The Penguin ditches Oz to tell the story it really wants to tell

There are a million things to talk about in “Cent’anni,” which is undoubtedly the hardest that The Penguin has gone to date (in ways that are both compelling and distressingly goofy). So it’s unfortunate that we can’t address any of them right now, because god damn, we really need to talk about what they’ve done to our boy Mark Strong.

Strong is a talented performer, with a gift for cool detachment and stillness that often makes him the most watchable member of an ensemble. What he is not good at, as it turns out, is attempting to project menace through what feels like a solid inch of sunglass and mustache that have both been wantonly glued to his face, as The Penguin sticks him in a Spirit Halloween “Bat-Hero Gangster Enemy” costume to play its flashback version of The Batman mobster Carmine Falcone. John Turturro’s turn in The Batman was already kind of a weird one, sequestered into one of its many subplots, and heavily dependent on affectation (something it shared with Colin Farrell’s Penguin, now that we think about it). It worked only because there are few actors on the planet capable of projecting faux joviality, tinged with evil, better than John Turturro, even from behind those dopey shades he apparently insisted on wearing. Strong can’t match it, for all his gifts; where Carmine Falcone should be projecting calculation, manipulation, life, as he casually discards his daughter in the name of vile self-preservation, all we can read from the depths of Strong’s shade-blocked mien is a dull and dead “Why the fuck did I agree to do this?”

If we sound like we’re getting distracted by this, it’s only because it’s massively distracting. The Penguin probably didn’t have a better out for this problem, since Sofia’s origin story—the topic of tonight’s episode—is heavily dependent on depicting her father as the twisted, “Let’s not talk about anything unpleasant, on pain of electro-convulsive therapy” heart of her mangled family roots. But trying to bury the character in Turturro’s old costuming choices, and then letting Strong just sleepwalk through the part, speaks to a failure of execution in moments when the show’s presentation needed to bring its A-game. This is The Penguin’s big-swing episode, its supervillain origin story; we shouldn’t be spending a quarter of the episode staring at an actor’s face, wondering why they didn’t just offer Turturro a few extra sacks of cash to come do five measly minutes of TV.

And by supervillain, of course, we mean Sofia Falcone. You didn’t think it’d be Oz, did you? No. One of the ways our interests and the show’s have aligned over the last four weeks is in being a lot more fascinated by Cristin Milioti’s character, a coiled spring of violence, than the title one. Farrell barely appears at all tonight, betraying Sofia to her father almost in passing. It tracks with what we’ve seen from the show’s previous episodes: He was a minor side character in her life, barely important enough to even swear vengeance on. (That is, until tonight, when we find out that part of what Vic missed while he was gearing himself up to Walter White the Maroni thugs on his boss’ behalf last week was Sofia finding out Oz is the one who killed her brother; no wonder he was ready to leave her to die.) 

But die she didn’t, instead developing one of those specific kinds of head wounds that are so convenient for screenwriters, where a character relives major portions of their past trauma for the benefit of the audience. The result is a fairly daunting example of Milioti’s skill as a narrative pilot, as she desperately works to keep Sofia’s story harrowing and relatable even as The Penguin continually tries to jerk her toward the rocks of over-the-top silliness. If you’ve been wondering where this show’s supply of camp was, it was apparently hiding here: in the ludicrous speed with which Sofia goes from good-hearted Mafia princess to miscarriage of justice to cold-blooded killer, in the depiction of Arkham Asylum as a haunted house of central casting “crazy” types and sadistic doctors, and in the well-worn visual metaphors used for Sofia’s mind starting to unravel. But while the signifiers are going over the top, the parable being told here is dead-serious and genuinely compelling: It’s one about gaslighting, masculine indifference to the pain of women, and the abiding terror of dead-eyed doctors who know best so why don’t you just shut the fuck up. Milioti holds tight to this aspect of the episode, even as her character’s circumstances get horror-movie silly; you can look at the trappings of it all, the peeling wallpaper and giggling inmates, and start to scoff, but look in the actor’s eyes, and you can see her connecting to the real pain at the core of the story being told.

