Robin Lord Taylor on Oswald Freezing Ed Nygma, Oswald's Parents, and Diversifying Content (San Diego Comic Con 2017 Interview)

When last we saw Oswald Cobblepot, he was well on his way to reclaiming his position of power and also had frozen Ed Nygma into ice to enact revenge for his attempt to kill Oswald. Now viewers are left to wonder just how long it will take before Ed is unfrozen and the two are reunited in their battle. "Obviously I can't give specifics... the lesson that Penguin never learns is the old saying, hubris precedes nemesis. Penguin, every time he makes a move that is successful or if he gets one over on someone, he immediately assume that it's locked and done. As we've seen over the past three seasons of the show, that's not the case. He thinks he's in a safe place keeping Riddler right there but he's also frozen the dude in a block of ice and put it as the center-piece of the Penguin Lounge. Stay tuned!"

Throughout the course of Oswald's journey on the series, viewers have seen how significant his relationship with his parents has been as well as the tragedy of losing both of them. "Danny Cannon, our executive producer, has said that one of the tenants of our show is, one of the bigger overarching themes is what happens to a human when love is lost, when love is taken away from them, when they don't experience love and they don't understand what it is. It's all about the loss of love, the lack of it, and what happens is you create super-villains. You create people who have no empathy, who put only themselves first. That's the overarching story that we're telling here. Oswald's loss of his parents, at least in the story that we're telling here, the loss of his parents are the reason why he becomes the monster, why ultimately, regardless of if there's something sympathetic about him or whatever people can see into that, regardless of all of that, he's a person who becomes a monster and deserves no empathy nor sympathy, [for] what he has done to innocent people since the pilot of our show. The loss of his parents are the main driving reason why he puts no one else above himself ever for the rest of his life."

Season three also brought about a plot point of Oswald becoming infatuated with Ed in an often too-rare showing in media of a same-sex romantic entanglement. "It's an enormous responsibility and as a gay man, it's incredibly personally important to me to not be cynical, to be honest with the character and true to the character, true to what his singular experience is, and also, any time you can show diversity on television especially LGBTQIA is an amazing gift, However, I will say though, I have a hard time accepting Oswald as a member of that community because he, as what we see with the Riddler, he has absolutely no idea of what love is. He has absolutely no true concept of what it is because what he does when he 'falls in love' is he rips the person that his loved one is most interested [in] out of his life. He murders that person. That's someone who is obviously so damaged and the moral compass is so off. I have a really hard time ascribing his experience to that of LGBTQIA. I love that just in the very least we portrayed this connection between these two characters, whether you want to call that love or whatever, but my favorite thing about doing that and this is a testament to the writers is that none of the characters used it as a derogatory thing against Oswald. It wasn't treated like, 'You're gay? I'm gonna blackmail you!' It was never about shaming him for being it, it was about getting one over on him cause he's a fucking asshole. But it wasn't about him being gay which, that's what I'm most proud of about that story. It was just another relationship."

Watch our full interview with Robin Lord Taylor here: