With Penguin’s Hangman twist, it’s finally become a real Batman show

I’ve had a few friends ask me what I think of The Penguin, HBO’s spinoff miniseries based in the setting of Matt Reeves’ The Batman, and to all of them I’ve said: “I mean, it’s a good crime show, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but, like… what am I doing here?”

That is, “What am I, a connoisseur of Batman in all forms, supposed to get out of this?” It’s not that I don’t like hard crime in my Batman stories (quite the opposite). But decent crime shows are a dime a dozen. A decent Batman show comes along more rarely. Peanut butter is great, there’s a huge audience for peanut butter, but what I really like is when you mix it with chocolate.

But with this week’s episode of The Penguin, focused intently on Sofia Falcone, heir to the Falcone crime family, The Penguin finally gave me a Reese’s Cup.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for The Penguin’s fourth episode, “Cent’Anni.”]

The Penguin has spent its first three episodes teasing Sofia’s escapades as the infamous Hangman serial killer, an adaptation of the comics canon “codename” she earned in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s Batman: Dark Victory by committing a string of calling-card murders.

But it turns out in The Penguin that the Hangman murders weren’t the work of an unhinged serial killer. They were Sofia’s father, Carmine Falcone, exercising his power and fury over women who displeased him. Over the years, he’d strangled a string of female staff at his “gentlemen’s club” with his hands — an idea that meshes with the events of The Batman — as well as his own wife, whom Sofia had always been told died by suicide. When it seemed as though the press and police were about to uncover the pattern of Carmine’s murders, he framed Sofia for his crimes by getting her family to corroborate that she was mentally unstable, and massaging a corrupt and prejudiced court system into indefinitely committing her to the women’s wing of Arkham Asylum.

And this isn’t some “realistic” depiction of a contemporary mental institution, either — well, sure, some of it certainly is, and we shouldn’t minimize the awful abuse inherent in the carceral state. But this Arkham is, as in comics, a fucked-up conglomeration of our worst cultural nightmare mythology of mental institutions. I’m talking about a cellmate who introduces herself by a fanciful codename (Magpie, an F-tier Batman supervillain associated with Arkham stories since Dan Slott and Ryan Sook’s Arkham Asylum: Living Hell). I’m talking about an inmate populace kept quiet with a sci-fi drug grown on horrifying (and real) mushrooms. I’m talking about a bespectacled, paper-thin, capital-E Evil psychiatrist, like an unholy union of a cackling mad scientist and the DSM-5.

A common subtext of great Batman comics is that Arkham Asylum not only never rehabilitates anybody, it mostly just makes people worse. That’s not an uncommon trope for fictional asylums, but Arkham serves a particular role in Gotham as the final level of damnation in a metropolitan hell, a cancerous organ that cannot be excised because the whole body is ruled by the indifference and avarice of the powerful. In this way, Arkham is more useful as a metaphor for prison, not mental health recovery; its revolving door represents Gotham’s problems in a microcosm.

Sofia only features in a handful of stories, but her comics arc is clear. In Batman: The Long Halloween and Batman: Dark Victory, Loeb and Sale illustrated a transitional period between the ’70s film realism that Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli used to redefine Gotham in Batman: Year One, and the supervillain flamboyance of modern Batman stories. These books asked the question: How did we get from a Gotham ruled by Carmine “The Roman” Falcone, who basically walked out of a Scorsese movie, to one where even ganglords have to have a codename and themed henchmen?

The answer, according to those stories, is that the particular Gotham City madness that makes killing people with a codename and a calling card the first solution to most of life’s problems swallowed his legacy whole when both of his children became infamous serial killers. And that’s exactly what The Penguin gave us this week.

Sofia was not a theatrical mass murderer when she was locked up in Arkham. But she is now, now that she’s given an ominous speech and methane gassed most everyone in the Falcone crime syndicate in a single evening.

All these rich supervillain flavors balance out the rest of the episode’s presentation of the misogyny Sofia faces as an ascendant mafia queen. There’s never a sense that the episode is preaching on the topic of how women are assumed to be too irrational to lead, or how mere accusations of a mental break can strip someone of their legal personhood. It’s a complementary flavor of realism that never overwhelms, because of how it’s mixed in with these good, strong, fantastical themes of how Gotham is a machine that turns crime into supercrime.

And there’s a limit on how much can be loaded on top of that theme before it breaks, anyway. Sofia is not faultless; before this was ever about revenge, it was about her ambition to ruthlessly defend and eventually wield her father’s power, which derives from the suffering of ordinary Gotham citizens. It’s the mix of realism and fantasy that keeps the whole thing from breaking under its own weight, a delicious cocktail of Batman bits and real-life bits and pathos and betrayal.

All too often, when Hollywood sets out to make a “realistic” comic book adaptation, you get the distinct feeling that the creators think that actual comic book stuff is beneath them, that they wouldn’t touch the actual books with a 10-foot pole, lest they catch Lowbrow Cooties. So most importantly, to me, this week’s episode of The Penguin shows me that the people behind it are not turning up their noses at the potential of the deep comic book stuff.

Sofia’s turn tells me that the folks behind The Penguin can see the compelling marrow of these stories. They haven’t just read some wiki articles about the Falcone family and used comic book names on original characters — they’ve read the damn books! The Penguin might call Sofia by her canonical comics codename, the Hangman, but this new origin story for her is borrowed directly from her brother Alberto, who, in The Long Halloween, was discarded as a weak son, unfit to take on his father’s legacy, and turned to the serial murder of mafia notables to prove that he was capable.

Sofia might not be cackling in a costume or recruiting themed henchmen just yet. But she is swanning around in a neon yellow evening gown as she gasses a mansion full of people to death. Finally, some good fuckin’ supervillain bullshit.