“I’m not broken” – “Cent’Anni” by the Penguin

After watching this week’s episode The penguinI find it impossible to believe that someone Among the production team, be it executive producer/showrunner Lauren LeFranc or someone below her, this is not the case very familiar with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Written in 1892, Gilman’s story is a damning indictment of the emerging psychiatric medical profession’s treatment of women, forcing women to undergo useless and/or harmful “treatments” to cure them of whatever ailments they suffered, whether real or not imaginary and often an excuse to get rid of “problematic” women. The narrator of the story is locked in a room with yellow wallpaper. The story is both a brilliant social commentary and a great horror story, as we get a first-person look at the narrator’s descent into madness, which is not due to hysteria, as the male doctors have pointed out, but to her imprisonment This one room should be for their own good.

The reason I know someone on the team must be familiar with the story (or perhaps one of the film adaptations of this 19th century classic made in the 21st century) is that Sofia Falcone’s story is set in the ” Cent’Anni” episode of The penguin is a fairly direct analogue of that of Gilman’s never-named narrator.

About two-thirds of the episode is devoted to Sofia’s backstory. We start with the other half from the end of last week’s episode. Nadia Maroni makes it clear that she will no longer put up with Penguin’s nonsense. She also reveals to Sofia that Penguin, not Sal Maroni, killed her brother Alberto. Then Vic runs over one of Nadia’s thugs, Penguin shoots two more of them, and they get in the car and drive off. At some point Sofia suffers a serious head injury. She calls Dr. Rush to ask for help, then faints…

…at this point we look back a decade. Sofia is Carmine Falcone’s good daughter who really knows what she’s doing, unlike the jerk Alberto. We learn the full story about Sofia’s mother’s death: nine-year-old Sofia apparently found her hanging. Carmine (played by Mark Strong, as John Turturro is not available to reprise his role The Batman) tells her that he will name her, not Alberto, as his heir. Sofia is thrilled.

(The recast is only partially successful. Strong has made a career out of playing villains – in fact, he has three other comic book villains on his resume, Sinestro in Green LanternDr. Sivana in Shazam!and Frank D’Amico in Kick ass– but one of the reasons why Turturro’s appearance in The Batman It worked so well that he had a pleasant charm, like the velvet glove over the iron fist of his threat. Everything is strong with an iron fist; His wine-drinking with Sofia as he makes her his heir was intended to be more familial, but Strong’s sneer means that it doesn’t work quite as well as planned, diluting the impact of later scenes where the threat is more obvious.)

And then Sofia makes her first mistake: she talks to a reporter. Summer Gleeson from the Gotham Gazette (a character who originated as a television reporter Batman: The Animated Seriesplayed here by Nadine Malouf) approaches Sofia and shows her evidence that several women, just like her mother, were killed by hanging. It also looks like evidence was suppressed, both in the case of her mother and these women, all of whom worked at the secret “44 Below” club beneath the Iceberg Lounge (which we also saw in). The Batman). We already know from the film that Carmine sometimes slept with the women who worked there – one of whom gave birth to a child, Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman. And now it seems that someone killed her but made it look like suicide. Gleeson thinks it could be Carmine.

Sofia’s driver Oz Cobb – who we see as someone who is kind and helpful to Sofia, even if she mostly treats him like a helper – is the one who takes her to a second meeting with Gleeson. At first Sofia is worried, but then she tells the reporter to fuck off, especially after Gleeson asks her to wear a wire in 44 Below.

Penguin, of course, tells Carmine about it – how could he not? But Carmine’s reaction is devastating. It’s clear that Carmine is responsible for the deaths of these women – and possibly the death of his wife – and it’s equally clear that Sofia is starting to put the matter together. Carmine is no fool, and he knows his daughter is no fool either. So he preemptively removes her from the panel, so to speak, and uses his influence with his family, the press and the police to have Sofia arrested for the murders of all the women and the latest victim, reporter Summer Gleeson.

