the penguin has defiantly resisted dabbling too much in the Batman canon. A very brave and grounded spin-off. the batmanThe HBO show has focused on its titular Batman antagonist and the much more street-level mafia war sparked by the events of the film (and, you know, Penguin's own murder of the criminal's potential successor from the movie). Falcone family). empire).
Episode 4 changes that. A flashback to Sofia's time in Arkham Asylum gives us insight into Hangman's true background and also brings in another Batman villain.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for episode 4 of The Penguin.]
Image: Dan Slott, Ryan Sook/DC Comics
In the penguinMagpie tries his best to present himself as Magpie, No Margaret, and if you have any idea what kind of world Gotham is in, your ears may perk up.
Magpie is a lower-level Batman villain who first appeared in The man of steel #3. He hasn't really featured prominently in much of the comics or the on-screen DC universe, but we do get some consistency for his character in the iterations we've seen. She was born Margaret Pye and has coveted shiny objects all her life. When he grew up, he took a job at the Gotham City Museum of Antiquities to be closer to those valuables. In the end the proximity was too much; Her mind broke, she became a Magpie and began stealing the museum's goods, only to eventually be caught and taken to Arkham Asylum.
Like many Gotham baddies, she has no powers to speak of. She is an expert gymnast and uses light weaponry such as explosives, toxins, and razor blades. Magpie goes one step further and creates deadly booby-trapped replicas of the museum artifacts he steals! But despite appearing in the Batman comics since 1986, he only appeared on screen in episodes of gothic city and batwomanplus a background appearance in The Lego Batman Movie.
Is Penguin Magpie different from the comics?
Photo: Macall Polay/HBO
This is a program about Oswald Cobbnot DC's “Oswald Cobblepot” proper. That's important to understanding what Magpie's story is here. For starters, there are no comics that show Sofia Falcone and Magpie together in Arkham.
“I had a lot of freedom because of the isolation of this universe, and also because the Magpie character hasn't been represented very much over the years in DC Comics,” Marié Botha, who plays Magpie, tells Polygon. “And then I was inspired by the erratic madness and the strange moments of joy and rage that happen in Arkham. And then I built my own version.”
And that's why Magpie's foray into the “Batman Epic Crime Saga” is limited: he ended up in Arkham and (apparently) dies when Sofia breaks and hits her head on the table. But Botha says he developed the “3D version” of Magpie beyond the scope of the episode, drawing on canon and adapting it to flashes of the character in the script.
“I really loved it [her obsession with shiny things] “Seeing Sofia Falcone arrive as a shiny thing, like a shiny object,” says Botha, noting that Sofia arrives still looking very “polished” amid a lot of rumors about her family and her (alleged) track record as a series. killer. “I love that we met through that little rivet hole at the beginning, because I really had to play with my eyes and my mouth and my fingers to try to get to this shiny thing, to try to possess it, to make it my friend. .”
Botha's goal in working with episode director Helen Shaver was always to instill Magpie with the same level of pathos as the penguin works to provide all of his Gotham offenders. Magpie, even in this brief appearance, is just a wounded bird to Botha; someone who is flitting between their inner child and their traumatized adult self. And even if it exits the narrative as quickly as it enters, it remains in the narrative as foreshadowing. After all, Sofia has only been there a while and has already killed someone. Magpie has been there a lot longer… Well, as we see at the end of the episode: Arkham does a real number on you.