sofia shaken and asking herself if she's continuing to play the same game her father made the rules for, or if she's truly doing her own thing. Young Francis, meanwhile, perfectly captures the frightened and weak but genuine love she has for Oswald. She knows something is wrong, but she can't bring herself to admit it.

This is also an action-packed episode as Salvatore and his goons attack Oswald's operation.  The two gang leaders have a knock-down drag-out fist fight, that doesn't go quite like I expected, but it's some of the best action in the show and one of the better fist fights I've seen in a show in a while. Things take a bunch of twists here, but it all lays the groundwork for an exciting finale.

Disclaimer: HBO provided Batman-News with early access to The Penguin episodes for the purposes of review.