‘The Penguin’ Episode 3 Recap: A Shortcut to Mushrooms

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Gotham. Or a little, anyway. The big question The Penguin has yet to answer — besides “Why is Colin Farrell playing this character when there are dozens of actors who wouldn’t have required Carmine Laguzio levels of prosthetics and padding?” — is why a Batman supervillain is involved in this straightforward gangster story at all. But now things are seeming a little less straightforward, no?

It’s not just the opening flashback, a highly effective and harrowing sequence that puts us in Victor’s shoes the night the Riddler blew up and flooded half of Gotham City, killing the poor kid’s family. That serves as a reminder that there are people in this world capable of real supervillainous shit, not just whacking rival mobsters.

More crucially to the here and now, however, we discover the nature of the big new drug that Sofia Falcone and her late brother Alberto were planning to introduce to Gotham. It’s cultivated from weird sci-fi mushrooms — from the character of Poison Ivy to the classic Superman story “For the Man Who Has Everything” by the Watchmen team of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, psychoactive plants have a rich Bat-history.

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What’s more, these drug derived from the blood-like sweat of these shrooms was used on Sofia herself. In Arkham, she explains, the crystalline derivative that they plan to market and sell as “bliss” was used to keep patients, well, blissed out — happy, docile, unaware not only of their pain but their surroundings. I guess that constitutes an endorsement.

At any rate, it’s enough to the boss of Gotham’s Triads (François Chau) to sign on as distribution, a necessary step since Oz and Sofia are trying to do this behind the back of their family’s nominal boss, her uncle Luca. In fact, they blackmail underboss Johnny Vitti into joining the scheme by threatening to expose his affair with Luca’s wife.

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All the while, Sofia and Oz do a delicate dance around each other. It’s clear they have a lot of history, and by the end of the episode it’s clear what the history is: As her driver, he was privy to the crimes she was committing as the serial killer called the Hangman and ratted her out to her father, Carmine. He claims to have done this out of concern, with no idea the old man would resort to sending her to a hellhole like Arkham. But when pressed, he admits he did it to climb up the ladder over her. He regrets what happened to her, he says, but he doesn’t regret making his move. With this kind of radical honesty, he proposes she continue to allow him to prove he can be trusted.

Then he immediately ditches her when Victor, who’s spent the episode debating whether or not to leave Gotham with his crush or stay and work for Oz, returns for the long haul just in time to run over a Maroni hitman. Our boys escape, but Sofia’s fate is unknown — which is fine with Oz, who after all the heartstring-tugging he did all episode just barks “Fuck, leave her!” when Victor asks if they should wait for her too. You really cannot trust a word this guy says, ever! I’ve got a feeling Victor, who gets a heaping helping of heartstring-tugging from Oz this episode too, will eventually learn this to his sorrow.

It’s an enjoyable episode all told, a neat little crime caper with an exciting ending. It gives actor Rhenzy Feliz, who’s on screen about as much as Colin Farrell or Cristin Milioti, ample time to shine; his ongoing battle with his stutter, and now PTSD flashbacks to the Riddler attack, make him an empathetic presence in an environment that does not reward vulnerabilities such as these.

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It also shows off the deeply maladaptive ways these people have developed to deal with adversity. When Victor suggests to Oz that he was afraid to leave, Oz responds by…getting so angry that he points a gun at Victor’s head to show the kind of guy he’s not . Very helpful, Oz. His almost compulsive inability to tell the truth to anyone seems likely to get him in trouble one day too, no matter how well it serves him at any given moment.

As for Milioti’s Sofia, I’m not sure what she means when she tells Oz, with apparent sincerity, “I’m not the Hangman.” Is she saying she was wrongfully accused, or that she’s not that person anymore ? It’s difficult to tell from her steely demeanor if she’s the way she is because this is a medicated step down from all-out psychopathy, or if she’s the way she is because getting sent to Arkham Asylum for crimes you didn’t commit turns you into a real bastard. Milioti, who has a lot of runway to work with considering how few non-goofy depictions of female serial killers exist in pop culture, hides the answer to this mystery in her dark brown eyes.

And despite its oppressively orange color palette — the flashback to the Aguilar household looks like it was dipped in marmalade — the show can look nice, too. The Triads’ cavernous club, Oz and Sofia sharing a cigarette, and the blue and red lighting in the bathroom as Oz menaces Vic over his plan to leave Gotham all stand out. Like mushrooms, the story and the performances are growing on me over time; maybe the look of the thing will too, or maybe it’ll just be easier to look the other way.

Sean T. Collins ( @theseantcollins ) writes about TV for Rolling Stone , Vulture , The New York Times , and anyplace that will have him , really. He and his family live on Long Island.

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