Sofia undergoes a psychiatric evaluation. Part of the evidence presented is affidavits from several family members, including Carla Viti. You may remember that last week we saw an awkward conversation between Sofia and Carla, and this week’s flashback shows the two of them looking like thieves before Sofia’s arrest. That’s why Sofia is pretty devastated when she sees that one of the affidavits claiming Sofia has a (completely fictional) history of mental illness comes from Carla.

And so Sofia goes through what the narrator of Gilman’s short story goes through, only on a much larger scale. She is admitted to Arkham State Hospital for six months to see if she is fit for trial. We see Rush when he first meets Sofia, the chief medical officer’s assistant, who treats Sofia as if she was already guilty and already diagnosed as mentally unfit. Sofia lives next door to a blonde named Margaret Pye who goes by Magpie. (We also see her being given a red drug, which we learned last week as Bliss; Magpie calls her “Candy.”) Magpie is based on a Gotham City-based villain from the comics, and she’s also completely insane.

Sofia suffers during the semester, which includes a pretty excruciating amount of electroshock therapy, and expects a trial at the end. But then we learn that the hospital director, no doubt on Carmine’s instructions, declared her unfit to stand trial and recommended that she remain in the hospital.

And she stayed there for ten years. Everywhere we see the dehumanizing treatment, the assumptions of insanity based on no evidence except denial, both of which are what a madman would say And what a reasonable person would say, so it’s rather flimsy evidence. The tiny cells, the abuse – at some point a fellow prisoner somehow escaped from her restraints and attacked Sofia; Later she commits suicide with a fork – and the electric shocks work a little too well. The denial of a trial pushes her to her limits, beating Magpie to death in the cafeteria and then telling the doctors that she is “damn innocent.”

Meanwhile, we see the wallpaper in her cell, and it is yellow (matching the wallpaper in the room where she found her mother). She reaches for it, just like Gilman’s narrator, and it contributes to her downward spiral.

Then we return to the present. Rush apparently quit his job at Arkham to protest the way Sofia was treated, which is why he now treats her privately. We do not know the exact circumstances of her release, although the fact that this happened after Carmine’s death is probably not a coincidence.

The main difference between Sofia and Gilman’s narrator is how it ends. Sofia is not just liberated, she is liberated. She’s not the executioner murderer, but everyone thinks she is, so she assumes so. Throughout her life she has been victimized, at least in part, because of her gender. (At one point, before she’s arrested and before Carmine initially makes her his heir, she bluntly tells Penguin, “You’ve got a dick, so at least you’re entitled to a promotion.”) But now she’s taking sole charge like them it can. Wearing a bright yellow dress, she intrudes on a family dinner and tells everyone present how much she “appreciates” all the support she has received from family who have lied in affidavits and/or never visited her or each other again didn’t care about her in the slightest after she was wronged there.

Then she wakes up Gia, Carla’s little daughter, and takes her to the greenhouse to have a midnight snack, and then they sleep there, just like she and Alberto did when they were children. In the morning, she puts Gia to sleep and checks the house while wearing a gas mask: she has gassed almost the entire house, and with the exception of Gia, who is safe in the greenhouse, and Johnny, whose room was spared, the entire Falcone family is dead in the process. Why she kept Johnny alive (aside from Michael Kelly in the opening credits) is not yet clear, but we still have four episodes to go…

“Cent’Anni” — an Italian toast meaning “May you live a hundred years,” a toast Sofia makes to a room full of people she plans to murder that night — is a brilliant treatise on how quiet it is , more than a century after The Yellow Wallpaper, it is incredibly easy to marginalize and banish smart, capable women by deeming them hysterical. The difference here is that Sofia survives and thrives now that it’s fiction and you can create your own ending.

Like the title character, Sofia Falcone is a smart person who was unfortunate enough to be born with traits that make her easy to get fired. For Penguin, it’s his appearance, his deformities and his background. For Sofia, she was born with a uterus. It will be very interesting to see how the rest plays out, especially since they are now on opposite sides and the Maronis are still a wild card.