Happy belated Mother’s Day! This (final?) episode of Mrs. Davis is all about moms: coming to terms with them and them coming to terms with their offspring. And, fittingly, the show gives the final word on its title “character†to “her†very own “mother.â€
Those sneer quotes are important! In terms of worthwhile messages, important themes, and what have you, the show basically hands things over to Joy (Ashley Romans), the brilliant programmer who concocted the all-powerful algorithm in the first place. For starters, in the kind of emperor-has-no-clothes moment that’s this show’s stock in trade (remember how the big opening-battle sequence turned out to be a sneaker commercial?), we learn that Mrs. Davis was created as a wildly overdelivering app for the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant chain. I don’t know if I laughed, but I definitely snorted.
The secret origin explains some of the app’s idiosyncrasies since much of the original Buffalo Wild Wings–centric code still existed inside the algorithm when Joy uploaded it to Opensource and unleashed it on the world. The wings everyone’s so desperate to earn from Mrs. Davis? Yeah, that’s a warped echo of the app’s original purpose, which was to get you to want and buy chicken wings. The expiration dates you receive when you make a deal with Mrs. D to get your wings directly instead of earning them? Coupons, my friend. The quest to find and destroy the Holy Grail? That’s Mrs. D’s bass-ackwards attempt to reconcile with the fact that she could never achieve “100 percent customer satisfaction,†a.k.a. Buffalo Wild Wings’ “Holy Grail,†according to its training manual.
But take heed of Joy’s words to Simone, who tracks her down thanks to that repetitive glitch we kept hearing when she’d talk to the app via proxy, culminating in that big serenade of “Electric Avenue.†(That’s where Joy lives.) Mrs. Davis isn’t a she, Joy says, but an it. Algorithms aren’t a form of life; they’re code. They don’t have subconsciouses; they have subroutines. They don’t have mothers; they have coders. It’s not just that the quest Mrs. Davis assigned to Simone is dumb; it’s that all algorithms are “super dumb.â€
This is the kind of energy we need in 2023, as our tech and business overlords try to convince us that AI is learning, growing, and experiencing organisms capable of replacing virtually all human endeavors. They’re just moronic computer programs that plagiarize Wikipedia and make pictures of fake people with 17 fingers. That’s it! Algorithms are not inevitable, and they don’t have intelligence, not any more than Pong was an Olympic table-tennis champion.
The episode’s problem — the whole show’s problem, in fact — is that its valuable insights kind of begin and end there. The stuff about religious faith, for example, much touted in this episode by Simone and the returning Mother Superior? It’s kind of meaningless in a world where you can occasionally visit Jesus Christ himself in his falafel restaurant, isn’t it? “Seeing is believing,†Simone’s mother Celeste says at one point, and on this show, at least, that’s correct.
Speaking of Celeste, her fraught relationship with her daughter? I’m fully aware of the fact that this is a science-fiction show with a healthy dose of meta-commentary about genre storytelling in general, so I know pretty much everything we see is operating on the level of metaphor. In that light, sure, Celeste and Simone’s relationship is a stand-in for every relationship between an emotionally distant, controlling, disapproving parent and their damaged, rebellious child.
But as it does time and time again, Mrs. Davis bogs it all down with so many kooky-crazy details — the mom is a genius inventor of stage magic who nearly kills her daughter by booby-trapping her workroom with a crossbow intended to kill her showboating husband; the rebellious daughter is a nun in a sexual relationship with Jesus who embarks on a quest to find and destroy the Holy Grail in order to turn off the world’s most powerful algorithm — that it’s hard to lick through the metaphorical Tootsie Roll pop to get at the chewy, chocolatey, “wow, this really applies to me and my life†goodness within.
Actor Elizabeth Marvel does her best to mine the unpleasant Celeste for emotional gold, but that lode is simply buried too deep, beneath too many layers of wackiness and, more importantly, beneath the fact that she never displays a single redeeming quality until the very end. Not even Betty Gilpin, acting her heart out in her tearful scenes with her mom, can rescue the material. But, hey, if you’re looking for an unintentional illustration of the limits of “actually it’s about trauma†storytelling, you’ve got one.
And issues with world-building abound; by the time we reach the end, they’re impossible to ignore. Take Wiley, who submits himself for his “expiration†only to discover it’s a ruse designed to make people let go of their fears and embrace their life’s purpose. We’ve been told that virtually every human being on the planet uses Mrs. Davis; are you telling me no one has leaked this secret or discovered it or anything?
After Mrs. Davis goes offline — and, by the way, kudos to the show for going through with it; I was worried for a minute there Simone would learn to stop worrying and love the AI — the chaos that erupts is … like what you might see if Comcast went down. A guy gets in a fender bender, another guy yells, a mom neglects to push her baby on the swings, some people look a bit sad, and the guy Mrs. Davis assigned to manually power the fake windmill at the donut shop where Simone and Celeste meet quits. That’s it. When you’ve created what is essentially God and then kill God after convincing the planet to depend upon Her, you’re most likely looking at a borderline apocalyptic reaction. Mrs. Davis seems to have decided it was too close to the closing credits to bother with all that.
By the way, I still don’t understand how Dr. Schrödinger knew the dead mouse on his desk had drank from the Grail, or why he’d let his own daughter drink from it if he did know, or how he came up with the notion that she had internalized some immunity to the Grail’s power despite her head exploding. It’s like the show got so used to hand-waving its own ridiculousness away with all that meta bullshit that, when it was most important to get something straight, it simply didn’t bother.
Speaking of self-aware wink-wink nonsense, the show ends with Simone and Wiley literally riding into the sunset on a white horse. It’s cute, but cute can’t get you very far. If you’re so uncomfortable with happy endings that you have to make yours a pseudo-parody of happy endings, maybe don’t do a happy ending at all.
I’ll say this for Mrs. Davis, though: This show is timely as shit. Not only are its main characters fighting against the growing influence of AI, but they’re also doing so with the kind of lunacy only a roomful of writers can concoct. (Obviously, I’m iffy on its ironic approach to genre storytelling, but boy, oh boy, did they come up with insanely unpredictably creative ways to be ironic!) So credit where due to co-creators Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof, who wrote this episode based on a story by Nadra Widatalla and Chikira Bennett. If I could ask Mrs. Davis to grant me one wish, it would be that the union writers of the WGA get treated and paid fairly by corporations who’d have no crazy dreams to sell us without crazy human beings dreaming them up first.