Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Penguin episode 4, “Cent’anni.” “We work for him,” corrupt Gotham City cop William Kenzie (Peter McDonald) says in 2022’s The Batman movie. “Everybody does.” The mustachioed detective is referring to crime boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) — the true Hangman killer who strangled Iceberg Lounge waitress Annika Kosolov (Hana Hrzic) and had Kenzie cover up the missing girl’s death while moonlighting as a bouncer for Penguin’s (Colin Farrell) 44 Below. When he’s investigated by Batman (Robert Pattinson) and a vengeful Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz), the dirty narcotics detective lets the cat out of the bag about Falcone ratting out the Maroni Drops operation.
Kenzie tells Batman and Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) about the corruption within the Thomas Wayne-founded Renewal Fund, the charitable fund that turned into a laundering operation after the deaths of the Waynes. Falcone orchestrated a play to take down his rival, Sal Maroni (Clancy Brown), who is incarcerated in Blackgate Penitentiary by the time of The Penguin.
Sunday’s “Cent’anni” episode takes place 10 years earlier, when Oz tips off Carmine (a recast Mark Strong) about his daughter Sofia’s (Cristin Milioti) clandestine meeting with Gotham Gazette reporter Summer Gleeson (Nadine Malouf). Carmine tells Sofia that he “spoke to Kenzie,” who informed him that Gleeson is working with the police on an open investigation into the murder of “some hooker at the club.”
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Peter McDonald as Kenzie in The Penguin (left) and The Batman (right).
Later, when Oz drives Sofia home, she’s arrested by Kenzie and charged with the murders of Summer Gleeson, Yolanda Jones, Taylor Montgomery, and Nancy Hoffman — victims of her father. Carmine implicates Sofia as the serial killer behind the “Hangman killings” and has her institutionalized at Arkham State Hospital, where chief psychiatrist Dr. Ventris (T. Ryder Smith) — a nod to the little-known Batman villain Floyd Ventris, a.k.a. the reflection-obsessed Mirror Man — claims she’s unfit to stand trial.
Carmine has the Family — including Sofia’s uncle, Luca Falcone (Scott Cohen), her cousin Carla (Aleksa Palladino), and Carla’s brother Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly) — sign affidavits falsely claiming that she has a history of mental illness, so Sofia spends the next decade locked away in Arkham alongside lunatics like Magpie (Marié Botha).
In the present, following Falcone’s death at the hands of the Riddler (Paul Dano) in The Batman, Oz makes a power grab against the acting heads of the Maroni and Falcone crime Families: Nadia Maroni (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and Sofia Falcone, who takes her father’s place as the head of the Falcone Family.
New episodes of The Penguin premiere Sundays on HBO and Max.
