The Penguin Just Quietly Rebooted An Underrated Crime Team

Gotham City’s crime scene is perhaps one of the more complicated comic book lore puzzles of all time. While some versions of Batman — like the 1960s show or the Joel Schumacher films — depict Gotham as a kind of circus where costumed criminals are just part of everyday life, more down-to-Earth versions of the Bat-verse have strived, for a very long time, to create a sense of realism when it comes to how and why crime, organized or otherwise, is so prevalent in Gotham.

While there’s a certain chicken or the egg paradox to the creation of mega-criminal leaders in Gotham, one thing tends to be true when it comes to the larger world of DC Comics: There’s always a bigger organization lurking in the background, which can tip the power scales one way or another. In Episode 6 of The Penguin — technically a sequel to the 2022 film The Batman — one key detail about a major crime syndicate was mentioned several, several times. And with this detail, it seems like this specific version of the Bat-verse is setting up bigger events for the future.

Mild spoilers ahead for The Penguin Episode 6, “Gold Summit.”

Episode 6 of The Penguin feels like a mild reboot in the third portion of the season. We’ve got a bit of a time jump, during which Oz (Colin Farrell) has built out his underground network, teased in Episode 5, into a full-blown criminal enterprise. But, in the No Man’s Land-esque area of Gotham City, Oz, his family, and his partners, including Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), aren’t quite on top of the game. At the top of the episode Oz seems to sort of set up the basic stakes for the rest of the show, asking the question: “Who’s got the power?”

Sub-textually, the answer to this question is mildly axiomatic. We sense that the titular Penguin, in the form of Oz Cobb, will wield more of that power by the end of the series, otherwise the entire point of the series might seem slightly strange. We’re not watching the rise and fall of Oz here, we’re watching the fall, and rise, and fall, and (probably) rise again of Oz. But, just like the show is fixated on gangs stealing each other’s mushrooms to make the fictional drug called “Bliss,” the entire stakes of the series revolve around credibility and crime currently that is basically ephemeral.

But Oz’s musings about “who’s got the power” are meant to be read as philosophical. Instead, this episode somewhat subtly revealed the bigger chess pieces of the show. And, among the power brokers that Oz talks about in this episode one name that comes up a lot is “the Triads.”

Specifically, at the top of the episode, Oz tells Victor that he hopes to gain the Triads as allies because they “have the connections to take our operation international.” By the end of the episode, Oz calls together the disparate gangs in an attempt to form a unified front against the Gigantes and Maronis. Among these various representatives is Feng Zhao (François Chau) who represents the Gotham Triads. But who are the Triads?

Based on real-life criminal organizations from China, the Triads in DC Comics first appeared as far back as 1993. They are analogous to the way Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels depict the organization known as SMERSH; the existence of these organizations is real, but their activities within the Bat-verse are fictional. In some DC continuities, the Triads have a leader called “Shan Chu,” also known as “Lodge Master” or “Dragonhead.” Zhao, who is seen in Episode 6, is not the Dragonhead of the entire Triads, but he is the Gotham City representative.

While we don’t know to what degree the events of The Penguin will inform The Batman 2, this is all taking place in the shadow of Batman, and within the version of Gotham that we saw in 2022. If the Triads start to support the Penguin in a very real way, then Oz’s prediction about taking his operation to a larger scale might actually come true.

What this actually means for the larger story of the Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson Bat-verse is still unclear. In theory, the entire cast of The Penguin could appear in that film, assuming they all survive this season. But, underneath all the star power, it seems very possible that Zhao and his Triads will be supporting whoever the major crime power actually is. Because when the dust settles, the Triads have more gang members throughout the world than any of these other crime families. If the Penguin is going to get bigger, he needs them. And if The Batman 2 needs a bigger, more realistic, organized crime problem to contend with, we may have seen the origin of that idea during Oz’s little tailgate party.

The Penguin streams on Sundays on Max.