Is bliss, the drug on HBO’s Penguin, real? Not technically — but the production designer team did grow real bleeding mushrooms (which met their end in episode 7)
[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.
