Who is Dr Julian Rush in ‘The Penguin’ and What Does He Want With Sofia Falcone?
Spoilers for episode four of ‘The Penguin’ below
As Sofia Falcone's true character is slowly revealed – alongside her highly traumatic past, courtesy of a father who’s unlikely to ever win Dad Of The Year – focus has turned to another man who is connected to her in a strange way.
Episode four reveals how their Oz and Sofia's connection began, and where his loyalties have always laid – with himself, mainly – but in an earlier episode, Sofia (the excellent Cristin Miloti) is shown having some red-light EMDR therapy, which triggers flashbacks to her time in Arkham State Hospital. She has a breakdown, but is comforted, pretty inappropriately, by her therapist, Dr Julian Rush (Theo Rossi), who tells her “you are safe.”
Is she, though? Who is Julian Rush and how does he fit into Sofia’s story?
The backstory
After the unconventional therapy session in episode two, we next hear of Julian in episode four, when Sofia calls him after the run-in with the Maronis, where Oz threw her under the bus. The fact that Julian is the first person she calls is telling: she sees him as the only person she can trust and turn to.
And so begins the full, horrifying flashback of how Sofia ended up in Arkham. In a nutshell, a reporter comes to her suggesting that her dad, or his cronies, have killed six women in Gotham, all by strangling but made to look like they hung themselves – just like how Sofia found her dead mother. When she begins to talk to her father, Carmine, about this, he sets her up for the murders. She’s locked up, without trial, and left to rot in Arkham for 10 years.
While she’s in the institution, there are two doctors who oversee a succession of terrifying treatments: Dr Ventris, the chief psychiatrist, who she quickly realises is on her dad’s payroll, and Dr Rush, who she can’t quite work out. It’s Dr Rush who comes to talk to her when she’s brutally attacked by another inmate. She tells him that her father framed her for murder, but he assumes she’s just being paranoid. “I’m here to help you,” he says, “I have no other agenda than that.” Oh, really?
She is forced to have electroconvulsive therapy, time and time again, but as she protests her innocence for the hundredth time, Dr Rush asks Dr Ventris: “What if she’s telling the truth?”, which implies that he has simply been following orders so far, and not questioning the torture treatments. Sofia clutches his hand at one point; does Julian believe her, and will he help her?
When she gets the news that her court case will never in fact make it to court – Dr Ventris wrote a report to the judge that she was unfit to stand trial – Sofia is understandably devastated. When she heads back into the hospital dining room, Julian appears to be an ally, as he tells her he didn’t know Ventris was writing the report and that he tried to stop him. However, when Sofia’s cellmate neighbour Magpie starts babbling on about being best friends, Sofia becomes paranoid that her dad is paying Magpie to spy on her – and, maybe he is? – and she beats her to death. It’s finally happened: Sofia is a killer.
It’s telling that when we jump back to the present time in episode four, we find Sofia in Julian’s house. Firstly – great, she’s not dead! But then there’s a weird energy between the two when he asks her if she wants to get cleaned up.
When Sofia asks him outright why he’s helping her, he says it’s to assuage the guilt of what happened to her in Arkham. We learn that he quit his job in Arkham and “abandoned her”.
“I left because I had to,” he says, but Sofia reads it differently: that he misses how it was in Arkham, the control he had, treating her and “rehabilitating” her.
He reveals that he helped get Sofia out of Arkham with Alberto, but she adds that she knew the way he used to look at her, and how he, like all the other older men in her life, was content to watch her be unravelled and destroyed. It looks like they’re going to kiss, then she tells him that she’s off to make a fresh start – just not in quite the way he suggests.
It appears that Sofia has been using Julian’s guilt over her hospital abuse to manipulate him into helping her escape – but is Julian also part of the wider Falcone family plot to get rid of her?
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