The daughter of crime boss Carmine “The Roman” Falcone, Sofia, was established in the comics in the miniseries Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale. Sofia, whose married name was Gigante, was a large woman, devoted to her father. At the end of the miniseries, she falls out of a high-story window in a fight with Catwoman. She survives, and we see her in Loeb & Sale’s followup miniseries, Batman: Dark Victory, in a wheelchair, her head held immobile by metal rods.
Dark Victory is about the Hangman murderer, who kills corrupt cops, revealed in the end to be Sofia, whose injuries were not as bad as she let on. She is killed in the end by Two-Face—who is the prime suspect for the Hangman murders for much of the miniseries.
The Penguin has both used and not used the comics as a template for the screen versions of the Falcone family that we first saw in The Batman. There are still Hangman murders, but they’re of women, not cops, and instead of Sofia being the surprise culprit after a long mystery story, she is instead the one everyone believes did it, though the true culprit was her father. In addition, rather than having her marry a Gigante, we have Gigante be her mother’s maiden name which—having killed almost the entire Falcone family last week—she claims as her own, declaring the Falcone family to be dead.
Loeb & Sale’s Sofia was a strong woman whose full strength was hidden from the reader until the last minute. Cristin Milioti’s version of the character is one whose strength has been front and center for two straight episodes now.
“Homecoming” is all about both Penguin and Sofia consolidating their power bases and dealing blows to their enemies. What’s especially interesting is that, despite whose show this is, Penguin is the one who has several setbacks, where Sofia’s plans all go perfectly.
More impressive is the body count. I did not expect both Nadia Maroni and Johnny Viti to be taken off the table five episodes in, but Penguin burns Nadia to a crisp and Sofia—after sparing Johnny from the gassing in order to use him to gather the remnants of the family—shoots her uncle in the head. On one level, this is disappointing, as Michael Kelly and especially Shohreh Aghdashloo are fantastic actors. Before being executed, Kelly’s Johnny gives a very heartfelt account to Sofia about what actually happened to his sister, Sofia’s mother: she was going to run away from Carmine, and Johnny was even going to facilitate it, but Carmine killed her and made it look like suicide instead. (Sofia is less than impressed with Johnny’s sorrow on the subject, given that he’s spent the decades since being Carmine’s underboss.)
Penguin, meanwhile, needs to get the mushrooms from which Bliss is harvested back from the Maronis. So he kidnaps Sal and Nadia Maroni’s son Taj—who is kind enough to post on TikTok, so they know where he is—and ransom him for the mushrooms. The Maronis expect a double cross, so there’s an ambush, but Penguin anticipated that and doused Taj in gasoline. When he embraces his mother, Penguin lights a match on the gas trail he left, and mother and son are burned alive. But the warehouse where they meet has fire suppression, which ruins most of the mushrooms. He only has two barrels…
That’s the first setback; the second is worse. He bribes a corrections officer to shank Sal Maroni, but Maroni gets the better of the CO and uses his keys to break out of jail. And Sofia’s first order of business, once she shoots Johnny and gets her house in order, is to propose an alliance between the Gigantes and the Maronis. I was not entirely convinced by this revelation in the story sense—a set of keys is, um, not enough to get you out of a twenty-first-century prison—but I was relieved in an aesthetic sense, as I didn’t want to also lose Clancy Brown in the episode that already cost us Aghdashloo and Kelly. (Plus, this leaves Maroni free to be arrested, put on trial, and put in a position to throw acid at Harvey Dent’s face…)
Penguin’s third setback is personal. He goes for comfort to the two most important women in his life, Eve and his mother, and is denied both times. Eve loves Penguin, but won’t put herself in danger for him and she rejects him, telling him to fix his shit. She’ll take care of herself and of her girls. After that, he goes to his mom. For her safety, he has Vic take her out of her house to somewhere safe, and Vic picks Crown Point, the neighborhood most devastated by the flood at the climax of The Batman. When Penguin tries to take comfort from her, Francis just bitingly asks what kind of son can’t take care of his mother (never mind that take care of her is, like, all he’s ever done…).
Tellingly, both Penguin and Sofia are able to gather forces loyal to them by the simple expediency of being good to the help. We’d already seen this with Penguin, as we saw him throwing a party for the people who survived the Maroni attack on the drops shipment. Oz Cobb knows where he came from, and hasn’t forgotten that, and part of why he’s been successful is that the rank-and-file are loyal to him, because he was one of them, and he remembers his roots. They know he’ll be there for them, so they’re there for him.
Sofia does something similar. She can’t relate to the hired help the way Penguin can, but she doesn’t have to. For one thing, she had all her loyalty to the bosses of the family drained out of her by ten years in Arkham prompted by several family members lying in affidavits about Sofia’s nonexistent history of mental illness. For another—and this is why she kept Johnny alive for a bit—she has her father’s cash stash, which she distributes to the lower ranks.
The episode has a welcome guest star in the great Con O’Neill, reprising his role as the GCPD Police Chief Bock that he also played in The Batman. O’Neill—recently seen being brilliant in Our Flag Means Death as the terminally loyal Izzy Hands—gives a wonderfully cagey performance. It wasn’t clear in the movie whether or not Bock was one of the dirty cops, and it’s not clear here, either. This storyline takes place before Jim Gordon is elevated to commissioner and able to at least curb the GCPD’s corrupt excesses, and Bock has no comics equivalent to use as a potential signpost as to his status. Of course, this could just be a case of convenient casting because O’Neill was available, but it might be interesting to see Bock play a role in the gang war to come, as either a good cop or a bad cop, since we still don’t know for sure what type of cop he is.
We end with Oz finding the headquarters from which he will fight the war that’s about to break out between Penguin and the Gigante/Maroni alliance. A jar his mother kept with coins in it includes an old Gotham trolley car token. The underground trolley system was abandoned when Penguin was a kid, a victim of political corruption, and he and his now-dead brothers used to play in the tunnels. There’s a huge station down there, long abandoned and forgotten, that is the perfect headquarters for Penguin—especially since it’s dank and humid and therefore perfect for growing mushrooms…
