What happens in episode four, ‘Cent’anni’?
WARNING: Major spoilers for episode four ahead.
Picking up from episode three, Nadia Maroni tells Sofia the truth about Oz’s hand in Alberto’s death, leaving her devastated. Hurt badly when Victor comes crashing through to save Oz, she calls her Julian Rush before passing out.
In a flashback to life before Arkham, Sofia is seen as a philanthropist for a female mental health foundation, with Oz as her driver. She’s stopped by a journalist at an event, who corners her about a number of deaths by hanging of women at businesses run by her father.
Cutting her off, Sofia remembers finding her mother’s body, who died the same way.
At dinner with her brother Alberto and father Carmine, Alberto leaves early in order to go out. Carmine praises Sofia and proposes she take over the family business when he steps down, which she happily accepts, but things get awkward when she brings up her mother, and he shuts the conversation down.
The next day, Sofia tries to air her worries about her dad to Alberto, who dismisses her, saying they have a good life.
Still uncertain, she meets the reporter, Summer Gleeson, who shows her photos of the dead women and notes that, while they were ruled as suicides, the women have defensive wounds and bruises on their neck resembling choking rather than rope.
At a dinner party the next night, Sofia is called into her father’s office, where he confronts her about talking to Summer, revealing he’s now being looked into for murder. She tries to say she doesn’t believe it, but notes she saw scratches on his hands the night her mother died. Instead of denying killing Sofia’s mother, he tells her she’s confused and sick, and needs to leave before making a scene.
As Oz drives her home, he and Sofia get into an argument, with Sofia knowing Oz told Carmine about her meeting with Summer, but they’re pulled over by police, where she’s arrested and charged for all the murders - including Summer’s.
Labelled as The Hangman by the media, her lawyer is helpless after her father, uncle Luca, Johnny Vittis and his wife Carla gave affidavits claiming she was mentally unwell. Alberto supports her, as blindsided as she is, but is unwilling to believe their father was responsible.
Immediately sent to Arkham Asylum, she is subjected to a brutal medical before meeting psychiatrist Dr Ventriss and Dr Julian Rush, who tell her she’ll be isolated for six months.
Locked in her cell, a woman called Magpie introduces herself, and when they meet the next day in the canteen, Sofia notices Magpie get docile after taking a blood-like red substance she refers to as “candy”.
Minutes later, an unchained prisoner grabs and viciously beats her in front of the other inmates. Dr Rush visits, but Sofia realises he doesn’t believe her innocence.
The next day, she’s taken into a room, given a fork, and joined by the woman who attacked her, now in chains. Sofia realises Ventriss is working with her father and refuses, but the woman takes the fork and kills herself with it anyway.
The psychiatrists use the death to begin brutal rounds of electro-convulsive therapy on Sofia. While Ventriss seems more than willing to do it, Rush begins to second guess her guilt.
After six months, Alberto is finally allowed to visit her, and tells her Ventriss has ruled her unfit to stand trial, but urges her not to give up and that he’ll find a way out for her.
Rush tries to speak to her, insisting he didn’t know Ventriss’s plan, but she’s completely blank. When Magpie talks to her, Sofia finally snaps, smashing her ‘friend’s’ head in.
Back in the present day, Sofia is being looked after by Rush in his apartment after he came and got her from the Maroni confrontation. She admits she feels like an idiot for trusting Oz.
It’s revealed Rush quit Arkham because ‘he had to’, and that he helped Alberto get her out. She starts prodding him for missing her being under his control, and says she no longer trusts men and is done with being told she’s sick. She vows to have a fresh start and leaves.
That evening, Sofia heads to a Falcone family meal, though it’s clear she’s not welcome. Making a speech, she calls out the people for making the statements that landed her in Arkham for a decade and failing to help her, before toasting to a new life.
That night, Sofia takes her cousin Carla’s daughter to the greenhouse for cake. Promising to look after the little girl, they spend the night there. The next morning Sofia returns to the mansion to find nearly everyone dead, having leaked gas throughout the house in the night.
Waking up Johnny Vitti at gunpoint, who avoided the massacre by sleeping with his window open, she tells them they need to talk.
The History of Magpie
Magpie, real name Margaret Pye, is another character with a long-chequered history in the DC Universe.
While she only has a fleeting appearance in The Penguin, and already locked up in Arkham, in the DC Comic Book series she is someone with a high-flying job at the Gotham City Museum of Antiquities.
With a natural love of shiny objects, Magpie works at the museum in order to be near beloved valuables, but grows to resent her position because she can’t own them.
This makes her turn to a life of crime, creating a gang to create forgeries so she could have the real items for herself.
Her new side hustle saw her come into conflict with Batman and Superman who tried to stop her, and it resulted in her being sent to Arkham.
Arkham Asylum
Whether it be comic book, TV show or movies, to supervillains a stay in Arkham Asylum is considered a fate worse than death.
A psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, the worst of the worst are sent to Arkham in order to be “rehabilitated” – though often the doctors are more corrupt than the patients, and their tactics rarely work.
The government allows Arkham to institutionalise those in their care for as long as necessary, and is often used to “observe” those awaiting trial to see if they are fit for it.
Based in a rural location in Gotham, Arkham is difficult to break out of, even for the most connected of gangsters. But it’s not impossible, and in some cases uprisings have seen the Asylum taken over in a coup.
It has been destroyed multiple times in attempts to break out, but has always been rebuilt bigger and stronger. So much so, other states at times transfer their super-villain inmates to Arkham as they have the facilities to incarcerate and control them.
Other famous patients of Arkham have included The Joker, The Riddler, Scarecrow and Mr Freeze.