The Penguin (Recap) | Bliss (S1 E3)

by Sean T. Collins for Decider

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. 

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.

Read the rest of the recap, HERE.