Underestimate The Penguin at your peril is the resounding message coming out of Gotham City. Initially, this series felt like a placeholder for Matt Reeve’s Batman movies, keeping the brand awareness out there, but with each new episode, the show eclipses that mandate because it’s getting quite good — it’s feeling more at home in the HBO Sunday night slot. All that said, it was inevitable that the episode following “Cent’anni†(Sofia’s “Hangman origin story†and triumphant family annihilation) would feel like a back-to-business episode of sorts — setting the table for the next round of the Gotham gang war.
Nevertheless, The Penguin continues to dish out a winning configuration of Batman villain lore, American crime-genre tropes, and plenty of room for Cristin Milioti to cook. At the top of the episode, Oz sets his Plum chariot ablaze (RIP King), reconciles with Victor, and kidnaps the Maronis’ shitass son Taj (Aria Shahghasemi) as ransom for the Bliss mushrooms they swiped. Meanwhile, Sofia plays the cops like a fiddle back at the Falcone house, now officially a crime scene. Chief Mackenzie Bock (Con O’Neill), one of the crooked cops last seen in The Batman, makes a welcome appearance — he has me absolutely howling with glee every time he opens his mouth and speaks in that thick East Coast tough-guy rasp. Bock starts asking Sofia about her whereabouts the night before, and the whereabouts of Johnny Viti, who is missing from the scene. But Sofia puts Bock back into place when she points out that GCPD will be missing all those kickbacks from the Falcones now.
That seems to be enough to get Bock off her back for now. Time to get back to Viti, tied up in the crypt and on the verge of freezing to death. I love how much the setup here is giving dominatrix: Viti chained up with the horse bit in his mouth and Sofia smoking a cigarette atop a freshly laid casket between rounds of ice-bucket challenges. Sofia has kept Viti alive because she wants the untraceable cash she knows her father kept somewhere close. All Viti’s got to do is show her the way. The switch from “just kill me already†to “let me help you†feels truncated as to strain believability, but Johnny reveals an emotional backstory that backs up his actions in the show and his unceasing animosity toward Sofia. See, Isabella Gigante Falcone was Johnny’s cousin, and he was the one who introduced her to Carmine. The night she died, she was planning to leave Carmine. Johnny was waiting with a car a few blocks down the road, but she never showed. She’d tried to leave Carmine before that night, but she’d gone back because of the kids. Hence, Johnny’s constant resentment and belittling of Sofia, the psycho-spawn of Carmine, who, however inadvertently, got his beautiful cousin killed.
Sofia doesn’t take kindly to this revelation, exhibiting the short fuse that lights up real quick whenever a cornered man is trying to feed her a story to save his own ass. But Johnny has no reason to lie anymore, and he still has a lot to offer her in organizing if she aims to take over the family business. The untraceable cash is just the start of it.
“I couldn’t help your mother,†he admits. “Let me help you.â€
Meanwhile, Oz regroups at Eve’s place with Vic, the Maroni kid, and the feeble few hangers-on from the Falcone crew. “The way I see it, Sofia done us a favor,†Oz says, rallying the troops. “One family down, one to go.â€
And go they do, up in flames. While Mikey, Oz’s guy inside Blackgate, tries and fails to shank Sal to death, Oz makes the trade-off with Nadia, sending her gasoline-drenched son into her arms. Setting the two of them ablaze is almost too easy, leaving Oz an extra beat to gaze into the flames of his burning enemies, indulging in the heat of the win, a bloodlust well satisfied.
The inner revelry is cut short by an overhead fire extinguisher and a gunfight. Oz and just one of his two cronies make it out alive, but all but two of the volatile ’shroom buckets are cooked. And Sal’s busted out of Blackgate, already threatening Oz from a dead Mikey’s phone. Backed into a corner, Oz first calls Vic to get his mom to a hideout apartment in Crown Point, their old neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Sofia Falcone makes her debut as the head of the Falcone … strike that, Gigante crime family. Popping Viti in the head the minute she takes her place at the head of the table is both unexpected and well played. Looks like that untraceable cash was all she needed from you, bro. That and a final gathering of the troops upon which Sofia can establish her newfound authority and take Gotham’s mafia goth-queen championship belt once and for all. Besides, she’s got a new right-hand puppy in Julian Rush, whom we can now all but officially confirm as the love-crazy Dr. Harleen Quinzel to Sofia’s Joker.
Having won over the troops with that big bag o’ Daddy’s cash and an appeal to the labor theory of value, Sofia finds an audience with Sal Maroni. This is Milioti and Clancy Brown’s first scene together, and it’s pretty glorious if you’re a fan of either of these actors. Milioti’s fully formed Sofia Gigante, poised to strike and strike big, plays beautifully against Brown’s injured, whiplashed, and grieving Sal. Her proposal is undeniable at this point: no way out of this shitshow but as a united front against their real, shared enemy, the missing Penguin. Only time will tell if this is a genuine strategic alliance or another double-cross in the making.
It’s late when Oz arrives at the hideout in Crown Point. Victor and his mother are well settled in and deeply haunted by the ghosts of their departed family members. “He’s gonna need my help, then, right? Okay, let’s go, let’s do this!†Francis had said in a flurry of excitement earlier that day when she thought it’d be smooth sailing from here. Now that circumstances are somewhat more dire, she’ll “help†Oz the best way she knows how: negative reinforcement. Oz’s eyes erupt with pain as he holds his mother close and she whispers, “Such big dreams. Like your father.†She shakes him off and succeeds in putting the fire under him.
“The city took them,†says Oz when Victor asks him what happened to his brothers. A dusty old City Trolley fare coin and memories of being boys in the city knock something loose in Oz. He and Victor take a trip down to the abandoned trolley tunnels where he and his brothers used to make their playground and find themselves a dank new base of operations. It’s got just the suitable climate to grow back a steady supply of Bliss. And dark corners from which to wait and scheme and, finally, to take the godfather’s throne.
As we head into the final three chapters of the Cobb/Gigante saga, the table is well set for a riveting clash of indelible Gotham baddies. Here’s where I must give credit to director Helen Shaver for approaching the previous episode and this one with a total command of the tone and iconography of the material. The Sunday night HBO crime caper aspect of the show remains mostly adequate and sometimes even inspired. But in its affection for its characters and tragic-pulp framing of them, The Penguin is shaping up to be a comic-book crime story worth its own weight in stacks and stacks of untraceable cash.
Under the Plum Hood
• So, what’s up with this Julian Rush guy? Speculation abounds as to whether Rush, too, will ultimately evolve into another colorful, known entity from Batman’s Rogues Gallery. We’ve already established something “Scarecrowy†about the whole Bliss operation — mushrooms stolen from Arkham Asylum that bleed red and give off a “party drug†vibe until the fear sets in? Sounds like Rush could be the Reeves Batman universe version of old Dr. Jonathan Crane, a.k.a. Scarecrow. It could also be that Rush is a version of Hugo Strange, a psychiatrist by trade who’s no stranger to running weird experiments on Arkham inmates. While it remains, in my mind, most likely that Rush is a wholly original creation — a genuine combination of guilt toward, affection for, and morbid fascination with Sofia driving his desire to be her right-hand man in the newly minted Gigante crime family — the line between career criminal and crazy, costumed career criminal is razor thin in Gotham.