For the past three episodes of The Penguin, we’ve seen the disfigured title character try and wriggle his way onto the throne of power while wriggling out of every single life threatening problem that suddenly gets in his way. However, while it’s been fascinating to watch him do his thing, there was a sense that maybe the show needed to switch things up a little or suffer the risk of getting a little samey. Lo and behold, episode 4 does that exact thing as it temporarily pushes the misdeeds of Oz to one side in favour of casting a more probing light onto the traumatic existence of Sofia Falcone, the daughter of mob boss Carmine Falcone who has spent the better part of a decade locked away in Arkham Asylum.
But why was she there, who dumped her there and why on earth was she lumbered with the nickname “The Hangman”? Stay tuned Gothamites, we’re about to get the full lowdown.
In the wake of the Maroni family figuring out that Oz has been playing them for fools, in the ensuring flare of gunfire Sofia takes a knock to the head which puts her on a one way trip to flashback-land and as she drifts through the events of the last decade, we see exactly what shaped her into the woman she is today.
Ten years prior, Sofia was the favoured child of Carmine who believed in his daughter so much, he was willing to break with tradition and groom his daughter to take over the family for him when the time came. While this comes as a pleasant shock to her, she also spends a lot of her time campaigning for troubled women after finding her mother’s body as a child after she apparently committed suicide.
As she is driven around by her driver, Oz, she’s approached at one event by reporter Summer Gleeson who has some disturbing news for her that a string of recent suicides might actually be murders made up to look like the victims took their own lives and as they all worked at the Iceberg Lounge, suspicion falls heavily on Carmine. However, after her father gets wind of his daughter chatting to a reporter (from Cobb, of course), he takes immediate and vicious action to close ranks and before you know it, Sofia has been declared sick and is transported to Arkham for six months of treatment.
While she builds a rapport with kindly psychiatrist Dr. Julian Rush and barking mad inmate Magpie, Sofia also suffers multiple indignities at the hands of the callous Dr. Ventris and numerous inmates after she is branded the killer who murdered all those girls her father killed and sees her time at Arkham stretch from 6 moths to ten years.
Back in the present, Sofia is rescued from the Maroni hit by Rush and after finding out that it was Oz that killed her brother all along, decides to finally take what she believes is hers – the reigns of the entire Falcone family.
Taking the focus off Oz and handing an entire episode over to Sofia is the temporary change of pace the show needed to give it the necessary oomph to carry it into its second half, but not inly does it clue us in to Sofia in a way that’s more intimate than ever, it also goes a huge way to building more of the world that Matt Reeves created in The Batman.
For a start, we see the return of a younger Carmine Falcone now played by Mark Strong (previously played by John Turturro) that allows us to see what a brutish hold he had over his domain even back then and while he’s forward thinking enough to consider placing Sofia at the head of the business, we also see that he’s cold bloodied and paranoid enough to hurl her into oblivion the very second he hears that she’s been chatting to a journalist. In fact, thanks to the work of both Turturro and Strong, Carmine Falcone may be the most vicious son of a bitch that’s ever lurked in Gotham since Robert Patterson’s Dark Knight first made its bow. His antisocial leanings also show that his weakness for throttling women to death wasn’t just isolated to Selina Kyle’s mother as we find that he not only is the serial killer known as the Hangman, but he also strangled his own wife and pinned it as a suicide. It’s this memory of her father trying to shield her from the sight of her mother’s dangling corpse that give Sofia the childhood memory of spotting tell-tale scratches on her father’s face which gives her the doubt to speak to a journalist in the first place.
So from there, it’s off to Arkham we go – and while we spend a little time in the psychiatric shit hole before courtesy of the Riddler, here we get the whole enchilada… and what an enchilada it is. Dirty, corrupt and dangerously outmoded, the infamous asylum is used as a chilling metaphor for how men discard and abuse women who threaten the power that they hold. It also brings up some serious questions of if this place could ever hope to rehabilitate people as far gone as the Riddler or Joker when it turns someone as civilised as Sofia into an enraged shadow of herself when her sanity finally snaps and she beats a fellow inmate to death.
However, whatever goes around, comes around as the old saying goes and once we’re done with these illuminating flashbacks, it’s back to the present in order to finally see The Penguin make some leaps and bounds when it comes to the matter of someone making a move on the throne and while Oz has been nibbling around the edges, hoping for something to give or slot in place, Sofia goes straight for the throat in a way that’s impressively swift and terrible.
Gathering for a Falcone family gathering, Sofia openly shows her contempt for the men that have kept her down and the family that vouched for her metal illness under the orders of Carmine by openly mocking her uncle, Luca, in front of everyone. However, once the social awkwardness has ended and everyone goes to bed, we see that Sofia manages to escort Gia, her cousin’s young daughter out for a camp out in the mansions greenhouse only to reveal that she’s had the rest of the house rigged up to be pumped full of poison gas that kills everyone while they sleep. In fact, the sight of her gleefully striding around the mansion and going from bedroom to bedroom to admire her sizable body count may possibly be the most outright example of classic Batman villain type behavior this incarnation of the universe has seen so far – I mean a mass gassing? It’s fucking textbook wouldn’t you say?
But with only Viti left alive, the road is utterly cleared for Sofia to finally claim what was promised to her over a decade to go and now we know exactly what makes her tick and how far she’ll go, the final target she has left is a particular gimpy criminal that’s been playing her like for a fool this entire time.
Can the Penguin possibly waddle loose of this one not that all of his secrets are laid bare? Right now, with the stakes suddenly launched so high, it’s tough to imagine, but with Sofia and the Maronis both looking to put this flightless bird on the extinction list, Oz needs to come up with some primo bullshit to get out of this one.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 