What happened to Jack and Benny in The Penguin? Details explored

The Penguin leads us into Gotham's crime underworld but also takes us into the troubled boyhood of Oswald "Oz" Cobb. In episode 7, it finally gets around to revealing what happened to Jack and Benny, Oz's older brothers, who drowned in a catastrophic accident after Oz trapped them in storm-flooded tunnels.

This is the show's darkest, most iconic moment! For most of the series, their destiny had been a mystery, Oz having dropped hints that some tragedy had occurred for them. But The Penguin sets those half-truths aside and tells us precisely how their destiny was made, by chance, but by an act of will on the part of their younger brother.

Jack and Benny's role in The Penguin's story

Jack and Benny appear in The Penguin only in flashbacks, but they loom over the life of Oz. They were his older brothers, tough, and always the opposite of whatever Oz turned out to be. Their history is not an aside; it's the missing piece in the puzzle that makes it obvious who Oz becomes.

The build-up to the revelation

For the entire first episode of The Penguin, there is no backstory at all for Oz. He discusses his childhood and what it was like to be a disabled child, but even though Jack and Benny crop up all over the place as his parents, they are never actually spoken about.

It was up to us to wonder what happened to them. Everything is made clear in episode 7, "Top Hat," with a haunting flashback that flips it all around.

The kids' game that went horribly wrong

In the flashback, The Penguin shows the three brothers playing flashlight tag in the desolate old underground tunnels of Gotham on a stormy night. Jack and Benny have no trouble leading, while Oz falls behind because he wears a leg brace. Apparently innocent play soon becomes something much darker.

Embarrassed and furious, Oz makes a horrible choice. Instead of stopping, he slams a heavy door on his brothers, entombing them in the tunnel. With one such action, his life is forever changed.

The tragic result

The flood from the storm traps Jack and Benny in the tunnels. The Penguin never takes shortcuts here, either, Oz hears them pleading for rescue, but does nothing. Oz returns home instead and flatly lies to his mother when she asks him where his brothers had disappeared to: he said that they went to watch the movies.

It is too late when the waters rise and Jack and Benny are carried away in the flood, their final moments observed by no one else but Oz himself.

Psychological weight of the scene

Jack and Benny's killing in The Penguin is not faked as an accident. Oz didn't simply walk off in a trance state; rather, he chose to deliberately do nothing. That matters. That suggests that already, at an early childlike level, he could turn off empathy whenever it began to get in the way of his desire to control and be noticed.

To Oz, the act symbolized something more than killing two rivals; it symbolized that his mother's love would never be shared again. Critics state that the drowning scene also marks where his sociopathy had started and the beginning of his fixation on loyalty and power.

Symbolism behind their deaths

The tunnels are not just a physical space; they are the darkness that consumes Jack and Benny, but not Oz, hurt but not irreparably traumatized. Water is figurative for guilt and revenge, too, consuming his brothers but not Oz. It's a blood-chilling reminder that survival doesn't come without a price in Gotham, typically someone else's.

How the revelation changes Oz in The Penguin

From episode 7 onward, the audience's perception of Oz changes. Until now, in The Penguin, he has been shown as a man shaped by the cruel world that he lives in. And then, suddenly, his past is revealed to be cruel, and it has been within him from the beginning.

All of his subsequent decisions, betrayals, assassinations, and conspiracies no longer have the same shock value; they're merely repetitions of the paradigm set with Jack and Benny.

Audience and critical reception

A majority of the audience was surprised at the darkness of the revelation in The Penguin. Others thought that Jack and Benny were killed by rivals or simply vanished in the Gotham mayhem. But no, it was a much more personal revelation.

The critics considered the episode to be the show's darkest one, pointing out how the flashback reinvented Oz not just as a survivor, but as a writer of his own family melodrama.

The long-term impact on the narrative

Whatever happened to Jack and Benny never goes away after the flashback; it persists. They become a turning point that informs Oz's behavior. His failure to maintain relationships, his need to dominate, and even his paranoia are all branches stemming from that night in the tunnels when the storm blew in.

The twist merely exists to confirm that Penguin's rise to power isn't a result of corruption in Gotham; it's the result of personal treachery and unseen depths.

Why their story matters

Jack and Benny’s story might seem secondary, but in The Penguin, it’s vital. Otherwise, people would take Oz as an aftermath of Gotham's environment. By showing the truth, the show forces us to accept the hard reality: Penguin was an aftermath of his own deeds and of Gotham's environment. Their death gives depth to the character and makes his later brutality believable.

In The Penguin, the destiny of Jack and Benny is ultimately revealed in episode 7. Locked inside flooding tunnels by their younger brother, they drowned while Oz walked away and covered up the truth. Not only does this disclosure unravel a previous mystery, it redefines the character of Oz and apprises us of the chilling origin of his transformation into Gotham's infamous Penguin.