The Penguin’s MO from his very first appearance in the lead story of 1941’s Detective Comics #58 (“One of the Most Perfect Frame-Ups” by Batman’s creators Bill Finger & Bob Kane) was that he was a planner. After stealing a valuable painting in broad daylight as a calling card, the crime boss of Gotham, known simply as “The Boss,” hires Penguin to plan crimes for him. However, The Boss tries to short Penguin for his cut, and in response Penguin shoots him and takes over the gang. He also gets Batman off his back temporarily by framing the caped crusader for a crime and then breaking him out after he’s arrested to make it look like Bats is his accomplice.
I have seen several complaints online about The Penguin, saying it’s “just” a crime story that has nothing to do with the comics. Those complaints are borne of not really paying close attention. Yes, many of the trappings of the comics character are missing—he isn’t wearing the top hat and monocle or smoking a cigarette from a holder or wearing a tuxedo—but the essence of the character is the same as it was in 1941: he’s a brilliant planner, and one who will frame his enemies and double-cross his allies.
All of that is on copious display in The Penguin, starting with the very beginning of “After Hours” when he shot this story’s equivalent of The Boss, Alberto Falcone.
However, the other aspect of “One of the Most Perfect Frame-Ups” that show-runner Lauren LeFranc (who is a longtime comics reader) has kept is the foe who keeps Penguin on his toes. In the absence of Batman, we have Sofia Falcone, herself a character of more recent vintage, and who is proving to be a powerful force in her own right.
(One of my only frustrations with The Penguin is one that’s not really its fault, but rather an issue I have with far too many of Warner Bros.’ DC TV adaptations of late: stuff that takes place deep within the Batman mythos, but without any Batman in it. This goes back to the short-lived Birds of Prey TV series in 2002, and had continued with more recent shows ranging from Pennyworth to Powerless to Batwoman—and by extension, the entirety of the Arrow-verse—to Gotham. Titans would’ve been on that list, too, in its first season, but they actually had Bats show up in season two… The Penguin is carrying on in that tiresome tradition, without nary even a mention of the guy in the bat suit.)
Plot-wise, we have Penguin getting a foothold on the drug trade with Bliss. He had the two buckets of mushrooms he liberated from the Maronis when he killed Nadia and Taj Maroni in “Homecoming” last week. He’s been able to grow more in the abandoned trolley tunnels and create some supply for the demand for Bliss. He’s also been serving as the connect for several different gangs, working as anonymously and secretly as possible, the flipping great wodges of cash they’re all making buying silence.
Meanwhile, Sofia and Sal Maroni are now allies. Maroni’s a fugitive, still, so he has to lay low, but they have one ally in the Triads, who won’t deal with Penguin. Sofia and Maroni are also determined to find Penguin and make him pay for his various misdeeds toward them—in Sofia’s case, killing her brother, not to mention his role in her unjustified incarceration in Arkham; in Maroni’s, killing his wife and kid. To that end, they go to his long-abandoned apartment in the hopes of finding something he cares about that they can leverage. What they find is Eve—whom Sofia knows was his alleged alibi for killing Alberto.
All the above is plot, and it’s important, but it’s not the heart of this most excellent episode: it’s the individual scenes, any one of which is absolutely brilliant both in and out of context, and which all add up to a great hour of television.
We’ve got Maroni cooking a late-night meal for Sofia, which is an incredibly touching scene. Sofia was abandoned by her family, and then she killed them all, and Maroni had his family taken away from him. The two wind up with a rather sweet father-daughter bond, beautifully encapsulated by the simple act of the father cooking a meal. It’s a recipe his wife taught him, one his son loved, and he shares it with her. Yes, the bond it solidifies is one of vengeance and crime and death, but it’s still very touching for all that. Clancy Brown and Cristin Milioti play it very low-key and effectively.
We’ve got Penguin coming home to the apartment in Crown Point, which still has no power, to find his mother freezing in a cold bathtub, because she doesn’t have the wherewithal to get out herself. Penguin helps her out and Francis pleads with her son to kill her if she gets so far gone, she doesn’t know who she is anymore. Penguin is unwilling at first, but his mother talks him into the potential euthanasia. He then helps her up and gets her dressed and puts makeup on her, quietly and effectively allowing her to get back the dignity that being caught freezing in the tub—and her illness—took away from her. (Later Penguin laments to Vic that the doctors for all their knowledge don’t even entirely know what she has. They thought it was Parkinson’s, then Alzheimer’s, and now they’ve diagnosed it as Lewy Body Dementia, the latter of which Penguin had never even heard of before.)