Which is, in essence, this: While being groomed to be dear Sunglass Daddy’s replacement as head of the Falcone crime family, Sofia found out (from a swiftly murdered journalist) that her beloved papa was a serial strangler of women. He got her sent to Arkham without trial, and all of her family (except Alberto) then immediately backed Carmine’s betrayal. And Sofia was subjected to a decade of absolutely brutal treatment that’s left her with some, uh, trust issues—as well as a serious belief in the pain-numbing effects of Bliss. All of this is a lot longer, and intermittently more impactful, in the episode proper, with lots of horror-flick insane-asylum imagery and shots of ECT mouth guards being shoved into Sofia’s mouth to get the visceral revulsion rolling. To her credit, she doesn’t actually snap until they rip her hope away, revealing she’s never going to trial and will likely spend the rest of her life in Arkham. (The moment where she screams “I told you I was innocent!” right after beating a fellow inmate to death in a burst of paranoia, after getting the news, is the kind of flashy darling a screenwriter should probably be encouraged to kill.) But if the goal is to demonstrate how a good person can turn into a killer in the span of six months, this sequence still feels a little rushed. Worse, it gives Milioti only so much she can do to sell such rapid changes in her character.

She’s far more effective once we switch back to the present day, where Sofia wakes up in the home of her therapist, who she called to come save her just before passing out. It’s in the scenes focused on this relationship and this character—who, we learn, was also one of Sofia’s doctors at Arkham, albeit a mildly more sympathetic one—that “Cent’anni” gets the closest to the portrait of a mind curdled that it’s clearly trying to depict. After watching 30 minutes of Sofia as an open, if traumatized, survivor, seeing Milioti shift into predator mode again is genuinely chilling; she twists her head like a bird, looking for weak points, always sensing the next grift someone’s trying to pull—whether it’s a mafia power play, or the blend of guilt, attraction, and white-knight savior complex powering the good Dr. Rush. The show knows how potentially grotesque the power dynamics (which contain an obvious sexual element) are between these two, and it makes sure we know Sofia knows them, too: Milioti projects both desire and disgust toward Dr. Rush’s efforts to “save” his patient, and when she lashes out at him for his perceived efforts to control her, it’s the only response that makes sense for the character. Who are we to argue? Sofia Falcone is the prime expert in this universe on Sofia Falcone getting fucked over, and she makes some very compelling points. She’s not broken, she insists to him with a seductive glower; the world is.

And if that doesn’t sound like supervillain rhetoric, hold on for our girl’s return to stately Falcone Manor, as Sofia finally goes full mass-murderer at last, telling her family off and then arranging their deaths via carbon monoxide poisoning—sparing only a little girl she clearly sees herself in and perennially pissy underboss Johnny Viti. (This is ostensibly for plot reasons. Why waste a perfectly good Michael Kelly?) It’s a chillingly pleasant bit of family annihilation, especially since the episode makes a pretty strong case for why this particular family had to go. 

What is there to make, then, of “Cent’anni”? (The title is the traditional, ironic “May you live 100 years” toast that Sofia drops on her family just before she gasses them.) It’s an episode of very high highs married to some extremely discombobulating lows. Milioti remains excellent throughout; her grasp of Sofia is what keeps the episode working as it makes its various gigantic plot moves. On a gut level, it hits hard—even as the brain frequently intervenes a few moments later with a series of incredulous “Yeah, buts.” If nothing else, it feels like The Penguin has finally gotten to a story it wants to tell—the irony being that it basically had to jettison its title character to get there. 

Stray observations

• • No cute tricks with the logo this week.
• • The speed with which Oz switches the direction he’s aiming his ass-kissing remains impressive; he doesn’t even bother trying to placate Sofia while the Maronis have a gun to his head. One set of people who want to kill him at a time.
• • The mob war is front-page news, according to the plot-convenient stack of papers Sofia collapses on. It’s a pity Gotham doesn’t have some kind of vigilante crime fighter who might take an interest!
• • Strong’s profoundly sleepy vibe is never funnier than when he’s “rushing” to stop his pre-teen daughter from staring at her mother’s hanging corpse.
• • We know Oz has betrayed Sofia because he has an ugly new jacket and is now allowed inside the house like a person.
• • Despite our jokes, Milioti does a lot of good work in Sofia’s scenes with her dad—registering the persistent unease he produces by constantly darting glances at him to make sure she’s still safe.
• • For the record, Sofia was never convicted for the Hangman murders. Carmine got her sent to Arkham and then ruled unfit to stand trial.
• • The rapid-fire sequence of Sofia being brought into Arkham is one of the spots where the episode’s willingness to indulge in horror imagery actually pays off. 
• • Magpie, the inmate who (extremely unsuccessfully!) tries to befriend Sofia is an actual DC Comics character. She’s a thief, created by John Byrne to be a minor road bump for Superman and some nobody named “Batman.” 
• • Kudos to Theo Rossi for making Arkham-era Rush a genuinely irritating, gaslighting piece of shit. 
• • “I mean, Jesus Christ, Milos has a higher bodycount than I do!” 
• • Get yourself a partner who looks at you the way The Penguin looks at a discordantly cheerful needle drop to underscore a mass killing.