Cristin Milioti has been the surprise standout of this show, and this episode puts the spotlight on her. We already knew Colin Ferrell was going to bring a great performance as the Penguin, but Milioti is turning Sofia Falcone into a legendary Gotham character. Spoilers follow forThe Penguin Season 1, Episode 4, “Cent’anni.”
“Cent’anni”
A huge part of this episode is set in a flashback. Historically, flashbacks in DC shows have driven me bonkers, but in this case it does some crucial work in helping us understand Sofia Falcone. It also works because Milioti is just making this character shine.
We flashback to how she ended up in Arkham–who put her there and what she did to earn it. This takes us back to before the flood, before the Riddler, to when Carmine Falcone hadn’t yet been assassinated. This is one of the strangest parts of the show. John Turturro played Carmine in the movie, but it sounds like there were major scheduling conflicts that kept him from returning. In his place is Mark Strong, who has previously worked in the DC Universe as Sinestro in Ryan Reynolds’ universally-panned Green Lantern and as Dr. Sivana in the first Shazam film.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about Strong in this role. I’ve liked him in many past roles, but with this recasting it feels more like he’s cosplaying Turturro than he is able to make the character his own. It’s hard to blame him, though; the showrunners were kind of locked into including the character if they were going to tell a Gotham-set mafia story. It’s just that every scene he’s in, he looks a little out of place. It looks like they’re trying to hide the fact that he’s a different actor while simultaneously giving him speaking lines and close-ups.
Thus far, when people have called Sofia the Hangman, she hasn’t disputed it. Even when it’s just her and her driver, she hasn’t pushed back. When she’s dumped in Arkham without a drop of blood on her hands, it’s actually pretty shocking. This episode feeds back intoThe Batman by turning Carmine into a true monster–he’s strangled at least seven women, including his wife, and then when Sofia finds out, he dumps her into Arkham and engineers her into a fall guy for his crimes.
But it also justifies where Sofia is at, and everything she’s done. For the simple crime of wanting to find justice for her mother, she was imprisoned for a full decade in a place where daily survival requires strength and a steel will.
In present day, she wakes up in the office of her psychiatrist, Julian Rush, who we now know she met at Arkham. These two characters continue to have really unsettling chemistry. He’s the one she calls after Oz leaves her for dead with (probably) a concussion, but he still seems like a well-intentioned creep, who wants to do the right things for the wrong reasons. He wants to protect Sofia, he believes her when she says she’s innocent, but it also seems like he’s trying trying to fix her so that she’ll reward him with her love. They have these tender, intimate moments followed by her pushing him away, emotionally and physically. And so he seems like someone that Sofia is using; she knows she can depend on him to a certain extent as someone outside the Falcone family, but has to hold him at arms length for her own safety.
The whole of Arkham feels as close to actual Batman content as we’ve gotten. Sofia’s cell is next to that of the thief Magpie. It’s funny how something as simple as putting in a few characters with special crime/vigilante monikers can go toward reminding us that, yes, this is from a Batman comic. Arkham has more character than most of the other sets the show has used, from the old-looking orange-and-white uniforms to the way the cafeteria looks simultaneously clinical and dingy.
By the time Sofia is zipping around the Falcone mansion in a Beauty and the Beast-style yellow dress and messing with the gas mains, I felt like, yes, this action is justified. At dinner the night before, she gives a long speech to her family about how she was treated. It isn’t a single shot, but there are long shots in there, and Milioti delivers the soliloquy flawlessly. It wasn’t Arkham that broke her–the asylum helped her develop a steel will and ruthless outlook that has made her strong enough to stand against any challengers. What broke her is the way her family treated her the moment she was let out of Arkham. All anyone wanted to do was shoo the psycho off somewhere out of view. Send the embarrassing daughter off to Italy, where she won’t bother anyone.
We’re left on a cliffhanger. I’m not totally clear on the status of the Falcone family at this point. But I know I’m going to enjoy the heck out of every scene Sofia appears in. It might say Penguin on the tin, but right now this feels like Sofia’s show.
Disclaimer: HBO provided Batman-News with early access to The Penguin episodes for the purposes of review.
