“Would you two prefer to keep on wildly theorizing, or may I continue on with the story?†I get the impression this question, asked by Dr. Schrödinger of his visitors Lizzie and Wiley, has been on Mrs. Davis co-creator Damon Lindelof’s mind for a long time.
On the one hand, wild theorizing has kept him in business. Large portions of the fanbases of Watchmen, The Leftovers, and especially Lost spent week after week frantically guessing, even passionately arguing, what would happen next. From water coolers to internet forums to social media to speculative articles on, well, websites like this one, theorizing generates buzz and maintains interest.
At any rate, Mrs. Davis is a wildly theorizing kind of show. Lindelof and his co-creator and showrunner Tara Hernandez have, in this respect at least, truly committed to the bit. From episode to episode, from storyline to storyline, from scene to scene, occasionally from line to line, the show is a constant deluge of “everything you thought you knew was wrong,†much more so even than Lost.
But it’s also much funnier in how it does this than Lost was. On that show, the mysteries were serious business. On Mrs. Davis, by contrast, the whole thing is one big metatextual tap dance atop the fourth wall. This isn’t a show that simply has big twists and turns, nor even a show about having big twists and turns — it’s a show about how its big twists and turns are inherently ridiculous. Look no further than this episode’s central conceit: As Dr. Schrödinger recounts the saga of his long-lost daughter Clara’s struggle to win the affection of her mother, Mathilde, by destroying the only thing she cares about, the Holy Grail, Wiley and Lizzie continuously interrupt to spout off new theories and congratulate themselves for when those theories pan out, regardless of how many times they had to revise previous theories to reach the right answer.
Look no further than how Wiley pats himself on the back for “knowing†Schrödinger is Clara’s father — even though he’d already “known†that Father Ziegler, the Grail cult acolyte turned rogue priest, was her father. Hey, he got there eventually, right? And if he hadn’t happened to actually bother saying he’d gotten there before Schroödinger revealed the truth, well, that’s just because there’s no Twitter on a desert island.
My point is this: Can you see the inclusion of that line as the writers having their cake and eating it too? A way to deliberately engineer a story about which one can hardly help but wildly theorize, then jokingly chastise viewers for doing so. Yeah. Can you also see it as self-aware and at least somewhat funny, like the whole rest of the show? Also, yeah. As one-liners that sum up a whole project go, you could do a lot worse.
The fact that the line is spoken by one of the few actors in this thing who’s been given enough resources in the script to come across like a real person rather than a character in a story doesn’t hurt either. Particularly when he’s out of his wild-man-of-the-woods wig and facial hair and presented as, you know, a handsome bookish English science professor, Ben Chaplin is convincingly normal, personable, likeable, maybe even relatable. This is more than you can say for a fake cowboy leading a secret society of bros dedicated to destroying the world’s most powerful algorithm or a Jesus-fucking nun whose formative trauma involves getting shot by a crossbow as part of a feud between her stage-magician parents and who now has four or five reasons to hunt down and either save or destroy the Holy Grail.
Okay, so secret societies and the Holy Grail still factor into his basic deal. But at heart, he’s a researcher whose colleagues bust his chops because of the whole “Schrödinger’s cat†thing, who meets an adult daughter he didn’t know he’d had with a woman he loved who spurned him, and who goes along with her scheme to destroy the Grail “whatever it takes†in part out of intellectual curiosity and in part, eventually, because he simply likes spending time with his kid. I kind of like this guy.
This is more than can be said for Mathilde (Katja Herbers), Clara’s nightmarish mother and the woman who reluctantly initiates her into the Sisters of the Coin, the secret society (yep) devoted to the protection, preservation, and — this is important — publicizing of the Grail. A remote figure at the best of times, she becomes a downright monster while directing her daughter in that epic British Knights commercial shown on the secret videotape in the last episode.
