The Penguin Recap: Men Have Called Her Crazy
If you’ve been basking in Cristin Milioti’s performance as Sofia Falcone the last few weeks, this origin story (within an origin story) will be a major highlight of the series. “Cent’anni” makes the most of the show’s secondary villain, flipping the script on Sofia’s “Hangman” origins in Tim Sale’s Dark Victory comic (in which she’s revealed to have killed high-profile members of the Gotham P.D.) to paint a portrait of a victim of a cruel, conspiratorial world and her father’s sins.
With the exception of a table-setting opening, the episode comprises an extended flashback and a ghoulish, downright delicious final act that plays like a souped-up Lifetime original prisonsploitation flick. It’s an inspired style and format to deliver the straight facts on what happened to Sofia and what drove her to eventually annihilate her entire family.
We start with the first incident in which she was forced to confront the murders for which she’d soon be accused. Amidst her pretty, innocent face-of-the-family duties at another philanthropic event, a reporter confronts her about a series of murders of women who worked for businesses owned by her father. Sofia bolts from the conversation the second she realizes she’s talking to a journalist, but not fast enough to dodge her loyal driver, Oz, witnessing the interaction, nor a flashback to when she walked in on her mother’s hanging dead body in her parents’ bedroom.
The next scene is an intimate family dinner for three: Carmine, Sofia, and Alberto. It’s also our introduction to Mark Strong as Carmine Falcone, a scheduling-conflict sub-in for The Batman’s John Turturro. Strong proves a welcome relief pitcher here — throwing some serious heat via his signature icy stare from behind the character’s “redrum”-red frames. It’s the right type of menace for a believable mob boss who moonlights as a psycho lady-killer. Had this been any other night, Sofia would have been elated at her father’s offer to inherit the family business. But that reporter’s questions knocked something loose in Sofia’s memory of her mother’s death. Sofia asks her father for details: Was there ever a sign of her mother’s depression before she took her own life? Did she ever seek help through therapy? Sofia doesn’t buy Carmine’s canned line that Sofia’s mother was a “proud woman.” Besides, why would Sofia “pick away at old wounds” when she knows it upsets him? Something about the quietly frantic dismissal of the subject and the switch to authoritative posturing is enough to cement her suspicions.
One more nighttime grubby-overpass meeting with the reporter confirms that whoever strangled all those women had to have been in a position of elicit power to cover his tracks. The police reports allege suicide by hanging in all the cases, but the marks on their necks are clearly denote a strangler’s hands. Defensive wounds also indicate that these women were fighting an assailant at the time of their death. Sofia thinks back to her newly departed, hanging mother’s hands, her nails broken and bloody from a struggle.
“You don’t know shit about my father! He is a good man!” Sofia shouts unconvincingly before she and Oz drive away. Oz humbly advises against Sofia meeting with the reporter again, and Sofia snaps back, “I don’t need your advice; I don’t care what you think. No one does. You are my driver and that’s all you are.”
A fatal mistake on Sofia’s part, making Oz feel small when she’d been the only person in the Falcone family to treat him like an equal. A momentary lapse of kindness is all it takes for Oz to sell out a friend, fair-weather or otherwise, for a status upgrade. Later, at the family party, Oz summons Sofia to talk to her father. Oz is wearing a flashy new suit — our first tipoff that he’s already ratted her out to Carmine. As for Gotham’s reigning Godfather, he’s all “How could you”s and “I trusted you, my ‘No. 1 boy’ of a daughters”s and all that bullshit. Just enough to make Sofia feel scolded and get her in the car home, where she’s met by the police to arrest her for the murder of the reporter and all the other women who worked for her father.
Carmine’s master plan becomes clear when Sofia’s lawyer hands her a fixed sentence: six months in Arkham for psychological evaluation, then a trial. Carmine is claiming that Sofia has a history of mental illness, and everyone else in the family but Alberto has written affidavits suggesting the same. In his own daughter, he’s found the perfect fall guy for his most murderous crimes, giving a diabolical double meaning to the moniker “hangman.” In Sofia — their cousin, niece, and family outcast — the Falcones have found an ideal candidate upon which to hang their complicity.
Things go about as well as you’d expect for Sofia in this grimiest of prisonsploitation versions of Arkham Asylum. A horrific and degrading delousing montage gives way to an intro to the sadistic Dr. Ventris and reluctant Dr. Rush. We’re also introduced to Sofia’s manic pixie cell neighbor Magpie, who makes incredibly annoying use of the tiny hole in the wall between their cells. At her first meal in the cafeteria, Sofia is welcomed by an ominous chant of “Hangman” from the rest of the women in the room, followed by an all-out assault from a tall, unchained woman blitzed out of her mind on her “clinically administered” dose of Bliss.
