One of my favorite stories is about a baseball player named Rickey Henderson. When a Major League Baseball team makes it to the postseason, the teams get a percentage of the revenue generated by the postseason games they play in. The members of the team get to decide how that money is divided amongst the players, staff, etc. According to Mike Piazza’s memoir, when the New York Mets were deciding how to divvy up the shares they got as National League Champions in 2000, and they got to the marginal folks—like a minor-leaguer who was only up for a few games or the parking-lot attendant or some such—Henderson would say, “Full share!” When someone tried to argue, he’d say, “Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!”
I thought of that story when watching the third episode of The Penguin, specifically the scene where Penguin and Sofia discuss the circumstances under which the latter was sent to Arkham State Hospital. Penguin was Sofia’s driver, and he’s the one who revealed to Carmine Falcone that she was behind the Hangman murders, which resulted in Carmine sending her to Arkham. In their conversation toward the end of “Bliss,” Penguin semi-apologizes, as he thought he was doing it to help Sofia—he didn’t expect her to be sent to Arkham. (The trailer for next week’s episode indicates that at least part of it will be flashbacks to flesh out this storyline. It should also be added that Sofia says in this episode that she isn’t the Hangman, which is an interesting twist. In the comics, Sofia was the Hangman murderer in the Batman: Dark Victory miniseries by Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale.)
But what Penguin doesn’t apologize for in the least is what he got after she went away. The Penguin that we were introduced to in The Batman, who ran the Iceberg Lounge and was the guy who ran the drops operation for the Falcones, got there after Sofia was committed. He has no regrets about attaining a bit more success. Sofia nastily points out that he’s not a capo, he’s not a made man, and Penguin knows that, but it’s a huge improvement on what his life was like as a driver.
As he said back in “After Hours,” the Falcones were “born full.” Penguin just wants more than he was born with.
“Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!”
That theme runs throughout the episode. “Bliss” opens with a flashback that is contemporaneous with the final forty-five minutes or so of The Batman. We see Vic meeting up with his girlfriend Graciela (whom we saw texting him last week) and then we’re introduced to his immediate family: his mechanic father, his home-care specialist mother, and his little sister. Both Vic and his sister think their Dad should be asking for more money for his boss given the work he does, but their father is content with what they have because it’s still way more than they had before. (In the after-show, executive producer/showrunner Lauren LeFranc says that Vic is half Mexican and half Dominican; LeFranc herself is half Mexican, and Vic actor Rhenzy Feliz is Dominican.) Vic pushes back against that with his father, unsuccessfully, and later on we see him realizing that Penguin is going to pay him a thousand dollars a week. When Penguin tells him that he needs to ask for what he wants, not just sit and wait for it, the first thing Vic does is ask for two thousand. Penguin congratulates him on that, and then says no way.
The flashback ends, of course, with the bombs going off that destroy the firewall and flood the city. Vic and Graciela are on a roof with their friends (some of whom we saw with Vic trying to boost Penguin’s car in “After Hours”), and they have to watch as their building is destroyed, their families killed.
Penguin continues to show his ability to verbally tap-dance and talk his way out of things. When Sofia realizes that Penguin doesn’t know the specifics of the new drug that she and Alberto were going to unleash on Gotham, Penguin doesn’t miss a beat: Al wasn’t big on details, he just said it was a new drug and he would have Penguin handle distribution. (The first two parts are true, though the third obviously is not.) The drug in question, Bliss, comes from a rare strain of mushroom. Said drug was used as a pacifying agent in Arkham, and Sofia viewed it as the perfect thing to supplant drops as the big moneymaker in Gotham.
Now even more so: the people of Gotham are hurting, badly. They need a something to take them away from the misery of their lives. That is, in fact, the argument that Sofia and Penguin make to Zhao (the eternal character actor François Chau), the head of Gotham’s Triad gang.
(Digression: the drug being called Bliss threw me for a loop, as I had a magically enhanced drug called Bliss in my high fantasy novel Goblin Precinct back in 2013. I mean, it’s an obvious name for a drug, but still, it amused me…)
They field-test the drug for the Triads because they’re the best bet to distribute without the Falcones or the Maronis knowing about it. But the only way to get the meeting with Zhao is for a high-ranking member of the Falcone family to vouch for them. Without hesitating, Penguin says that Johnny Viti will make that call. Sofia is confused, then learns that Viti has been sleeping with Luca Falcone’s wife, the blackmail that Penguin has had on Viti since the opening of the first episode (information he’s already sold to the Maronis in exchange for them not killing him), and he leverages that to get Viti to call Zhao.
Viti, however, is dangerous to both of them. He dismisses Penguin pretty thoroughly (which gets a cell phone shoved in his mouth in anger by the Penguin), and he also wants nothing to do with Sofia, having followed through on Luca’s suggestion last week that she go to Italy by actually buying her a plane ticket. (Cristin Milioti plays it beautifully: “Aw, did you print this out yourself?”) However, he can’t afford for Luca to know about the affair, as the nicest possible response from Luca will be a bullet in his brain, so he plays ball for now. But this will come to a head in some way…
Meantime, Vic is presented with a difficult choice. After being homeless and reduced to scavenging cars for parts, he’s now in a thousand-dollar-a-week job with a place to stay and everything. But then he and Graciela finally touch base for, apparently, the first time since the flood. She’s going away to California to start over, since her family’s dead and her school is destroyed. She wants Vic to come with her.
The problem is that Vic doesn’t think he’s free to go. Penguin, after all “hired” him at gunpoint. The conflict rages in Vic all episode, and comes to a head when they’re field-testing Bliss at his club. Vic is the bag man for the women who are selling the drug in the club, and at one point the sound system plays some explosions and Vic has a massive PTSD flashback. (Kudos to director Craig Zobel, who has the spilled vials of Bliss rattling on the dance floor visually resonate with the pebbles on the roof vibrating from the explosions in Vic’s flashback.)
It’s only when Penguin sees the text messages from Graciela asking why he isn’t at the bus station yet that Vic realizes the truth: he could have left any time. Penguin initially did virtually kidnap him in order to help dispose of Alberto’s body, but not after that. He was trying to give Vic the better life that his father never strove for. Penguin pulls out a gun and points it at Vic’s head, and asks if this is what being with Penguin felt like. And then he lets Vic go.
Vic makes it all the way to the bus depot, but finds that he can’t get on the bus with Graciela. He can’t run away from the opportunity that has been presented to him. While Graciela is more to him than “a piece of ass,” as Penguin dismissively says, going with her means leaving his home, even if it’s not much of a home these days.
And there’s that thousand a week. “Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!”
When he returns to the club, he finds that Sofia and Penguin’s heart-to-heart has been interrupted by Nadia Maroni, who is not happy that Penguin has double-crossed them. Sofia is not thrilled at the news that he was in a position to double-cross the Maronis, but Vic drives his car into the melee before anybody can get into any detail on the subject. Vic and Penguin drive off—Penguin specifically saying to leave Sofia behind—and now Penguin’s verbal tap-dancing skills are going to get their biggest workout.
But that’s for another episode, as “Bliss” ends on that flip-the-table moment.
