This The Penguin review contains spoilers.
After three tumultuous episodes, the Penguin needs a break. Oz (Colin Farrell) started the season by killing Alberto Falcone and making his move to pit the Maroni family against the Falcones, a plan complicated by Sofia Falcone’s release from Arkham.
It all came to head at the end of episode three, when Nadia Maroni (Shohreh Aghdashloo) revealed Oz’s machinations to Sofia. Vic drove Oz’s car into Nadia and then drove away with his boss, leaving Sofia in a wreck behind. Episode 4 “Cent’Anni” splits timelines between Sofia recovering from her injuries after Oz’s betrayal and the events leading into her incarceration for killing seven women.
Episode 4 also represents a break for The Penguin. For its first three episodes, director Craig Zobel struggled to balance the tone between gritty crime drama and Batman spinoff, a problem exacerbated by the show’s tendency to borrow from other series instead of developing its own characters.
But with “Cent’Anni,” Helen Shaver steps into the director’s chair, working from a screenplay by John McCutcheon, and the show settles into a consistent, thrilling tone. After calling her boyfriend/psychatrist Dr. Rush for help, Sofia recalls the month leading up to her incarceration, where she used her power and wealth to advocate for women’s mental health. Sofia’s motivation comes from a horrific childhood incident, when she found her mother hanging from the ceiling.
Yet, despite her father Carmine’s (Mark Strong, standing in for John Turturro) offer to make her the next head of the family, Sofia keeps asking questions. And when she starts talking with a reporter about other women killed via strangulation around Gotham, Sofia finds herself sentenced to Arkham for murder.
More than revealing that Sofia is not actually a murderer, “Cent’Anni” fleshes out her relationship to her family and to Oz. Where previous episodes told us about the bond she shared with Alberto, here we see it in everything from their joking rapport to his desperation to set her free. The Batman established that Carmine would do terrible things to his own daughter, but this episode shows how he targeted even his child with his wife, using his influence to sentence her to Arkham and cover up his crimes. And we see Oz’s first betrayal, when he told Carmine about Sofia talking to Summer Gleeson, earning a promotion from his lowly driver position.
Oh, and yes, we see how Dr. Rush ingratiated himself to Sofia, a plot point that seems to come to an abrupt end in this episode. But if theories that he’s the Scarecrow or Hugo Strange or the Calendar Man have any validity, we’ll see more of Rush soon.
Christin Milioti has always been the best part of The Penguin, so it’s no surprise that the show improves when she gets the lead. She’s wonderful throughout, whether she’s cowering in desperation after being dragged into Arkham by police or sashaying through the Falcone family mansion in a gas mask and yellow party dress, stepping over the bodies of all the family members she just poisoned, including Alberto’s successor. By the time she walks into the bedroom of Johnny Vitti, whom she kept alive by cracking his window, and declares “We need to talk,” Sofia’s transformation is complete.
Hopefully, episode four also means that The Penguin‘s transformation is complete as well. “Cent’Anni” expertly navigates the tonal issues that plauged the previous three episodes. At the start of the episode, Milioti played Sofia as a believable member of a mob family. Sofia tried to do good work and didn’t pry too deeply into her father’s business, which made her feel like a good person.
When Carmine tore all of that away, Sofia becomes unhinged and desperate, as does the episode. A bombastic score accompanies shots of Sofia getting stripped and violated as she’s processed at Arkham, which somehow feels both dehumanizing but not too real and offensive. Inside Arkham, The Penguin seems to turn into an episode of Gotham, complete with a scene-chewing scenes with D-list villains.
Fun as those moments are, they are just moments and the episode wisely turns away. Because, after all, The Penguin isn’t Gotham. It isn’t The Sopranos either and it should stop trying to be. It’s something between those two poles and, for the first time this season, the series finally got it right. Let’s see if Oz can follow Sofia’s lead for the rest of the season.
The Penguin airs on HBO and Max at 9 p.m. ET on Sundays.
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