“Join in imitating me, brothers and sisters, and pay careful attention to those who live according to the example you have in us. For I have often told you, and now say again with tears, that many live as enemies of the cross  of Christ. Their end is destruction; their god is their stomach; their glory  is in their shame; and they are focused on earthly things. Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Films and series about villains don’t typically do very well. There are a handful of exceptions to this, but not many. Sony’s attempting at creating their own Spiderverse (mostly) separate and apart from the MCU is a great example. They took a bunch of villains, removed the hero who gave them substance, and tried to sanitize them by making them complicated antiheroes. And most of them bombed. Badly. The Joker 2 is another good example. By all accounts it was unbelievably awful. A villain-based series from HBO Max, though, seems like it could be an exception. I’m only three episodes in, but the story is pretty good, if frustratingly depressing. Let’s talk about The Penguin.

From what I can tell, HBO Max tends to put out really good content. Now, they’ve put out a bunch of stuff I don’t and won’t watch, but the little bit I’ve sampled I have generally enjoyed quite a lot. The Penguin is so far proving not to be an exception to this. Its production values are high, the scripts have so far been great, and the acting has mostly been spot on. But while I’ve gotten drawn into the story, the further it develops, the less I like it.

The Penguin is about the rise of the famous Batman villain. The Penguin has been around battling Batman since at least Adam West wore the cape and cowl back in the 1960s. I never followed Batman in the comics, so I don’t honestly know when Penguin premiered in that forum (and I haven’t stopped to look it up). While Batman’s Villain’s Row contains a pretty extensive and colorful cast of characters, the Penguin sits among the true royalty of that group. He’s a Gotham crime boss who runs the Iceberg Lounge as a legitimate cover for his long list of more illegitimate enterprises. The HBO Max series explores how he came to occupy that position in Gotham, rising from an obscure member of the Carmine family operation (another famous Batman crime family, but not one that ever reached supervillain status) to become a crime kingpin in the famously dark city.

Penguin is beautifully played by an almost completely unrecognizable Colin Farrell. Honestly, unless you know who it is going in, you wouldn’t have the first clue who is playing him. The makeup job is remarkable and must be intense to put on day after day. His paycheck for the series (not to mention for his role in The Batman and its upcoming sequel) is probably sizable for the discomfort alone.

At just three episodes in, I can’t say very much about the plot except that it’s tracking his slow rise through the ranks of the Gotham underworld. What I can speak to a bit more is the character development of the Penguin thus far. In all of his appearances in previous Batman properties (minus the comics because, again, I can’t speak to those), the Penguin really doesn’t get any character development of any kind. He’s just a villain. His motivations are…villainous. He wants to rob banks and kill people because he’s the bad guy. Danny DeVito’s version in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns got a bit more development, but that was mostly just cartoonish. The Penguin series, set firmly in Matt Reeves gritty and realistic Gotham, is actually trying to take the character seriously.

This, though, is where the series is running into trouble for me so far. When a particular character is the protagonist of the story, we expect some level of moral benevolence to them. We expect them to be the good guys. This is part of why Sony’s attempt at creating their own Spiderverse from Spider-Man’s Villain’s Row flopped so hard. They took a bunch of bad guys and tried to make them complicated, morally conflicted anti-heroes. But they’re bad guys. It didn’t work.

Credit HBO Max for not trying to make Penguin a morally complicated anti-hero. There’s nothing morally praiseworthy to any of his actions. He’s a borderline sociopath who will lie as quickly as he’ll tell the truth. He has no value of human life unless he determines that it will serve him in a given moment. He has no friends. He only has acquaintances of convenience, and these he will turn on in an instant if he sees a better opportunity for himself somewhere else. He’s deeply insecure and will lash out with extreme violence when provoked…and he doesn’t require much provocation before he explodes on someone.

At the end of the day, he’s a nihilist. He doesn’t believe in anything save his own ability to take for himself at the expense of those around him. He rails against a system that is not designed for the have-nots, and thus they need to be prepared to use whatever means necessary to advance their own interests. And, since benevolence means don’t work, violence and will to power are the only solutions. In a sense, he’s a perfect combination of the ideas of Nietzsche and Darwin. He’s all survival of the fittest and will to power.

