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.