“A woman beat the shit out of me while everyone stood around and watched, so yeah, I had an ‘incident,’” is how she describes it to Dr. Rush hours later. He shows genuine sympathy and seems to mean it when he says he has no other agenda than to help her. He may not actually be in on Carmine’s conspiracy, but he knows something’s off about the whole situation. Nevertheless, he offers up a rote bit of doctorly advice, and Sofia sticks to her guns. She knows the woman who beat her up was uncuffed for a reason, and she knows she’s been framed for murder by her own family.
The mad doctors at Arkham Asylum never do end up breaking Sofia’s spirit, nor do the Falcones succeed in shutting up their fall gal. Instead, they succeed in making the very monster that brings them all down. When a staged mess-hall rematch between Sofia and the woman who beat her up ends in the other woman repeatedly stabbing herself in the neck (presumably to end her own suffering as a Bliss guinea pig), Dr. Ventris subjects Sofia to repeat rounds of electroshock, triggering a series of hallucinations that burrow her deeper into an endless loop of her memories of her mother’s death. When the time comes for her trial, Alberto visits with the news that Ventris has declared her unfit to stand. As all hope of escape from the plight of the Hangman is finally lost, Sofia snaps into her newfound psycho killer role — slamming Magpie’s head into oblivion in the cafeteria. “I told you I’m fucking innocent,” she says for the last time.
Sofia wakes up from her extended flashback in Dr. Rush’s house, where our girl realizes the full repercussions of trusting Oz Cobb despite their history. Backed into a corner, she realizes the best course of action is to flip the script on the whole “family annihilator” scenario and fortify herself from every enemy in one swift swing of the scythe. One can’t laud Milioti’s efforts enough in making Sofia’s devilish fuck-y’all speech at the Falcone family dinner table. Her unhinged death dealer’s command reverberates through the next scene as we follow Sofia through the Falcone house of horrors — each member of the family suffocated from the gas she rerouted through the house. All except her little cousin Gia, who she kept with her overnight in the greenhouse, and Johnny Viti, who happened to have slept with the window open. It’s unclear whether Johnny’s survival was part of the plan, but with the rest of the family so swiftly and violently out of the picture, there’s nowhere for him to stand but at Sofia’s right hand.
When one considers crime as the inevitable result of “deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice,” as Pauline Kael put it in her New Yorker review of Dirty Harry, even the pulpiest (or comic-bookiest) American crime stories reveal volumes about the effects of crime on the American psyche. As The Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc elaborates, they “reflect back the world we live in — who we take care of and who we condemn.” The Hangman was the illusion of a monster, created by a monster to absorb the fallout of his monstrous deeds. Rather than remain the monster that her family made of her, Sofia mutates into a triumphant manifestation of her own wrath and the wrath of the women her father killed. In Gotham City, you either die the victim or live long enough to see yourself become the criminal of the week.
Under the Plum Hood
• More on the comic book version of Sofia Falcone: as written by Jeph Loeb and illustrated by Tim Sale in The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, Sofia enters the scene as a ruthless (and fucking swole) participant in the Falcone family machinations. Despite her father Carmine’s reluctance, she shows an insatiable desire to be part of the family business and seeks revenge for all threats to the Falcone empire. In Dark Victory, she’s the actual Hangman who does the actual Hangman killings — the victims: high-profile members of the Gotham P.D. to avenge her father’s death. Sofia’s fierce ambition and lust for vengeance (as well as her narrative function as a bridge between the criminal past and future of Gotham) remains in The Penguin as a firm foundation upon which to build a mostly new character and worthwhile excavation of the monsters greed makes of all of us.
• Milioti has talked a lot in interviews for this show about fulfilling a childhood dream by playing a Batman villain — citing 1995’s Batman Forever and the beloved Batman: The Animated Series as the urtexts of her Bat fandom (girl, same). While there are simply too many instances of actors claiming to be lifelong fans of the IP they’re starring in for all of them to be legit, this one certainly bears out in the performance. Matching the tone of a Joel Schumacher Batman movie with another grimy post-Joker villain-rising project may sound like a mismatch at first, but the whole show seems to be drinking from the same tonal cocktail, anchored by Milioti’s command for the material. Even Farrell’s performance feels augmented to humm on the Sofia register at this point.
• It was a fatal mistake on Sofia’s part to make Oz feel small when she’d been the only person in the Falcone family to treat him like an equal. On the one hand, it seems like a bit of a stretch that a momentary lapse of kindness is all it would take for Oz to sell out his only friend in the family, fairweather or otherwise. On the other, it does seem clear he thought the boss’s punishment for his only daughter would be minimal (and certainly not a decade-long stay in Arkham). Either way, there’s something of a foggy truncation of Oz’s actions and motivations here, which may require further clarification down the road if Oz’s betrayal continues to be such a major emotional talking point.