There’s a lot going on in this episode of The Penguin, and I mean a lot. You ever go to one of those places where they serve you a burger or a sandwich or a hero or something and it’s just like, there’s no possible way this is all fitting into my mouth? I mean, there’s no conceivable way you could take a bite of the thing that encompassed it from top to bottom. Like it wasn’t even designed with being eatable in mind. Just a huge hunk of stuff you need to cram down your gullet one bite at a time, you know what I mean? That’s this episode of The Penguin. It’s a triple-decker plot sandwich, with layer upon layer of stuff happening. I suppose that’s what making a densely plotted no-nonsense crime thriller that runs nearly a full hour every episode gets you.
But as is often the case with such culinary monstrosities, there’s one ingredient that stands out from the rest and makes you think “wow, this was worth the effort.” In this case, that’s Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone — excuse me, Sofia Gigante, rechristened with her mother’s maiden name after wiping out the family’s entire upper management tier. This is a Gotham City crime boss worthy of the title.
Is she sexy? Oh, you better believe it. Her huge dark eyes perpetually accentuated with thick black eyeliner, she adopts a dress code of low-cut off-the-shoulder numbers to show off not just her skin, but the countless scars that criss-cross it, some of them fresh. And in an inversion of the Joker/Harley Quinn origin story, she effortlessly — and I mean no effort at all, this was not something she was even thinking about trying to do on purpose — secures a submissive sycophant in the form of Dr. Julian Rush, who abandons his career to serve by her side. (It’s a bit like how Victor became the Penguin’s sidekick the same way the second Robin, Jason Todd, became Batman’s: by trying to steal the rims from his ride.) When he begs to join her, she’s not even wearing pants.
But she’s also a fun, supervillainous bad guy. She openly takes credit for gassing her family to death. She chains up underboss Johnny Vitti and tortures him with near-hypothermia to get the location of her father’s hidden cache of cash out of him, has him arrange a sit-down with the family’s low-level associates, then kills him in front of them all to make the point that there’s a new boss in town.
Sofia’s intention is to make peace with the Maronis rather than prosecute their current war till its bloody conclusion. She personally makes peace with an on-the-lam Salvatore Maroni (more on that later), pitching an alliance that can both rule the city and stamp out their mutual enemy, Oz Cobb. Sofia also promises to pay the Gigante foot soldiers what they’re worth, and she starts by handing out her dad’s money to them directly. She even talks about ending the era of her murderous and misogynistic father making money off of “your labor.” She’s the mafia’s first socialist.
And crucially, she’s a huge hypocrite. A huge part of her pitch the Falcone grunts is that her father, Johnny, and the rest of the top dogs did nothing when Carmine killed her mother, then framed her and shipped her off to a mental hospital to die. She’s not that kind of boss, she claims. But she simply watches sadly and does jack shit when the little girl she saved from the carbon monoxide the night of the poisoning is taken away to a children’s home the next morning. In other words, this is no one you should root for. She’s not the kinder, gentler boss she’s making herself out to be.
The Penguin, meanwhile, spends the episode yo-yo’ing from triumph to total ruin. He kidnaps the Maronis’ failson (every mafia family has one), lures his powerful mother Nadia to a hostage exchange where she returns Oz’s shrooms in exchange for her son, and burns them both alive. It’s prolonged, loud, and unpleasant, and Oz watches every second of it the way you’d watch the best scene in your favorite movie.
But he didn’t count on the chemical fire suppressant in the garage where the execution takes place. He and his henchman may have survived the Maronis’ attempt to ambush them, but the mushrooms don’t survive contact with the chemicals. Only a couple of sealed buckets of the shrooms survive.
Meanwhile, a simultaneous hit the Penguin orchestrated on Sal Maroni in prison fails, leaving the bosses of both families alive. Oz killed Sal’s wife and son, horribly. He murdered Sofia’s brother, the only member of the Falcone family who cared about her, then lied about it, years after dropping the dime that got her locked up in the first place. It’s safe to say they’ll stop at nothing to get at the guy.
He and his associates know it, too. He rallies the handful of men left to him, but his girlfriend calls things off unless and until he’s not bringing danger into the lives of her and her girls. Victor brings Oz’s increasingly senile mother to his abandoned and half-destroyed apartment in Crown Point for safekeeping, but all she can think about is her own time in that destitute neighborhood, how much she hated it and how much she misses the husband and sons she lost. (To what? “The city,” Oz half-explains to Victor.) But when Vic’s neighborhood tough-guy spots him bringing Mrs. Cobb indoors, the odds of their discovery by Sofia or Sal skyrocket.
The episode ends with Oz leading Victor down into abandoned underground trolley tracks (to the tune of the Cure’s goth standard “A Forest”), where he and his brothers used to have a secret clubhouse. Warm and humid, it’s a perfect place to grow their few mushrooms into a bumper crop, while staying off the streets and away from the new mafia super-family’s prying eyes. That’s right: It’s the Penguincave. (No giant penny or robotic T-rex yet, unfortunately.)
The Penguin is still plagued by its over-reliance on orange, its inescapable Halloween hue emerging from living room lamps, streetlights, the long-disused lighting fixtures in an abandoned trolley tunnel, you name it. But director Helen Shaver also carves out some room for good old-fashioned blacks and vivid colors in the cave sequence, and lights late-afternoon/early-evening Crown Point naturalistically. She has a real eye for making Oz’s face look carved out of something rather than grown organically, an effect that both works for the character and fits the prosthetic nature of that face. The show surrounding it? At this point, it’s good dirty fun.
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.