The Penguin’s production team really grew those mushrooms

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of The Penguin episode 7.] 

While it seems unlikely that the Batman didn’t hear of that explosion at the end of The Penguin episode 7, the show has made its case for his absence here: He’s not very high on Oz’s list of problems. In this episode alone, Oswald deals with his mother being kidnapped, his own abduction — twice! — and his underground drug business getting blown up. 

In the grounded, gritty world of The Penguin, this was more than a shot across the bow. It was confirmation that the loser in this war for some stake in the Gotham underworld shouldn’t expect to come out unscathed. Still, pour one out for the bliss drug operation that just got wrecked in the process. After all, Penguin’s production designers grew real mushrooms for that. 

“We literally grew some real mushrooms and painted the blood dots on them,” Kalina Ivanov, Penguin’s production designer, says. “It was quite the mushroom operation.” 

Of course, the whole thing about molding a proper drug kingpin — male or female; fictional or no — is that it takes a lot of work. Ivanov guesses they made some “hundreds and hundreds of fake mushrooms” to round out the sets. Obviously none of the mushrooms grown were actually drugs, nor were they the very real type of bleeding mushroom (which is, it should be said, also not a drug). 

“We all became experts on bleeding mushrooms and how you grow them, and how the bags should be, and what the conditions are, and what the rooms should be,” Ivanov laughs. “That’s the reality; you go deep into the research, and you can figure it out.

“We showed the writers a bunch of options — of how we could bake them, and how we could crush them, and it gets put in little vials. […] It was a lot of drug meetings.”

Ultimately, the vials won out over little drug baggies simply by being “more interesting” as a means of delivery. But in the end, it’s all kind of a wash in the Falcone/Gigante/Maroni/Cobb drug war: First, Oz kneecapped Sofia’s operation in the milk factory, moving it to the trolley depot that Sofia blows up in episode 7. Bliss is, seemingly, no more in the world of The Penguin. 

There’s symbolism, too, to Oz’s hidden mushroom factory going out like that. Throughout the show, Ivanov picked locations with arches and vaulted ceilings, always searching for “cathedral-like spaces.” 

“And when we get to the trolley depot, I pitched vaulted ceilings, and I called it a ‘cathedral for the working man,’” she says. “With the vaulted ceilings, with the tunnels, it really felt like at one point, this was a place where everybody who went to work felt like they were entering church and loved the work that they did.” 

Whatever heyday Oz’s chapter in the trolley depot had, it’s certainly over now. Still, as episode 7 shows us, you can never fully count him out. He’ll take out his kidnapper; climb out from the bowels of the earth; leave his brothers to die. This man will crawl through hell for his higher power — and unfortunately, Sofia is holding her hostage.