by Sean T. Collins for Decider
There are worse ways you can spend your TV time than watching Cristin Milioti, both slasher-movie freaky and hugely attractive in a black gas mask and a form-fitting gold gown, swan around a mafia mansion gazing at the corpses of her enemies — her own family. I mean, that’s a given, right? “It’s fun to watch beautiful people do terrible things” is a core tenet of cinema, baby. Dressing like the Miner from My Bloody Valentine at the Met Gala to lord it over the bodies of the gangsters who framed you for murder and thrust you into an inescapable hellhole for ten years of your life? That’s entertainment!
Of course, the Hollywood flipside of “It’s fun to watch beautiful people do terrible things” is “It’s fun to watch terrible things be done to beautiful people.” That’s what the bulk of The Penguin Episode 4 is about: the methodical destruction of Sofia Falcone’s personality in Arkham State Hospital by a system rigged by her serial-killer mob-boss father to do exactly that.
Sofia’s ordeal has a little bit of everything. She starts out as an ambitious mafia princess with no blood on her hands, receiving word from her father that she’s been named heir to the Iron Throne. She ends up as a mass murderer for real, gassing the vast majority of her family to death as they sleep — sparing only an innocent child, and underboss Johnny Vitti, for purposes yet unrevealed.
In between, she gets caught up in a newspaper investigation of a series of killings of women, all of them who work for the secret club run by Sofia’s father Carmine (Mark Strong, stepping in for John Turturro from The Batman). The strangulation marks and evidence of struggle happen to match the “suicide” by hanging of Sofia’s mother, whose body the girl discovered…before quickly being whisked away by her father, who has scratches all over his hands.
Read the rest of the recap, HERE.