When executive producer Matt Reeves first spoke to showrunner Lauren LeFranc about making “The Penguin,” he encouraged her to take the same approach she took with “The Batman”: Dive deep into the Batman comics for inspiration , but with the freedom to create something new.

“Matt never wanted to make a straight-up movie adaptation of a comic book,” says LeFranc. “It’s fantastic that those stories exist, but I would like to create new stories. I wanted to create a new canon.”

There’s no better example of what LeFranc did with this freedom than how she flipped the script on the character of Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), who, in Episode 4’s shocking conclusion, gasses the Falcone family at the mafia family’s palatial estate. It’s not just an amazing ending to the episode; it’s a surprising revelation of the character – a side of Sofia that LeFranc kept hidden from the audience by tapping into the lore of the comics and the conventions of the crime genre.

“Sofia is drawn and depicted very differently; she really is kind of a daddy’s girl in the comics,” LeFranc said. “Women, historically, in comics and crime dramas don’t really have much depth and you don’t get to spend a lot of time with them.”

As we discover in the episode 4 flashback, Sofia was a daddy’s girl, so to speak, as we see a level of trust and admiration between Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong) and his daughter. It’s a relationship that the mafia boss quickly destroys the moment Sofia asks one too many questions and has his daughter committed to Arkham Asylum. He uses his considerable power to get those closest to the family, including Oz (Colin Farrell), aka the Penguin, to testify that she is insane. Only her brother Alberto (Michael Zegen) is by her side.

“When we first meet Sofia in the first few episodes, there’s a lot of anger inside her because she’s lived in Arkham for ten years, but she’s trying to keep everything under control,” LeFranc said. “We also discussed this with hair, makeup and clothing. She puts back on the clothes Sofia might have been wearing before she was placed in Arkham. Despite herself, she tries to become part of this patriarchal world of the mafia again.’

When constructing the Sofia Arch for “The Penguin,” LeFranc was inspired by Rosemary Kennedy, the “forgotten” or “hidden” sister of President John F. Kennedy. The eldest Kennedy daughter was considered difficult by her father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who had her lobotomized when she was 23 years old. The procedure left her permanently incapacitated, unable to speak, and institutionalized for more than 60 years.

“Rosemary was placed in a mental institution and given a lobotomy, and that’s when her story ended. Her story was never told, which I always found fascinating, tragic and terrible,” LeFranc said. “In the history of mental hospitals, usually someone would say a woman is ‘hysterical,’ and we don’t really know what that means, and then they would lock her up. So I asked Matt early on, ‘I would like Sofia to come out of Arkham State Hospital, and he was on board, which I’m so grateful for, because Matt has the ability to say, absolutely not, and instead he leaned against it. ”

LeFranc liked to play on the idea of ​​how easy it was to say Sofia was crazy. When we meet Sofia’s character in the first two episodes, it’s clear that she’s struggling to keep her swirling emotions at bay after living in the disturbing facility. LeFranc, who deliberately switched between points of view in the early episodes, makes the viewer question the character’s mental health.

“In the beginning it was important for me to play Sofia as a kind of cipher from Oz’s perspective, just like you’ve seen in many crime dramas. Unfortunately, you can never really get into those women and who they really are,” LeFranc said. “The fact that at first you might think Sofia is crazy, and everyone around her thinks she’s crazy, I want the audience to think that too, and then realize, oh, they’re wrong.”

Another aspect of this false impression is that in the Batman comics, Sofia Falcone is the mysterious cop killer The Hangman. It’s yet another label LeFranc wanted the audience to attach to, planting this idea early in Episode 4 before flipping the script.

“Sofia is The Hangman in the comics, so I took that as inspiration and thought, ‘Well, what if she was innocent?’” said LeFranc, who changed it from a cop killer to someone who supposedly killed sex workers. “I found Women Against Violence against Women interesting, especially when we find out that her father is the one who blames his own murders on his daughter.”

Forcing Sofia to search her memory in flashbacks in episode 4, discovering that not only was her father The Hangman, but that he killed her mother is a surprising discovery for the character.

“It’s just horrible and cruel, Sofia lost her mother and father at that moment,” LeFranc said. ‘That’s why she and Alberto are so close. They’ve always had each other.”

This is what makes the discovery of Oz’s betrayal at the end of episode 3 such a double slap in the face for Sofia. One night, Sofia looked past Oz’s role in tying her to Arkham, only to discover that he was not only tricked again, but also killed Alberto, the only family member who stood by her.

Once again, LeFranc carefully guided the audience’s expectations into assuming the story was going in a different direction. Episode 3 aims to explore how Oz and Sofia would form a dynamic duo as they drive through Gotham and lay the foundation for their new drug venture.

“Oz and Sofia are two sides of the same coin. They could actually be a very good team because they have similar motivations,” LeFranc said. “Episode 3 was so much fun. I was going to call it our “Moonlighting” episode in the writers’ room because I thought, this needs to have some banter and a little tension between them; Maybe they have a connection.”

One of the reasons why Sofia finds it more manageable in episode 3 to look past Oz’s past transgressions is because he treats her with respect, something that is sorely lacking as Sofia tries to slip back into her father’s world after she left Arkham.

“She eats a lot of shit; these men treat her so terribly and with such contempt that it seems like this woman can take a lot. And after the revelation about Oz, after she put her trust in him again, I think she feels really stupid and angry and frustrated,” LeFranc said. ‘That the door was opened a little bit for Oz to find out what he had done to her brother. She’s had it. She’s ready. It’s like, ‘Why do I have to play by the game that was created, the institution of the crowd. Why should I play by those rules? It wasn’t built for someone like me.’ And so she decides to burn everything down, gas her entire family, and she does it with a level of joy that feels very freeing, suddenly unlocking the woman she has become as a result of Arkham.

Sofia reveals her scars and no longer feels the need to suppress the well-deserved anger she has been building up inside for ten years. She has an almost Gene Kelly-like ease in her movements and a palpable joy at the end of the episode, as she wipes out her father’s world, which she now sees with absolute clarity.

“It’s so easy to say she’s insane, but what if she’s not?” said LeFranc of her grand approach to mapping Sofia’s arc. “I wanted Sofia to take that story back in a way that Rosemary Kennedy was never afforded. I wanted Sofia to tell her own story on our show.”

Episode 4 of “The Penguin” is available on HBO and Max. Episode 5 airs on Sunday, October 20.