Warning: This article contains spoilers from The Penguin episode 5. The Falcone crime Family is dead. Long live the Gigante-Maroni Family. Sunday’s “Homecoming” episode of The Penguin ended with Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) shooting and killing made man Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly) after gassing Don Luca (Scott Cohen) and the Falcones, then embracing her late mother’s maiden name: Gigante. “As of today, my father’s legacy is dead, and we will never speak his name again,” Sofia said of the late Carmine Falcone. “From this point on, I am a Gigante — and this is a new Family now.”
Having learned that Oz (Colin Farrell) killed her brother Alberto (Michael Zegen) and has been pitting the Falcones and the Maronis against each other to get his new mushroom-based Bliss drug operation going and seize power, Sofia — rechristened as Sofia Gigante, head of the Gigantes — makes Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown) an offer he can’t refuse: end the war between the Families that claimed the lives of his son Taj (Aria Shahghasemi) and wife Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo).
“The Falcones don’t exist anymore. I am offering you an alliance. We join our Families, the Maronis and Gigantes, as a show of strength. We kill Oz. And then we take over the city,” Sofia says. “Together.”
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“Notoriously, the Falcones and the Maronis are always at odds in the comics,” series creator and showrunner Lauren LeFranc explains in this week’s Episode 5 Insider. “I thought it was interesting, and seems right, to have Sofia — knowing that the Falcones have wronged her just as much as the Falcones have wronged the Maronis — to try to team up with Sal Maroni, to align the powers that they have to get Oz.”
It’s a change from Sofia’s comic counterpart, who is introduced in 1997’s Batman: The Long Halloween #6 as Sofia Falcone-Gigante. The issue sees Carmine Falcone’s daughter released from Gotham Penitentiary (rather than Arkham Asylum) as Batman unravels the mystery of the Holiday killer during a war between two rival gangs: the Falcones and the Maronis.
“She wants to own this part of her past that rejects this sort of dark patriarchy of her father,” says series executive producer and The Batman filmmaker Matt Reeves. LeFranc notes that “in the comics, it’s Sofia Falcone-Gigante because she marries into a Gigante family. But I thought it was more appropriate to have her take her mother’s maiden name. That’s Sofia’s moment of taking back power and declaring herself to the world.”
“That’s such an excellent last twist of the knife into her father’s legacy,” Milioti adds. “To be like, ‘Your legacy ends with you, and I’m going to honor my mother, and this is going to be a matriarchal mob family.’”
A flashback to ten years earlier revealed Sofia was poised to inherit her father’s crime empire as head of the Family. But when Oz betrayed Sofia to her father (Mark Strong), Carmine framed her for his Hangman murders, faked her mental illness, and had his daughter remanded to Arkham for a decade.
New episodes of The Penguin premiere Sundays on HBO and Max.