Salvatore Maroni first appeared in the comics in 1942’s Detective Comics #66 by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson, & George Roussos as “Boss Moroni,” a gangster who was on trial for killing Bookie Benson. The prosecutor was “Harvey Kent,” and Batman testified on the stand to Moroni’s guilt. Kent produced a two-headed coin found at the scene with Moroni’s fingerprints on it. Angered, Moroni threw acid at Kent, which scarred half his face and one of his hands, which eventually led him to becoming one of Batman’s most enduring foes, Two-Face.
Over the years, Moroni became Maroni and Kent became Dent, but Maroni’s status as the guy who, in essence, created Two-Face remained, both through various retcons and additions to the lore in the comics, as well as in many (though not all) of the screen adaptations. The 1996 miniseries Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale established Maroni as a rival crime boss to the Falcone family that was established in the “Batman: Year One” story by Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli, which has been one of the major influences on the Matt Reeves version of the Bat-mythos seen in The Batman and The Penguin.
Alas, if Two-Face shows up in one of the “Reeves-verse” productions, it won’t be Maroni who “creates” him, as this version of ol’ Sal doesn’t make it out alive.
Clancy Brown, as usual, gives a magnificent performance. The alliance between the Maroni family and the Gigante family is entirely built on the mutual hatred Sofia and Maroni both hold for the Penguin, and that loathing is etched in Brown’s every pore. Last week ended with Sofia discovering that Penguin’s mother is still alive, despite the best efforts of Penguin to convince everyone that she died years ago.
The present-day portion of the latest episode of The Penguin opens with Penguin coming home to find a broken door, Vic with a head wound, and no sign of Francis Cobb. Penguin gets Vic the hell out of the apartment first, telling him to get in touch with everyone working for them and gather them. He needs an army.
Then Maroni arrives, having been waiting for Penguin to show up. Maroni starts by beating Penguin up with his own golf club that he took from his apartment, then forces Penguin to bring him to his operation.
I love Maroni’s reaction to the Bliss setup Penguin has in the abandoned trolley tunnels. Is he impressed with the scale of the operation? The fact that he has access to the whole city? Nope, he just sees a guy in a filthy stinky underground sewer, a fitting place for a rat like him.
It continues the theme of the “Reeves-verse”: the differences in class. Penguin is working-class poor. Maroni is a gangster from a family of gangsters, who married into another family of gangsters—he was, as Penguin so perfectly and succinctly put it way back in “After Hours,” “born full.” He’s used to big mansions and nice things, not dank, dreary underground lairs. (Penguin predicted this last week, saying that the Maronis’ and Gigantes’ noses are so far up they’ll never look down.)
There’s one more important difference, which we’ve also seen from jump in this series: Penguin has earned the loyalty of those underneath him. He’s completely confident that Vic can get him an army, and when he brings Maroni down to the abandoned trolley tunnels, he’s able to turn the tide because his people will fight for him, not just roll over for Maroni.
That’s part of why Penguin is able to win. The other reason is that Maroni has a heart attack in the middle of the rather lengthy fistfight between him and Penguin. It’s not a surprise, really. Your wife and kid being immolated doesn’t do much for your blood pressure, and given that he’s a fugitive, it’s not entirely clear that he’s been under a doctor’s care in any case.
Colin Farrell beautifully plays Penguin’s disappointment that it ended that quickly. “The fuck?” he cries, and then tries to taunt Maroni with his victory, but Maroni himself is no longer in a position to respond.
And then for good measure, and probably because he’s familiar with the tropes of the comics this series is based on, he shoots Maroni several times to make sure he stays dead.
I said the “present-day” portion of the episode started with Penguin discovering that his mother’s been kidnapped, because we open with an extended flashback, showing us how Oz Cobb’s brothers Jack and Benny died. While we’ve heard plenty of stories about the brothers’ death, we’ve never gotten the specifics of how it happened.
First of all, the casting department hit it out of the park here, as Emily Meade and Ryder Allen do an absolutely letter-perfect job of playing the younger versions of Francis and Oz, respectively. (It’s worth mentioning that Allen is interviewed for the after-show, “The Penguin: Inside Gotham,” and the kid is very smart and thoughtful. He’s got quite the career ahead of him…) We see Oz’s jealousy of the attention that Francis gives to his brothers, and we also see how smart he is, and how the wheels even then were always turning.
(Points to the set designers, also, for re-creating 1988: we’ve got older cars on the street, older types of currency changing hands, a big PC with a CRT monitor on top of a CPU with 5¼” disk drives, an old-fashioned adding machine, and so on.)
