There are worse ways you can spend your TV time than watching Cristin Milioti, both slasher-movie freaky and hugely attractive in a black gas mask and a form-fitting gold gown, swan around a mafia mansion gazing at the corpses of her enemies — her own family. I mean, that’s a given, right? “It’s fun to watch beautiful people do terrible things” is a core tenet of cinema, baby. Dressing like the Miner from My Bloody Valentine at the Met Gala to lord it over the bodies of the gangsters who framed you for murder and thrust you into an inescapable hellhole for ten years of your life? That’s entertainment!

Of course, the Hollywood flipside of “It’s fun to watch beautiful people do terrible things” is “It’s fun to watch terrible things be done to beautiful people.” That’s what the bulk of The Penguin Episode 4 is about: the methodical destruction of Sofia Falcone’s personality in Arkham State Hospital by a system rigged by her serial-killer mob-boss father to do exactly that. 

Sofia’s ordeal has a little bit of everything. She starts out as an ambitious mafia princess with no blood on her hands, receiving word from her father that she’s been named heir to the Iron Throne. She ends up as a mass murderer for real, gassing the vast majority of her family to death as they sleep — sparing only an innocent child, and underboss Johnny Vitti, for purposes yet unrevealed.

In between, she gets caught up in a newspaper investigation of a series of killings of women, all of them who work for the secret club run by Sofia’s father Carmine (Mark Strong, stepping in for John Turturro from The Batman). The strangulation marks and evidence of struggle happen to match the “suicide” by hanging of Sofia’s mother, whose body the girl discovered…before quickly being whisked away by her father, who has scratches all over his hands. 

Sofia puts two and two together, but stonewalls the reporter who brings her the evidence. Her biggest mistake? Trusting Oz, her driver. Decked out in a chauffeur’s uniform that gives him the black-and-white palette of his namesake waterfowl, he dutifully reports the reporter’s contact with Sofia back to Carmine. It seems like Oz expects her to get a talking-to about the dangers of talking to journalists, little more — although this also puts him directly on Carmine’s radar, which Sofia says is what he really wanted.

But Sofia says a few too many wrong things implying she believes Carmine killed her mother and all the other women. Carmine goes apeshit, killing the journalist and framing Sofia for that murder and all the others. (Except mom’s; as far as I can tell, they’ve decided to leave that one officially a suicide. No need to open the door for any more questions there.)

Instead of a trial, though, Sofia is found mentally incompetent, and her six-month remand in the brutal Arkham facility is extended indefinitely. There’s some material in this segment you might have heard referred to pejoratively as “torture porn” back in the ‘00s. Sofia is stripped naked, hosed off, scrubbed down, and searched in every cavity; the camera focuses on her face as the staff penetrates her with a speculum. 

She’s brutally beaten by an inmate set free for the purpose, then framed for that inmate’s gruesome suicide-by-fork when she refuses to kill the woman herself. She’s subjected to repeated and completely medically unnecessary ECT, leaving her vomiting and convulsing and tormented by nightmares. All of this has been done at the behest of her father, who’s trying to ensure she either dies or goes legitimately insane enough to no longer be a threat. When she beats a fellow inmate with the DC supervillain name Magpie (Marié Botha) to death out of sheer paranoia, it appears Carmine’s plan is a success.

Unfortunately for all the family members who toed the line and falsely claimed Sofia had a history of violent mental illness at Carmine’s behest, Carmine is now dead. Sofia is out, having fully “recovered.” She now knows that Oz killed her brother and was planning to sell her out, because she heard it directly from the Maroni crew sent to kill them both before Vic charged in to save the day. Sofia survived and spent the night with Dr. Julian Rush (Theo Rossi), the only even slightly sympathetic figure in Arkham, who quit rather than continue to participate in her torture. Sofia, who has the magnetism of a black hole, toys with his obvious attraction, both to her and to the feeling of being in control of her.

So she crashes a big family dinner, wearing that gold dress and enough black eye makeup to put Siouxsie Sioux to shame. She gives a bitter toast, confronting them with their complicity in her wrongful institutionalization. It’s really interesting, incidentally, how this recasts the family’s discomfort around her when she gets back from Arkham: They’re not afraid of what did, since they know she didn’t do anything to deserve being put in that place — they’re afraid of what she might do now, because of what she became after they put her there. Anyway, Sofia retires for the night, rescues her little niece or cousin or whoever, and has a little slumber party in the greenhouse while she kills the whole family in one fell swoop. That’s the Gotham way!

This kind of material is not going to be for everybody. For starters, there’s the question of whether this level of brutality is warranted for a show based on a character who wears a top hat and monocle and shoots at a guy dressed as a bat with an umbrella machine gun. But DC and Warner Bros. have been ratcheting up the Bat-violence for decades at this point. I’d love to see more room made for other approaches to the character and his milieu — I suppose there’s always animation for that — but for the live action stuff, the ship has sailed.

You also might not be in the mood for Caged Heat shots of a nude woman doing prison BDSM. You might find Arkham’s medieval approach to psychiatry hard to swallow even in a world with Batman in it. You might be the kind of viewer that just sort of internally recoils from storylines based on unfairness, on mix-ups and mistaken identities. (Personally, it’s why I have a hard time watching Frasier.) If any of that’s the case, I can’t blame you for bailing.

But when we get to that final sequence, where she Saltburns her whole family while dressed like a post-apocalyptic Oscar statuette, most of my complaints fell by the wayside. What we’re looking at, of course, is a gothic, updated for the 2020s — a New Lurid tale of twisted family secrets erupting forth and unmaking the rich and powerful who built their empires upon them. Sofia Falcone is The Penguin’s Poe homage — Madeleine Usher risen from the tomb, the tell-tale heart beating out a reminder of murder, the Masque of the Red Death visiting diseased vengeance on Prince Prospero and his revelers. Spooky Season has come to Gotham City.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.