Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first five episodes of The Penguin. For more on the series, check out IGN’s The Penguin: Season 1, Episode 5 review.
In a year without a lot of new live-action DC content, The Penguin is a real breath of fresh air. The series continues where The Batman left off in 2022, charting the rise of Colin Farrell’s Oswald Cobb as he makes his bid for power in a city still reeling from the Riddler’s terrorist attack.
But if one thing has become clear over the course of the series thus far, it’s that Oz isn’t the real star of the show here. That honor goes to Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone, a profoundly damaged woman making her own power play following her father’s death. Sofia has developed into the most compelling DC villain of 2024. Let’s break down why that is.
The Penguin: The Problem With Oswald Cobb
To be clear, we’re hardly arguing that Farrell’s Oz is a dull character. As he did in The Batman, Farrell is delivering one of the best performances of his career. He’s all but unrecognizable under all that makeup and prosthetics work and with that thick New York accent. Farrell paints a vivid picture of a man tired of being treated like life’s punching bag. Oz has ambition, and he’s not afraid to turn Gotham’s two most powerful crime families against one another if it’ll help him claw his way to the top of the city’s underworld.
The problem, though, is that the series can only do so much with Oz as its main protagonist. This is a character whose fate is essentially preordained. Anyone who’s read a Batman comic or watched a Batman series knows Oz is destined to achieve his dream of becoming a high-level crime boss. That’s his whole purpose in the franchise. He’s the bridge connecting the traditional mob with the new generation of costumed supervillains who come to rule Gotham.
That’s the one thing working against the series. As much as The Penguin steadily ramps up the tension, with Oz continuously playing both sides against each other, followed by him invariably screwing up and having to improvise, there’s no getting around the fact that we know how this story is going to eventually end. As bad as things get for Oz (and the deck is certainly stacked against him in Episode 5), ultimately, his victory is assured. Nor is there much room for him to evolve as a character. He’s a schemer, not a man overly torn about the consequences of his actions.
That’s why the series makes the essential decision to place so much attention on the other characters in Oz’s orbit, people like his new right-hand man Victor (Rhenzy Feliz) and his mother Francis (Deirdre O’Connell). Again, it’s not a question of whether Oz will succeed in the end. He’s inevitably going to end up on top. By the time The Batman 2 rolls around, Oz will probably be reigning over his new criminal empire from the Iceberg Lounge. The question is who will pay the price for his rise.
Where will Victor be by the end of the series? Will he be rewarded for sacrificing his chance at happiness to throw his lot in with Oz? Or is he going to be one more casualty in his boss’ obsessive thirst for power? Will Francis end the series as the proud, doting parent Oz so desperately wants her to be? Or will we find that Oz isn’t above sacrificing even his own mother if it helps him climb to the top?
Those are the questions that make The Penguin such a compelling Batman story. The supporting cast is vital to this supervillain origin story. And no one proves that more true than Milioti’s Sofia Falcone.
The Appeal of Sofia Falcone
As much as Matt Reeves’ The Batman universe seems to be sticking to the source material where Penguin is concerned, the same can’t be said for Sofia Falcone. This villain has already been radically transformed from how she was portrayed in comic book series like Batman: The Long Halloween and Batman: Dark Victory. And all of those changes have been for the better.
In the comics, Sofia is a physically and psychologically imposing figure. In The Long Halloween, she’s a hardened criminal freed from prison in order to help her father hunt down the mysterious Holiday Killer. In the TV series, Milioti’s Sofia is a far more complex and morally ambiguous character. She’s a woman determined to find a seat at the table in a family that would just as soon have her disappear forever. She’s also someone deeply haunted by the horrors of her past, to the point where she regularly wakes up from nightmares screaming and clawing at her neck.
When Sofia is first introduced, we learn she spent time in Arkham after going on a killing spree. The city has branded her as The Hangman - a serial murderer responsible for strangling seven women. But Episode 4 casts doubt on that story. Sofia’s father Carmine (Mark Strong) was apparently responsible for those murders (as he was responsible for the death of Sofia’s mother), and he framed Sofia for those killings in order to protect himself. Yet, as we see Sofia calmly poison her own family at the end of Episode 4, we’re left to wonder if she was truly innocent of the Hangman killings after all. Clearly, a quiet penchant for bloodshed runs in the family.
Sofia fascinates so deeply because she isn’t like Oz. She’s a character with greater depth, one we can simultaneously sympathize with as she struggles to survive inside Arkham’s hellish walls and feel a sense of repulsion towards as she casually murders an entire mansion full of family members. We can even understand her pride as she sheds the Falcone name in Episode 5 and rechristens herself “Sofia Gigante.” She’s not a good person, and she’s probably not redeemable, but we can still hope for a relatively happy ending for this deeply unhappy person. Hasn’t she suffered enough?
And there’s the rub. Her story doesn’t have a preordained ending. Is it possible she’ll become the final and greatest casualty in Oz’s rise up the criminal ranks? Definitely. But there’s no guarantee the show ends with her death, as happens in Dark Victory. It’s just as likely Sofia winds up in Arkham again, free to rub elbows with fellow inmates like Barry Keoghan’s Joker and Paul Dano’s Riddler. One thing the series has made abundantly clear is that, given the right push, Sofia could be just as deranged and deadly as the rest of Batman’s rogues gallery. Rather than kill her off, perhaps the series leaves room for her to become a member of that rogues gallery.
Whatever happens in these final few episodes, Sofia Falcone has emerged as The Penguin’s most fully realized and compelling character. It’s telling that Episode 4 focuses almost exclusively on Sofia and her troubled past, to the point where Oz himself barely shows up at all, and yet the series doesn’t miss a beat. Sofia Falcone has become the reason we tune in every week.
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