Dan Stapleton
The following review contains spoilers for the fourth episode of The Penguin, “Cent’anni.”
As gritty and grounded as 2022’s The Batman was, “grounded” is a relative term. Yes, there aren’t any super-powered people (and there won’t be, according to writer/director Matt Reeves) and Robert Patinson’s Batmobile is just a souped-up muscle car without rocket engines or James Bond-like gadgets, but that world is still full of wacky, heightened characters that don’t quite feel like real people.In The Penguin, though, the most fantastical element – Bruce Wayne himself – has been removed from the equation, allowing for a story that’s even more realistic… up until this week’s episode, “Cent’anni.” A flashback trip to Arkham finally lets loose the comic-book craziness in an episode that brings the series to an abrupt halt for a focussed, chilling look at Sofia Falcone’s last 10 years, but it’s one that takes both feet off the ground and leans into the inherent weirdness of a world where Batman exists.
Her stay in Arkham State Hospital (Asylum would be too outlandish) is a tragic tale of betrayal by the ones she trusted most. The episode drives home just how cruel the Falcone family was to her, which sets up a satisfying final sequence really well. But it also drives home just how cartoonishly exaggerated some of the characters in this show can be. Not only in Sofia, who we obviously see a lot more of in “Cent’anni,” but characters like Doctor Ventress (in name alone, even), Dr. Rush, and Magpie, as well as the unnamed prisoner who takes her own life. It’s truly a nightmare, what happens in Arkham, and it’ll definitely give you cause to rethink whether Batman’s doing the right thing by sending addled criminal minds there. Some might say that this is where the series jumps the shark, moving away from the pure mob movie vibe it’s had so far, but I don’t think that’s what The Penguin was ever really going for. It may be more grounded than other recent adaptations, but just like the movie it’s spun off from, it’s found its own balance of the two.
My complaint is more that “Cent’anni” doesn’t always feel like it’s placed properly in the overall story the series is telling. It has to be super tough to pace out a show, especially in today’s age of eight to 10-episode seasons and limited series (both of which The Penguin is an example of). Any amount of introductions to new characters you have to do, and any flashbacks that feel necessary, have to be positioned strategically so as to not mess with the balance of the series.
Last week, Victor got his time to shine in an episode that deftly wove in and out of flashbacks to show us his past while relating his life before The Riddler’s attack to what’s happening in his present. “Cent’anni,” by contrast, goes for a more Inception-like structure, where an unconscious Sofia goes on a magical mystery tour through her past – but then, within that flashback, we get another time jump to the day her mother died. On the surface it sounds like a lot to manage, and it kind of is, but every step backwards in time feels necessary to tell Sofia’s full story and is smoothly executed, as is getting back to the present.
As clean as it’s able to make those transitions, it’s still jarring to have two flashback episodes in a row at a time when the third episode left so much going on in the present-day, where Victor and Oz sped off and left Sophia to die. Where that was able to move Oz’s power grab forward while laying down groundwork for Victor’s character arc, this time the sole focus on Sofia makes it work as a standalone piece but it fails to do the same service to what’s happening in the now, save for the climactic sequence at the end.
I do like that as the pieces come together in The Penguin, previous conversations start to make more sense. In the moment of the second episode where Oz tells Sofia that he owes her, we’re completely unaware of what he might be referencing. Now, knowing how everything went down 10 years ago, those conversations are recontextualized in a really satisfying way. It’s an attention to detail in the writing that fleshes out the characters and makes the passage of time feel real, which is often a sticking point for me in movies and shows that span decades. If there’s a big time skip but the characters are seemingly unchanged and it feels like nothing happened in the years between, then why even have a jump? But The Penguin has rooted itself in this one specific time jump, and that helps keep things stable, especially as we get to see some of what happened during those years (or at least the start of it) in “Cent’anni.”
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