It may seem impossible, but HBO is great. baton spinoff series, penguinIt’s getting better. last weekWe watched Cristin Milioti give a masterclass with Sofia Falcone. A scorned woman went from mob princess to Arkham inmate to de facto head of the Falcone crime family before learning how to kill them all in one fell swoop. This week, Sophia, dressed in a brown fur coat, black slip dress and fox eyeliner, presents us with a new mafia business model: socialism.
penguin‘s fifth episode shifts between our principal and the duo of Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) and Vic (Renzi Feliz), who are now on opposite sides of the war for control of Gotham. While Oz and Big work to steal the psychoactive mushroom drug they have begun selling on the street, Sophia must convince several men that she is innocent (despite killing her family) and capable (the ability to run a family). do. She is). After skillfully dealing with Gotham City Police Chief Mackenzie Bock (Con O’Neill) baton), Sophia, who shows up to “investigate” (read: gloat) the mysterious deaths of her entire family, locks Johnny Beatty (Michael Kelly) in the Falcone family crypt and pours cold water over his nearly naked body. Turns out it’s true. It was a form of torture to get her father to hand over the unmarked wads of cash he had stolen.
And she makes money (torture works!), but she doesn’t keep it to herself. Sofia Falcone (now Sofia Gigante, who has decided to take her mother’s maiden name to honor her memory and distance herself from her father) wants to run a more egalitarian family, a socialist-leaning mob if you will. She wants to end the senseless war between the Falcone and Maron families. The Maron family used these men as disposable chess pieces while the capos sat in their mansions and grew richer and fatter. She literally wants to share the wealth.
Sofia gathers all the men together, explains her new business model, and presents them with a huge bag of money. She puts the bag of money down on the table and shows that this is what the money has accumulated while working and bleeding for them. Viti begins to protest and talks about Sofia while Sofia mumbles. So she shot him in the head. As his blood spreads across the table, she tells him that they will have more money than they know what to do with in the future, and after promising that they will split what they earn, she flips the bag of money upside down on top of him.
she said sarcastically as a man reached for a wad of cash. They all fall down in a heap and grab as much as they can carry. This is an equitable distribution of wealth in the mafia business model. Welcome to socialism, Gotham.
It’s very interesting that Oz and Sophia stand for the same ideals, but use completely different methods to try to bring about fair change in Gotham’s criminal enterprise. In this episode, Oz reminds the crew that they always eat when they dine, while Sophia points out that Falcon’s men were never “made men” and never received an equal piece of the pie. But Sophia negotiates with purpose and grace, knowing she must satisfy the men’s precarious egos while ensuring her own power never wavers. She’s the scalpel, and Oz is the bulldozer, destroying everything in his path so he can rise through the ranks and become King of Gotham.
It will be interesting to see how their very different approaches play out over the remainder of the season. next episode penguin It airs Sunday, October 27th at 9pm ET on HBO Max.
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