We’ve got two scenes between Vic and Squid, the local small-time criminal for whom Vic was trying to steal Penguin’s rims back in “After Hours,” and about whom he was nervous when they returned to Crown Point last week. Squid knows something’s going on, and he wants in. Vic tries to buy him off, but Squid won’t tolerate that. He knows that Penguin’s up to something, and he threatens to go to the Maronis. At which point, Vic feels he has no choice but to shoot him.
It is, of course, horrible. Vic’s never killed anyone, and he shoots Squid in the throat, so it’s a wet, sticky, messy, gurgly death, making it a million times worse for Vic to have to watch. He’s crossed a line now, and it disgusts and revolts him. This is the dark side of the choice he made when he didn’t leave town with Graciela in “Bliss.”
And then we have the magnificent coda to this: Penguin comforts Vic by saying, “It gets easier.” Which is no comfort at all—it just means he’s going to, like Macbeth, wade so far into blood that going back is as difficult as continuing onward.
We’ve got the titular Gold Summit, where Penguin gathers the leaders of the various Gotham gangs—Blacks, Latinos, Irish, Triads, etc.—and proposes an alliance among all of them. The gangs are reluctant, particularly since Sofia and Maroni have already killed a couple of the Sullivan gang’s dealers for selling Bliss. Plus, the Triad leader (François Chau) views Penguin as a betrayer. But, in a brilliant bit of oratory written by Nick Towne and performed by Colin Farrell, Penguin convinces them. He reminds Sullivan that the Maronis and the Falcones made all their money off their labor while living in a mansion across the bridge—the bridge built by Sullivan’s ancestors. From the very beginning, we’ve seen that Penguin knows who everyone is working for him, by name. He talks to the other gang leaders as people, and the thing he brings to the meeting is a cooler full of cans of beer that he passes around to everyone. They’ll be stronger working together. They’ll have each others’ backs.
The alliance is then symbolized by each leader opening his can, a beautifully effective working-class symbol of their coming together, nicely directed by Kevin Bray. After all, it doesn’t get more blue-collar than a can of beer…
And then we’ve got the pièce de résistance: Sofia tries to locate Eve, and finds her efforts stymied, as none of the working girls will give her up. Then one finally does—but it turns out that Eve told her to, so they could get it over with. Sofia arrives in Eve’s apartment to find the latter in a sweatshirt and yoga pants, her natural dark hair tied up sloppily, the first time we’ve seen Eve out of “uniform.” The two bond over their mutual past saying things to make men happy, though for Eve it’s still her present. Eve also knows that Sofia’s going to kill her, and asks only that the Hangman not kill her girls. Sofia is appalled to realize that Eve still thinks she’s the Hangman when Penguin knows damn well that she isn’t. Sofia also knows that Eve is Penguin’s alibi for killing her brother, which is another reason why Eve expects to die at her hand. But Sofia is impressed both with the fact that none of Eve’s girls gave her up until explicitly told to and that Eve is now doing everything she can to protect her girls from the Hangman, even at the cost of her own life. Sofia doesn’t have anyone like that in her life—and she never did, which is why she spent a decade in Arkham and why the rest of her family is now dead by her hand.
Knowing that Penguin betrayed her by never telling her that Sofia isn’t really the Hangman, Eve tells Sofia that he’s in Crown Point. “You deserve your shot,” she tells her, which is in many ways the theme of the episode (along with the refrain of people having each others’ backs). Sofia promises not to say where she got the info.
The entire scene is a tour de force between Milioti and Carmen Ejogo as two women who have been forced into submissive roles by the men around them, but who have managed to thrive as best they can within those limitations.
The gut punch, though, comes at the very end. Penguin is able to get the power back in Crown Point by the simple expediency of physically threatening a corrupt city councilman who used to be in Carmine Falcone’s pocket. When the power comes back, Vic and Francis are both home, and the two of them dance to “Glow Worm” by the Mills Brothers. First off, the start of that is perfectly played by Deirdre O’Connell and director Bray, as we think that Francis is crawling out of bed and shaking due to her illness, but the shaking is her trying to dance. After a few seconds, we see Vic dancing with her and it’s absolutely joyous.
At which point we pull back to see Sofia standing in the hallway with a gun.
It’s been clear all along that very few people know that Francis is still alive, and none of that number includes anyone (besides Vic) involved in Penguin’s business in Gotham. In fact, Penguin specifically said to Sofia at Alberto’s funeral in “Inside Man” that his mother was dead.
So Sofia’s knowing that she’s alive is, um, not a good thing for the title character. The consequence to that, however, are left for next week, as Sofia watching Vic and Francis dance is how this truly magnificent episode rather brutally ends.