In the premiere of HBO’s The Penguin, we met Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), who just got out of Arkham after a 10-year stint for murdering seven women as the Hangman killer. And in this week’s episode, we got a number of new, intriguing pieces of info on the character, including some strange-looking scars on her neck. So to paraphrase another Gotham villain: wanna know how she got these scars?
Spoilers for The Penguin Episode 2 “Inside Man” past this point.
There’s a short answer here for where the scars came from is pretty clear in the episode. We see that Sofia has been sleeping on a blanketless cot in her closet, clearly traumatized by her decade in Arkham and aiming to reproduce the experience now that she’s back in the Falcones’ palatial mansion. We also see she has blood under her short-cut fingernails.
So yes, Sofia has been self-harming, most likely scratching at her neck during the night. This sort of thing is so common in fiction it has its own TV Tropes page under “Clawing at Own Throat.” But there’s a bit more going on here, including a riff on one of Sofia Falcone’s characteristics from the DC Comics source material.
A good chunk of The Batman is pulled from The Long Halloween, a series by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. And the way The Penguin is bringing in Sofia Falcone is riffing a bit off the sequel to that series, Dark Victory. In The Long Halloween, Catwoman scratched Carmine Falcone’s face, giving him three scars down his cheek — a moment that was reproduced in The Batman. Like in The Batman, Carmine is killed in The Long Halloween.
At the end of The Long Halloween, Sofia flees to Italy, where she scars her face just like Carmine’s. Those wounds aren’t caused by Catwoman, but instead are self-inflicted, a la what Sofia seems to be doing her on The Penguin. Those scars also become a major clue to Batman when he’s trying to decipher the Hangman killings in Dark Victory (more on that in a second). So, that’s the reference the TV series is riffing off of, most likely. But why is she self-harming?
Sofia’s Scars Are Likely Tied To The Hangman Killings
This part is speculation, as it doesn’t come from the books. In the comics, she’s called Hangman because she hangs her victims (you could have probably figured that out). But who she’s been hanging is vastly different than on the TV series. In Dark Victory, she’s killing police officers and city officials who were tied to Harvey Dent, to frame the villain now known as Two-Face.
On TV, we don’t yet know why Sofia is named Hangman, but we do know she killed seven women. And yes, they could be seven women who were cops, but it seems likely they were not… Otherwise, that would have been the lede here, versus seven unnamed women.
So how does this tie into the scratches on Sofia’s neck? Again, speculating but it seems likely she still used a noose as her instrument of murder. And we know she’s been in Arkham for 10 years — she was arrested and committed to Arkham on September 5, 2012, and The Penguin begins on November 13, 2022. That’s a pretty long time. And while it’s possible she could have been suffering from some sort of neck-scarring delusions that caused her to become Hangman, I’ll throw out another possibility.
As Sofia has explained, her time in Arkham was humiliating and dehumanizing. It’s entirely possible that she was subjected to some sort of hanging herself, possibly even multiple times, that traumatized her and now causes her to scratch at her neck during the night… In order to remove a noose that isn’t there. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a guard or guards wanted her to feel what her victims felt. And certainly, the positioning of her scars seems to be about where a noose would rest.
So are the scars there because of a lifelong delusion? A newer fear caused by her time in Gotham? Or perhaps, like how The Joker explained his scars in The Dark Knight, there’s no real answer. That’ll put a smile on that face of yours.
Where To Watch The Penguin:
The Penguin Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
The first episode of The Penguin premieres Thursday, September 19 at 9 pm ET on HBO and Max. There will be an encore airing on Sunday, September 22 at 9 pm ET, and then the show will move to its regular time slot of Sundays at 9 pm ET starting on September 29.
Here’s the full list of episodes in The Penguin, with premiere dates:
- Thursday, September 19, 2024: The Penguin, Episode 1: “After Hours”
- Sunday, September 29, 2024: The Penguin, Episode 2: “Inside Man”
- Sunday, October 6, 2024: The Penguin, Episode 3: “Bliss”
- Sunday, October 13, 2024: The Penguin, Episode 4: “Cent’Anni”
- Sunday, October 20, 2024: The Penguin, Episode 5: “Homecoming”
- Sunday, October 27, 2024: The Penguin, Episode 6: “Gold Summit”
- Sunday, November 3, 2024: The Penguin, Episode 7: “Top Hat”
- Sunday, November 10, 2024: The Penguin, Episode 8: “Great or Little Thing”