I Would Like To Join The Penguin’s Sofia Falcone-Led Mob

It seems impossible, but HBO’s excellent The Batman spin-off series, The Penguin, keeps getting better. Last week, we watched Cristin Milioti put on a masterclass as Sofia Falcone, learning how the scorned woman went from mafia princess to Arkham inmate to de facto head of the Falcone crime family after killing them all in one fell swoop. This week, clad in a brown fur coat, black slip dress, and fox eyeliner, Sofia gives us a new mafia business model: socialism.

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The Penguin’s fifth episode flits back and forth between our principessa and the Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) and Vic (Rhenzy Feliz) duo, now on opposing sides of the war for Gotham control. While Oz and Vic work to steal back the psychoactive mushroom drug they want to start flipping on the street, Sofia has to convince a bunch of men that she’s innocent (of killing her family, which she’s not) and capable (of running her family, which she is). After deftly handling Gotham chief of police Mackenzie Bock (Con O’Neill, reprising his role from The Batman), who’s shown up to “investigate” (read: gloat about) the mysterious death of her entire family, it’s revealed that Sofia is keeping Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly) in the Falcone family catacombs, dumping cold water on his nearly naked body as a form of torture in an attempt to get him to hand over the wads of unmarked cash her father squirreled away.

And she gets her money (torture works!), but she’s not keeping it to herself. Sofia Falcone (now Sofia Gigante, as she decides to take her mother’s maiden name to honor her memory and distance herself from her father) wants to run a more egalitarian famiglia, a socialist-leaning mob, if you will. She wants to end this pointless war between the Falcone family and the Marone clan, which used these men as disposable chess pieces while the capos sat in their mansions getting richer and fatter. She wants to share the wealth—literally.

Sofia gathers all the men to explain her new business model and present a huge bag of money, which she slams on the table to show them this is what the dons hoarded while they worked and bled for them. Viti begins to protest, talking over Sofia while she’s mid-rant—so she shoots him in the head. As his blood spreads across the table, she upends the bag of money onto it after promising that, going forward, they will have more money than they know what to do with, that they will share what they earn.

“Go ahead,” she says sardonically as one man reaches for a wad of cash. They all collapse upon the pile, snatching as much as they can carry. This is an equitable distribution of wealth in a mafia business model. Welcome to socialism, Gotham.

It’s fascinating that both Oz and Sofia champion the same ideals but employ wildly different methods to try and shift Gotham’s criminal enterprises toward fairness. In this episode, Oz reminds his crew that they always eat when he eats, while Sofia points out that the Falcone henchmen were never “made men,” they were never given an equal piece of the pie. But Sofia knows that she’ll have to cater to men’s precarious egos while ensuring her power never falters, so she moves through negotiations with purpose and elegance. She is a scalpel, while Oz is a bulldozer, destroying everything in his path to ensure he can rise through the ranks and become king of Gotham.

It’ll be interesting to see how their very different approaches play out throughout the rest of the season. The next episode of The Penguin airs on Sunday, October 27 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.

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