‘The Penguin’ Episode 4 Ending Explained: Is Sofia the Hangman After All?

The Penguin Episode 4 “Cent’anni” finally reveals once and for all exactly what Sofia Falcone ( Cristin Milioti ) did to wind up locked away in Arkham Asylum for ten whole years. The HBO show reveals that Sofia might not have been totally lying when she insisted she’s not the Hangman, but then again, she’s still something of a cold-blooded killer.

**Spoilers for The Penguin Episode 4 “Cent’anni,” now streaming on Max**

The Penguin Episode 4 “Cent’anni” takes us back ten years in the past, when Sofia was less an unhinged mob boss and more the Audrey Hepburn of Gotham. As the society front of the Falcone family, it’s young Sofia’s job to host charity luncheons and attend major galas. It’s Oz Cobb’s ( Colin Farrell ) job to drive her to these events.

‘The Penguin’ Episode 4 Recap: Arkham Asylum

When journalist Summer Gleeson (Nadine Malouf) suggests to Sofia that a string of suicidal hangings might not be suicides — but rather the work of a serial killer — the mafia princess finds herself pulled into dangerous territory. Her father Carmine (Mark Strong) wants her to potentially succeed him as head of the Falcone crime family, but in questioning her father’s crimes, she soon finds herself on his bad side. As Sofia continues to dig into these deaths, it becomes clear that her father is the Hangman. He has been strangling lovers for years, including Sofia’s mother, and staging their deaths as suicides.

Oz, seeing a path to promotion, tells Carmine about Sofia teaming up with Summer Gleason. Carmine, in turn, kills the journalist and frames his own daughter for his crimes. He’s so desperate to keep her quiet that he arranges for her to be thrown immediately in Arkham Asylum for the six months ahead of her eventual trial.

The Arkham Sofia encounters is one of heinous torture and sadistic mind games. On her first day among the general population, a vindictive patient named Abby (Syd Skidmore) is allowed to roam free in the cafeteria to beat the bejesus out of the “Hangman” as vengeance for her crimes. Later, Arkham’s head psychiatrist (or lead torturer) Dr. Ventris (T. Ryder Smith) offers Sofia the opportunity to take her revenge on a shackled Abby with a most peculiar weapon: a fork.

Who is Magpie in ‘The Penguin’ Episode 4?

Sofia refuses to kill or harm Abby, as she sees the test as a trap to prove she’s violent. In the end, Abby opts to die by gruesome suicide by grabbing the fork herself. It’s a horrifying moment, which could explain why the Sofia we see in The Penguin prefers to eat with her hands…

“Oh, my God!” Penguin star Cristin Milioti laughed when Decider brought this up. “Yeah, I never thought… Yeah. Wow. You’re the first person to make that observation. And I just was like, ‘Whoa, wait. Yeah, that’s seems brutal.'”

As Sofia endures months of brutal torture from the therapists at Arkham, her only glimmer of hope is knowing that a) her brother Alberto (Michael Zegen) believes in her innocence and b) she will get a fair trial. When Alberto, however, drops the news that she will not get a trial and has been sentenced to life in Arkham, something breaks in Sofia. When she returns to the cafeteria and hears her annoying cell neighbor Magpie (Marié Botha) rejoice that her “friend” isn’t leaving, Sofia takes a tray and bludgeons the girl to death.

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Sofia has finally become the Hangman.

“Arkham broke her and it revealed a part of her that would never have been revealed,” Milioti said of this moment. “She’s driven so mad that she becomes the thing that everyone accused her of being.”

“I think in that moment, it does uncover something really like primal and deep that would have probably stayed dormant for her whole life. But I think it was there in maybe a small way.”

When we jump back to the present day, we see exactly the monster Sofia has become during her years in Arkham. She arrives at what’s meant to be her last family dinner in a low cut canary yellow gown and lays into her treacherous relatives. Then, she causes a gas leak in the mansion that kills everyone save for her cousin’s innocent daughter and the family’s most cunning living member, Johnny Vitti (Michael Kelly). The murderous move leaves Sofia totally in charge.

Sofia has finally become that which Gotham feared and her father revered: a stone cold killer capable of doing anything to stay on top of the city’s underworld. As Milioti said, Arkham didn’t simply transform her into this monster, but it revealed the Falcone within.

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