Cristin Milioti Is Awards-Worthy In ‘The Penguin’ Episode 4

Oz Cobb has emerged as such a compelling character that you’d think The Penguin wouldn’t work without him, but Episode 4, “Cent’Anni”, barely features him and doesn’t suffer at all. Cristin Milioti takes the reins instead in a flashback-heavy installment that explores her time in Arkham State Hospital and her relationships with Oz, Alberto, her father, and one of Arkham’s psychiatrists, Dr. Julian Rush.

The episode also culminates in the most significant present-day plot development thus far, radically raising the stakes for the remainder of the season.

The Real Hangman

“Cent’Anni” begins where Episode 3 left off, with Oz and Sofia being held at gunpoint by Nadia Maroni and her henchmen. Since we previously took this in from Vic’s perspective, we missed the contents of the conversation that Episode 4 reveals in full. Nadia not only exposed that Oz had been playing the Falcones off against the Maronis but also that he killed Alberto. Vic arrived in the nick of time, just as Sofia was about to lose it over this latest betrayal. In the carnage that follows, she manages to make a brief call to Julian — croaking “It was Oz…” — before succumbing to a head wound.

Sofia slips unconscious and into her own memories. You know what that means — flashbacks!

The Penguin | Image via HBO

We’re first taken to a luncheon for the Isabella Falcone Foundation, a project that Sofia worked on with her father to raise funds and awareness around mental health issues and suicide among women (Isabella took her own life). Oz is still her driver at this point, and they have a visibly close relationship. But Sofia, while fairly even keel, is pressed by a journalist about a spate of suicides, all by hanging, that seem to be befalling employees of Carmine Falcone’s various business endeavors, including the Iceberg Lounge.

This leads to another flashback — Sofia, much younger, discovering her mother hanging from the ceiling — and then another; they’re nested like Matryoshka dolls. A meal Sofia has with Alberto and her father, Carmine, is especially illuminating since it reveals two things. One is that Carmine intended to cede control of the Family to her instead of her layabout brother, breaking from tradition. The second is that Sofia never quite recalled her mother being depressed, or forlorn; never understood why she didn’t reach out for professional help. Carmine’s excuses — she was stubborn, she refused help, she hid it well — imply quite strongly that he killed Isabella, and that Sofia suspects as much.

Sofia’s Time In Arkham

This becomes clearer and clearer when Sofia meets with Summer Gleeson from the Gotham Gazette, the same reporter who approached her at the luncheon. All the dead women had bruising suggestive of manual strangulation, not hanging. They all had defensive wounds. In Sofia’s recollections, so did her mother. She recalls her father coming into the room that night, and seeing scratches on his hands.

When Oz cautions Sofia about meeting with a journalist, she snaps at him, so when Carmine confronts her about him, she knows Oz told him what she was doing. Cristin Milioti is fantastic here. Her fear of her father and what he might have done — to her mother, to the women at the club, what he might potentially do to her — mingles with her hope that she’s wrong, a childlike yearning to see her father as an idyllic protector and not who he really is. She can’t commit to accusing him, so she floats the suspicions on a flurry of ready-made excuses, hoping he’ll take one and reassure her. But Carmine knows he’s been found out.

Theo Rossi in ‘The Penguin’ Episode 4 | Image via HBO

This is how Sofia gets fitted up as “The Hangman”. Carmine murders Summer Gleeson in the same way and pins the killings of all the women on Sofia, getting several family members — Luca, Johnny and Carla Viti — to sign affidavits testifying to a long history of mental health issues. Sofia is to be remanded in Arkham State Hospital for six months awaiting trial, where she’s subjected to a litany of indignities and abuses.

Arkham’s head, Dr. Ventris, is on the Falcone payroll, and Sofia’s time at Arkham is a series of manipulations designed to mentally break her; assaults by unchained patients in the canteen, an urging for Sofia to commit violent retribution, and prolonged electroshock therapy. After six months, when she’s told by Alberto that Ventris has written a report prohibiting her from standing trial, she snaps, brutally murdering a fellow inmate named Magpie — who may or may not have been bribed with Bliss to spy on Sofia — and living up to the narrative that her father has carefully cultivated. Sofia is, for all intents and purposes, The Hangman.

Sofia Begins Anew

Sofia’s only ally in Arkham was Julian Rush, who she wakes up to when we return once again to the present day. We learn through dialogue that Rush helped Alberto get Sofia out, but the exact nature of their relationship is a little unclear. In some of the flashbacks he expressed reservations to Ventris, but that’s all we saw. On the outside, Sofia clearly has a direct line to him, and more to the point there is some clear sexual chemistry between the two.

But we don’t spend much time with Rush. Sofia, slightly inspired by Oz’s latest betrayal, returns to the Falcone estate to reinvent herself. She attends dinner dressed to the nines and gives a speech that puts everyone present on edge since she calls out how they all betrayed her by writing letters to the judge and propping up what they knew was fiction. But, that’s fine. Sofia’s starting a new life. What they don’t quite realize is that none of them will be in it.

That night, Sofia takes little Gia out to the greenhouse in the middle of the night to share some cake. While Gia sleeps, Sofia returns to the house, where everyone is dead. Sofia gassed them all in the night. Watching her pad through the house in her bare feet and dress, wearing a gas mask and checking everyone has expired, makes for an eerie sequence. The Falcone family is no more. Everyone, including Luca, is dead.

Well, almost everyone. The Penguin Episode 4 closes with Sofia waking up Johnny Viti, whom she apparently has a use for. We’ll have to wait until the next episode to see what that might be.