The Penguin has been defiantly proof against dabbling too deep within the Batman canon. A derivative of the extra gritty and grounded The Batman, the HBO present has zeroed in on its titular Batman antagonist and the way more street-level mafia conflict kicked off by the occasions of the movie (and, y’know, Penguin’s personal assassination of the would-be successor to the Falcone household’s legal empire).
Episode 4 modifications that. A flashback to Sofia’s time in Arkham Asylum provides us a glimpse on the true background of the Hangman, and brings in one other Batman villain besides.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for episode 4 of The Penguin.]
Picture: Dan Slott, Ryan Sook/DC Comics
In The Penguin, Magpie goes out of her method to introduce herself as Magpie, not Margaret, and when you have any notion of what sort of world Gotham is in, your ears would possibly perk up.
Magpie is a lower-level Batman villain who first confirmed up in The Man of Metal #3. She actually hasn’t been prominently featured in a lot of the comics or within the on-screen DC universe, however we do have some consistency for her character throughout the iterations we’ve seen. She was born Margaret Pye, and has coveted shiny objects her entire life. When she obtained older, she took a job on the Gotham Metropolis Museum for Antiquities so as to be nearer to such valuables. Finally the proximity was an excessive amount of; her thoughts snapped, she grew to become Magpie, and she or he started stealing the museum items, solely to ultimately be caught and put in Arkham Asylum.
Like many Gotham baddies, she doesn’t have any powers to talk of. She’s a talented gymnast and makes use of some mild weaponry like explosives, toxins, and razor blades. Magpie does go a step additional and create lethal booby-trapped duplicates of the museum objects she steals! However regardless of showing in Batman comics since 1986, she’s solely appeared on-screen in episodes of Gotham and Batwoman, plus a background look in The Lego Batman Film.
Is The Penguin’s Magpie totally different from the comics?
Picture: Macall Polay/HBO
It is a present about Oswald Cobb, not DC correct’s “Oswald Cobblepot.” That’s essential when understanding what the lore of Magpie is right here. For starters, there are not any comics that present Sofia Falcone and Magpie in Arkham collectively.
“I had a number of freedom due to this universe’s isolation, and in addition as a result of the character Magpie has not been represented lots all through the years within the DC Comics,” Marié Botha, who performs Magpie, tells Polygon. “And so I drew from the erratic madness and peculiar pleasure and rage moments that occur in Arkham. After which I simply constructed my very own model.”
And so Magpie’s foray into the “Batman Epic Crime Saga” is restricted: She has wound up in Arkham, and (seemingly) dies when Sofia snaps and slams her head into the desk. However Botha says she developed the “3D model” of Magpie past the scope of the episode, drawing from canon and tailoring it to glimpses of the character from the script.
“I actually liked [her obsession with shiny things] — to have a look at Sofia Falcone coming in as a shiny factor, as a shiny object,” Botha says, noting that Sofia arrives nonetheless wanting very “polished” amid a bunch of buzz about her household and her (alleged) monitor file as a serial killer. “I like that we meet by way of that little rivet gap at first, as a result of I obtained to actually play with my eye and my mouth and my fingers to try to get to this shiny factor, to try to possess her, to make her my pal.”
Botha’s objective in working with episode director Helen Shaver was all the time to instill the identical degree of pathos to Magpie that The Penguin works to offer all its Gotham offenders. Magpie, even on this temporary look, is only a wounded chicken to Botha; somebody who’s flitting between her interior little one and her traumatized grownup self. And even when she’s exiting the narrative simply as shortly as she enters, she stands within the narrative like an omen. In any case, Sofia has solely been there for somewhat bit and she or he’s already killed somebody. Magpie having been in there for lots longer… Nicely, as we see from the top of the episode: Arkham does an actual quantity on you.