If the goal of the writers is to tell a gritty, engaging story, they’re succeeding so far. If the goal is to somehow make Penguin a sympathetic character, they are failing rather profoundly. Nothing about him – in at least my opinion – is in the least bit sympathetic. He’s just pathetic. But the storytelling is good, its rooted in the comic world that I enjoy, so I’ll keep watching.

The character of the Penguin is actually just the kind of person that Paul warned us about in his letter to the Philippian believers. He is an enemy of the cross of Christ. The cross of Christ is about God’s love and our humble willingness to receive His help to have the life we’ve always wanted. It’s about grace and kindness, compassion and mercy. Penguin is none of those things. He’s all self-righteousness and vengeance.

Of these kinds of people, Paul says their end is destruction. Those who live by violence and selfishness, die by violence and selfishness. Paul says their god is their stomach. His point there is not that they worship food, but rather that they worship their appetites. Whatever they want in a given moment is what they seek. There’s no real sense of self-restraint or denial. There’s no sense of putting others first or selflessly advancing their interests. They see, they want, they take.

Their glory, Paul says, is in their shame. That is, the things which should bring them shame because they deviate so profoundly from the character of God are the very things they point to as their crowning achievements. And, they are focused on earthly things. Penguin never looks beyond the things of this world. There is no next world in his view. Whatever he can get in this one, therefore, is the most logical thing to pursue.

Now, Penguin is obviously a caricatured version of the kind of person Paul is talking about here, but this character really does exist in the real world, and it’s a lot more common than we might imagine. In fact, it’s a depressingly easy character pattern for us to fall into in our own lives. It’s depressingly attractive in terms of a path to walk through this life. This has actually been illustrated in the series so far through the character of Victor, Penguin’s driver and accomplice.

Victor gets tied to Penguin when he and some buddies were trying to steal his car. Penguin shoots at them, and the other escape, but not Victor. Rather than killing him, Penguin basically forces Victor into his employment. He takes him on as an initially unwilling sidekick. For Victor’s part, his family was killed in the tragic events at the end of The Batman movie when The Riddler flooded the part of the city where his family lived. He had a good family. They were poor, but he had two loving parents who worked hard and by their example were teaching him to be satisfied with the good but simple things in life. Over the course of the second episode, he gets the chance to leave Penguin and the nihilistic life of crime he is mentoring him into in exchange for the simple, but happy life his parents raised him to desire when he reconnects with an old girlfriend. But at the last second, he decides to stay with Penguin. He chooses earthly things over more heavenly ones. He sticks with the god of his own desires. It was really a depressing moment in the story.

Here’s the thing, though, this kind of a life is natural. It’s natural absent a belief in some kind of a higher power that calls us to a higher moral pathway than what we produce on our own. By “this kind of life,” I don’t mean a life of crime and violence. I mean a life dedicated to nothing but our own desires; a life focused on earthly things. Indeed, if there’s no life beyond this one, a life focused on earthly things is all there is. It’s all we know to desire. Yet when this life is all we desire, there is much good that we lose out on the ability to grasp and enjoy. Now, this obviously doesn’t mean that anyone who is secular is necessarily going to be a selfish jerk. What a demonstrably silly notion! But it does mean that their worldview cannot furnish the necessary philosophical and moral resources to direct them away from such a path on its own. Instead, they have to borrow from other worldviews, and especially the Christian worldview, to supplement what their own cannot produce.

As followers of Jesus, what we look forward to is the full and final deliverance on our citizenship in heaven. We “eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.” He has promised to “transform the body of our humble condition into the likeness of his glorious body, by the power that enables him to subject everything to himself,” that is, the power of God. Because of this, we can live our lives now in pursuit of His command to love like He did without fear of anything that might threaten us along the way of that path. We don’t have to worry about meeting our needs on our own. We don’t have to worry about the rejection of others. We don’t have to worry about persecution of any kind. We can love freely and generously. We can show kindness without reserve to everyone we meet. Often doing that will go well for us and for the people around us. But even when it doesn’t, He’s still got our back, and we’ve still got an eternity with Him in His kingdom. We win either way.

I’m curious yet to see how the rest of the Penguin series is going to develop. For now, though, it is a reminder of why the vision of the kingdom of God is so much better than anything this world has to offer. This world’s vision is seductive, make no mistake. It’s a fun thought to think that we can have all of our desires met if we are only willing to take hold of the means of manifesting them. But that path never ends well. The path of Christ, on the other hand, will lead to life and joy every single time. If in doubt, choose the latter. You’ll be glad that you did.