The penguin is defiantly resistant to digging too deeply into the Batman canon. A spin-off from the more rough and grounded The Batmanthe HBO show has focused on its titular Batman antagonist and the much more street-mafia war set in motion by the events of the film (and, you know, Penguin’s own murder of the would-be successor to the Falcone criminal family) . Empire).
Episode 4 changes that. A flashback to Sofia’s time in Arkham Asylum gives us a glimpse into the Hangman’s true background, and introduces another Batman villain.
(Ed. remark: This post contains spoilers for episode 4 of The penguin.)
In The penguinMagpie does her utmost to introduce herself as Magpie, not Margaret, and if you have any idea what kind of world Gotham is in, your ears might perk up.
Magpie is a lower level Batman villain who made his first appearance The man of steel #3. She’s not really prominent in many of the comics or in the on-screen DC Universe, but we do have some consistency for her character in the iterations we’ve seen. She was born Margaret Pye and has lusted after shiny objects all her life. As she grew older, she started working at the Gotham City Museum for Antiquities to be closer to such valuable items. Eventually the closeness became too much; her mind broke, she became Magpie and she started stealing the museum goods, eventually being captured and placed in Arkham Asylum.
Like many Gotham villains, she has no powers to speak of. She is an accomplished gymnast and uses light weapons such as explosives, poisons and razor blades. Magpie takes it one step further and creates deadly booby-trapped duplicates of the museum items she steals! But despite appearing in Batman comics since 1986, she has only appeared on screen in episodes of Gotham And Batwomanplus a background appearance The Lego Batman Movie.
Is The Penguin’s Magpie different from the comics?
This is a show about Oswald Cobbnot DC’s ‘Oswald Cobblepot’. That’s important if you understand what the Magpie lore is here. For starters, there are no comics showing Sofia Falcone and Magpie together in Arkham.
“I had a lot of freedom because of the isolation of this universe, and also because the character of Magpie has not been represented much in DC Comics over the years,” Marié Botha, who plays Magpie, tells Polygon. “And so I drew on the whimsical madness and strange moments of joy and anger that exist in Arkham. And then I just built my own version.”
And so Magpie sets off the “Batman Epic Crime saga” is limited: she ends up in Arkham and dies (apparently) when Sofia snaps and hits her head on the table. But Botha says she developed the “3D version” of Magpie beyond the scope of the episode, drawing on canon and adapting it to include glimpses of the character from the script.
“I really loved (her obsession with shiny things) – to see how Sofia Falcone came in as a shiny thing, as a shiny object,” says Botha, noting that Sofia still looks very “polished” amid a lot of buzz about her family and her (alleged) record as a serial killer. “I love that we meet through that little rivet hole in the beginning, because I really had to play with my eye, my mouth, and my fingers to try to reach this shiny thing, to possess her, to make her my friend to make .”
Botha’s goal in working with episode director Helen Shaver was always to instill the same level of pathos in Magpie as The penguin works to provide for all his Gotham offenders. Even in this brief appearance, the magpie is but a wounded bird to Botha; someone who moves back and forth between her inner child and her traumatized adult self. And even though she leaves the story as quickly as she enters, she remains in the story as an omen. After all, Sofia has only been there a short time and has already killed someone. Magpie has been there much longer… Well, as we see at the end of the episode: Arkham does a real number on you.