The Penguin has been defiantly resistant to dabbling too deep in the Batman canon. A spinoff of the more gritty and grounded The Batman, the HBO show has zeroed in on its titular Batman antagonist and the much more street-level mafia war kicked off by the events of the film (and, y’know, Penguin’s own assassination of the would-be successor to the Falcone family’s criminal empire).
Episode 4 changes that. A flashback to Sofia’s time in Arkham Asylum gives us a glimpse at the true background of the Hangman, and brings in another Batman villain to boot.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for episode 4 of The Penguin.]
Image: Dan Slott, Ryan Sook/DC Comics
In The Penguin, Magpie goes out of her way to introduce herself as Magpie, not Margaret, and if you have any notion of what kind of world Gotham is in, your ears might perk up.
Magpie is a lower-level Batman villain who first showed up in The Man of Steel #3. She really hasn’t been prominently featured in much of the comics or in the on-screen DC universe, but we do have some consistency for her character across the iterations we’ve seen. She was born Margaret Pye, and has coveted shiny objects her whole life. When she got older, she took a job at the Gotham City Museum for Antiquities in order to be closer to such valuables. Eventually the proximity was too much; her mind snapped, she became Magpie, and she began stealing the museum goods, only to eventually be caught and put in Arkham Asylum.
Like many Gotham baddies, she doesn’t have any powers to speak of. She’s a skilled gymnast and uses some light weaponry like explosives, toxins, and razor blades. Magpie does go a step further and create deadly booby-trapped duplicates of the museum items she steals! But despite appearing in Batman comics since 1986, she’s only appeared on-screen in episodes of Gotham and Batwoman, plus a background appearance in The Lego Batman Movie.
Is The Penguin’s Magpie different from the comics?
Photo: Macall Polay/HBO
This is a show about Oswald Cobb, not DC proper’s “Oswald Cobblepot.” That’s important when understanding what the lore of Magpie is here. For starters, there are no comics that show Sofia Falcone and Magpie in Arkham together.
“I had a lot of freedom because of this universe’s isolation, and also because the character Magpie has not been represented a lot throughout the years in the DC Comics,” Marié Botha, who plays Magpie, tells Polygon. “And so I drew from the erratic insanity and weird joy and rage moments that happen in Arkham. And then I just built my own version.”
And so Magpie’s foray into the “Batman Epic Crime Saga” is limited: She has wound up in Arkham, and (seemingly) dies when Sofia snaps and slams her head into the table. But Botha says she developed the “3D version” of Magpie beyond the scope of the episode, drawing from canon and tailoring it to glimpses of the character from the script.
“I really loved [her obsession with shiny things] — to look at Sofia Falcone coming in as a shiny thing, as a shiny object,” Botha says, noting that Sofia arrives still looking very “polished” amid a bunch of buzz about her family and her (alleged) track record as a serial killer. “I love that we meet through that little rivet hole in the beginning, because I got to really play with my eye and my mouth and my fingers to try and get to this shiny thing, to try and possess her, to make her my friend.”
Botha’s goal in working with episode director Helen Shaver was always to instill the same level of pathos to Magpie that The Penguin works to provide all its Gotham offenders. Magpie, even in this brief appearance, is just a wounded bird to Botha; someone who’s flitting between her inner child and her traumatized adult self. And even if she’s exiting the narrative just as quickly as she enters, she stands in the narrative like an omen. After all, Sofia has only been there for a little bit and she’s already killed someone. Magpie having been in there for a lot longer… Well, as we see from the end of the episode: Arkham does a real number on you.