“The Penguin” Episode 4 Introduced a Classic Batman Villain
In the first three episodes of HBO’s devilishly entertaining The Penguin, Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb has made daring, painful inroads with Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), the daughter of the late Gotham underworld poobah Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong). As the series kicked off in the wake of the Riddler’s attack on Gotham in Matt Reeves’ feature The Batman, Sofia was freshly sprung from Arkham Asylum, where she spent a decade after being accused of the murder of seven women working at her father’s Iceberg Lounge, earning her the nickname “The Hangman” in the press and within her family. The fragile, budding partnership between Oz and Sofia has been slowly fleshed out over the first three episodes, revealing their tortured shared history—including episode one’s explosive opening sequence in which Oz kills her beloved brother, Alberto—and their common goal of filling the power vacuum left after Carmine’s assassination. Episode 4, “Cent’Anni,” filled in the full extent of Sofia’s banishment to Arkham, Oz’s complicity in her miserable decade of confinement, and the people Sofia met while there. One of those people happened to be a classic Batman villain, although her future as a Gotham ghoul was cut brutally short in the episode.
“Cent’Anni” (an Italian phrase meaning “may you live 100 years”) took us back to life in Falcone family before the Riddler killed Carmine, when he was running the most powerful crime family in Gotham, and Sofia was his chosen successor. Unlike the unreliable, unfocused Alberto, Sofia was smart, composed, motivated, and somewhat in awe of her father. In short, she wanted to do right by him and wanted him to be proud of her. There was one impediment to her transition into the top spot in the Falcone family—the suicide of her mother, who Sofia found in her parents’ bedroom; she’d hanged herself. When a reporter from the Gotham Gazette, Summer Gleeson (Nadine Malouf), approaches Sofia at a benefit for mental health that the Falcone’s sponsor in honor of her mother’s troubles and asks her pointed questions about the string of apparent suicides of young women working at her father’s club, Sofia’s grim fate is set into motion.
Sofia agrees to meet with the reporter to hear her out and learns that the young women who keep turning up dead are not, in fact, suicides—they were strangled, and they had fought their killer, as evidenced by marks on their hands and under their fingernails. Confronting this reality forces Sofia to recall a detail from her childhood—the bloody scratches on her father’s hand after her mother’s suicide. The brutal reality of what has actually been happening to these women and what happened to her mother is too much to bear for her. She decides to look away. It doesn’t matter.
Back then, Oz wasn’t the Capo he was when we met him in The Batman or here; he was with Sofia’s driver, and he drove her to meet with Summer Gleeson. Oz goes behind Sofia’s back and tells Carmine about this, and Carmine summons Sofia to meet with her father at his birthday party. In short order, he has her arrested for the murder of Gleeson (which is news to both Sofia and Oz, or so he says), as well as the seven women who had worked at the Iceberg Lounge and its secretive inner sanctum, 44 Degrees. She’s shipped off to Arkham, where she’s tortured, mentally and physically, for the six months before her trial.
Arkham is a legendary breeding ground in the comics and the films for Batman villains, and while Sofia goes into Arkham a sane, innocent woman, she will leave a killer. While there, she meets the woman sharing the next cell over, a patient who calls herself Magpie (Marié Botha), an eccentric, talkative sort who seems desperate to be Sofia’s friend. The problem for Sofia is everyone at Arkham is working for her father, and there will be no end to the brutality she endures—shock “therapy,” unshackled lunatics allowed to attack her, and eventually, the erasure of the one thing holding her together, her court date. The doctors at Arkham have said she’s not stable enough to stand trial, and her family members have all signed affidavits attesting to her insanity. Carmine Falcone has destroyed Sofia’s life and left her no exits whatsoever. And there’s Magpie, chattering away in her ear.
Magpie is a classic Batman villain from the comics. She was first introduced in 1986 in the third issue of “The Man of Steel,” in which she is a curator for the Gotham City Museum by day, a serial robber by not. She’s a kleptomaniac and a tech whiz who creates explosive replicas of the objects she wants to steal, eventually drawing both Superman and Batman into orbit. It takes the two of them to track her down and send her to Arkham.
In the comics, Magpie was eventually killed by the Penguin’s associates. However, a new version was resurrected as a Black Lantern in the “Blackest Night” saga, and other versions of Magpie ended up in the Suicide Squad and appeared in the shows Gotham, Beware the Batman, and Batwoman.
Unfortunately for us, despite a riveting performance from Botha, Magpie’s tenure in this particular vision of Gotham is short-lived. Sofia finally snaps at Arkham, and Magpie pays the price—Sofia beats her to death. It ain’t pretty.
It was, in short, a riveting but pitch-black episode devoted to Cristin. Milioti’s sensational performance as Sofia and the injustice she’s endured. It also teased us with a glimpse of some of the colorful villains that have moved across the pages and screens of Gotham-set stories. “Cent’Anni” also made clear that as incredible as Colin Farrell is as the Penguin, as much as we find ourselves rooting for him in a way that’s not so dissimilar from how we rooted for the deeply troubled and decidedly bad Tony Soprano, his complicity in Sofia Falcone’s torture is impossible to look away from. The irony is after screwing over countless dangerous people in Gotham for years, and years, Sofia Falcone might be the one person capable of making Oz finally pay for his crimes.
Go inside the episode here.
For more on The Penguin, check out these stories:
Inside the Shaky Alliance Between Oz and Sofia in “The Penguin” Episode 3
How “The Penguin” Production Designer Kalina Ivanov Helped Bring Gotham Back to New York City
“The Penguin” Trailer Reveals Colin Farrell’s Crime Lord Scheming for Control of Gotham
Featured image: L-r: Marié Botha, Cristin Milioti. Photograph by Macall Polay/HBO