Francis apparently was doing bookkeeping—or book-cooking—for a local gangster named Rex, and we see Oz, Jack, and Benny deliver a ledger to Rex, for which the gangster gives them $50. It starts raining, so they go to the very same abandoned trolley tunnels that Oz will use as a headquarters decades hence to play hide-and-seek. Oz is “it” first, and Benny and Jack hide in a tunnel that is only accessible via a ladder. With his messed-up foot, Oz can’t climb down the ladder, and he’s pissed at his brothers for doing that. Even as Jack apologizes in a manner that sounds sincere, Oz closes the big metal door to the tunnel and leaves.
The tunnel is flooding, however, and eventually the brothers drown. Oz goes home and tells Francis that his brothers went to the movies (he says they saw Beetlejuice, an amusing in-joke, as that was a pre-Batman collaboration between director Tim Burton and actor Michael Keaton, plus its sequel is now in theatres…). Oz tells Francis that he didn’t go with them because he wanted to be home with his mother, which just solidifies his bond with Francis—what he wanted all along.
The two of them then sit down to watch a videotape of Oz’s favorite movie, the 1935 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical, Top Hat. In particular, Oz loves the scene where Astaire is performing “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails” while dressed in the titular outfit (very similar to the sartorial choices favored by the Penguin in the comics), and uses his cane as a fake gun to shoot down his backup dancers. Oz really likes that bit, and unsubtle but effective bit of characterization…
The next part of the flashback, interestingly enough, isn’t seen directly, but rather in the present day, during a conversation between Francis and Sofia, specifically when Sofia brings Jack and Benny up. Penguin told Sofia a story about his brothers and his mother back in “Inside Man.” Since he lied about Francis being dead in that conversation, Sofia questions whether or not Francis’ other two sons are dead also. This leads the dementia-suffering Francis to have a flashback to the day after Oz abandoned his brothers, yelling at someone (probably a cop) to look for them and try to find them, they didn’t have an umbrella, they aren’t anywhere they should be, and just generally being hysterical with worry over her missing sons.
The scene between Sofia and Francis is another tour de force. Cristin Milioti and Deirdre O’Connell are stellar, as Francis is supremely confident in her son’s ability to think two steps ahead and get the better of his opponents, because everyone always underestimates him. She also has some words of derision for Sofia, for thinking that she’s doing anything different by changing her name to Gigante—she’s just another gangster doing gangster things.
This proves cathartic to Sofia, who then goes to visit Gia in the children’s hospital, as Sofia’s little cousin—the only remaining survivor of Sofia’s massacre of her family in “Cent’Anni”—has been making noises about talking to the police, and also has been self-harming. While Sofia lies to Gia and says that the gassing really was an accident, that Sofia wasn’t responsible (Gia remembers seeing a gas mask in Sofia’s bag), she also tells Gia an important truth: the people who died were bad people who deserved it.
And then Sofia changes tracks. She sends a car to the tunnels to do an exchange with Penguin: Francis for his Bliss operation. Penguin has no intention of honoring his end of the deal, but neither does Sofia. The car has what looks like a dead body under a blanket, so Penguin hesitates to uncover it—which proves disastrous, as it’s really a bomb.
In an amusing touch, Penguin is saved from the blast by going into the very same tunnel that he trapped his brothers in. When he climbs back up to the surface, he’s discovered by Detective Wise (Craig Walker), established back in “Inside Man” as a corrupt cop working for Sofia, who plans to bring him to Sofia…
Before that confrontation with Wise, however, we have one more flashback. The story Penguin told Sofia in “Inside Man” was about how his mother grieved for Jack and Benny. After weeks of her lying in bed and barely speaking or eating, she suddenly emerged from the bedroom all dressed up, and took Oz to Monroe’s, where they danced to the live music.
We see that play out exactly as Penguin described to Sofia, but we also see an important conversation between Francis and Oz: Francis needs Oz to take care of her. She needs a better life than what they have, and he has to do it for them. Oz promises to do that very thing for her. Which pretty much gets him started on the road to where he is now.
Oh, and we also see Sofia and her people take Francis to Monroe’s, which is apparently where the final confrontation between Penguin and Sofia will take place in next week’s season finale.
Penguin’s Bliss operation appears to be toast, and a big chunk of his army is now dead or injured. One thing we don’t know is where Vic is—he didn’t appear in the episode after Penguin sent him to get an army. You gotta figure that he will play a role in the final battle as well….
