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The Penguin Episode 4 “Cent’anni” flashes back ten years to follow Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) as she endures the endless indignities of Arkham Asylum. We’ve already visited the hellacious “hospital” in Matt Reeves‘s The Batman and met some of its most infamous male inmates, but now we’re getting a look at the female side of Arkham. And, yes, the HBO series has planted a fun DC comics Easter egg in Arkham. She goes by the name “Magpie,” not Margaret, and she plays a pivotal role in Sofia’s journey from naive mafia princess to true comic book villain.
**Spoilers for The Penguin Episode 4 “Cent’anni,” now streaming on Max**
As soon as Sofia is thrust into her cell at Arkham Asylum, she meets her next door neighbor. Magpie (Marié Botha) chatters to the shell-shocked rich girl with an annoying sing-song voice about how much fun it must be to be “famous.” Magpie, along with the rest of the Arkham inmates we’ll soon meet, fully believes the lie that Sofia is the serial killer known as the Hangman. Sofia, however, has not killed anyone. Instead she has been framed by her crime boss daddy, Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong), for the many, many strangulations he’s done.
Magpie will attempt to befriend Sofia, much to the anti-heroine’s horror. In fact, after Sofia later suffers the blow of learning she has not been given her promised trial and is doomed to stay in Arkham forever, Magpie prods her too far. A despondent Sofia beats Magpie to death with a cafeteria tray, thereby finally becoming the killer her father has cast her as.
So why push Magpie, a lesser known Batman villain, into The Penguin now? Did The Batman’s Matt Reeves and Dyan Clark have some master plan for which characters we’d meet in Arkham Asylum? Did they make The Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc put Magpie in? Who came up with this specific Easter egg?
“No, that was Lauren LeFranc,” Matt Reeves told Decider.
“That was Lauren,” Dylan Clark concurred.
According to Penguin EPs Reeves and Clark, a huge part of their version of the Batman comics was mining the source material for characters they could reinterpret like never before — and comic book fan Lauren LeFranc was more than up to the challenge.
“We grounded our characters in the film so that they were characters that you saw attributes and characteristics from or inside the comics, but they were new explorations. Lauren did similarly here with the television exploration we have,” Clark said. “Sofia from The Long Halloween isn’t exactly that Sofia Falcon, but there’s elements of that character inside of her.”
Matt Reeves summed up the process as “finding that intersection between the things people are familiar with and then introducing them something to something that feels new.” And this version of Magpie certainly feels new.
So who is Magpie? How does The Penguin‘s Magpie differ from the comics? And is Syd Skidmore’s Abby someone DC comics fans should know?
Who is Magpie on The Penguin?
Magpie, or Margaret Pye, is a DC comics supervillain who first appeared in 1986’s The Man of Steel #3. In the comics, she is a museum curator-turned-jewel thief. In 2004’s Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, writer Dan Slott revealed that Magpie was Poison Ivy’s cellmate in the prison. Most recently, Magpie was a member of Suicide Squad who, uh, died during the suicide mission.
The Penguin‘s version of Magpie is a lonely soul who is jealous that Sofia’s arrest made the papers. She desperately wants Sofia to be her friend, much to the other woman’s chagrin.
Magpie is played by Marié Botha, who is best-known for her work in the theater, but has appeared in an episode of Dickinson.
Who is Abby in The Penguin?
Magpie isn’t the only Arkham inmate who makes an impression in The Penguin Episode 4. Syd Skidmore plays a prisoner the credits name “Abby.” Skidmore’s character is the one who is let loose to beat Sofia up on her first day in Arkham. Dr. Ventris (T. Ryder Smith) then conjures up a staged fight between an unshackled Sofia and chained Abby to goad Sofia into killing her tormentor. Sofia refuses, but Abby takes her own life with the fork provided as a weapon.
Unlike Magpie, who is properly named after a comics character, Abby does not appear to be a specific character. However, you could make an argument that she’s meant to be a version of Abigail O’Shay, who was transformed by experiments conducted by Dr. Jonathan Crane (aka the Scarecrow). That said, she’s just credited as Abby.
- cristin milioti
- Max
- The Batman
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