It turns out that while there’s a bit of an art-imitating-life quality to it, what with the role of the Grail and all, it was all just a commercial. (Introducing your series with a bloody fight sequence you later reveal to be smoke and mirrors is a bold choice and not one I’d necessarily have made.) But it was made with a single purpose: airing during the Super Bowl in order to fulfill the mystical condition that the Grail must be shown to no less than one percent of the world’s population every year lest disaster strike.
Fed up with her mother’s emotional brutality — including a bogus claim that she’s dying, made to coax a better lead performance out of Clara — the daughter swaps out the Grail for a bogus one made by a vengeful Ziegler, who also wants to get back at Mathilde for getting treated like dirt for years. She whisks the real one away to Schödinger, whose identity and location she discovered via a cache of love letters he’d sent to her mom, and the rest is history. Said history ends when she breaks one of the Grail’s few real rules and drinks from it, causing her head to explode in the middle of an outdoor taco joint. To paraphrase what a wise man once said under similar circumstances, she chose … poorly.
But so did the two other main characters in this story, as best I can tell, and to a comical, suspension-of-disbelief-threatening level. Take Mathilde, for instance. The big joke is that after all the time, effort, and money spent on her big British Knights Holy Grail commercial — most notably forcing Hans/Ziegler to spend years becoming a priest and infiltrating the Vatican in order to embezzle its money to fund the commercial and find one of its secret European land holdings as a location to film it — she never even got the green light from British Knights first. Never got anything in writing, never had a face-to-face, never even bothered talking to more than a single person at the company, who turned out to be an intern. She just did the whole thing on spec after talking to some kid working for college credit or whatever. It’s like something Rose Nylund would do if she’d been entrusted with an artifact from the Indiana Jones series.
Schrödinger’s story makes a little more sense when you come right down to it. He makes a big deal of how Clara pitches drinking from the Grail as a last-ditch possibility for destroying it. He doesn’t want her to, he tries to beat her in Rock/Paper/Scissors for it, but he loses, she drinks, she dies. Boo hoo.
However! First of all, you’d have to be a literal moron not to realize Clara is lying when she tells him she is 100 percent for sure going to throw Rock, causing him to throw Paper, which she, of course, beats by throwing Scissors instead.
Second, Schrödinger tells a whole story about how a mouse drank from the Grail in his office and died, then his cat ate the mouse and appears to have become immortal, leading him to believe that incorporating the body of a Grail victim into your own grants you immunity to its lethal powers, leading him to ensure Clara’s kidney gets donated, leading to Lizzie and Wiley receiving chunks of that kidney, leading to them potentially being indestructible means through which the Grail can be destroyed.
There’s just one problem — actually, no, there are several problems. How does he know the mouse drank from the Grail? How does he know that’s why it died? How does he know his cat at the mouse? How would he know what to test the cat for, or even that it needed testing in the first place? If he suspected drinking from the Grail was lethal, why did he even allow Clara to entertain the idea of drinking from it? If he didn’t know drinking from the Grail was lethal until after her head exploded, why would he have been so gung ho about donating the litter to create people immune to the Grail, since you only need immunity if you believe the Grail is poison in some way? How would “microtoxins,†as he speculates the Grail contains, cause a human being’s head to explode? For that matter, why didn’t the mouse’s head explode at all? Is the whole story bullshit, designed to motivate Lizzie and Wiley to hunt down the whale to whom Schrödinger eventually fed the Grail and reclaim it? Is the whale even real? Is the Grail even real?
The episode makes all this worse for itself by having spent a full hour presenting Lizzie and Wiley as overeager, overtalkative, but intent and astute listeners, constantly poking holes in the story and demanding answers to the many questions it raises. Neither of them thought to question Schrödinger’s story. The easiest answer I can come up with is “He’s lying.†Why couldn’t Lizzie and Wiley come up with that one too? They’re the stars of the story, not me!
All that being said, this is probably the most I’ve enjoyed a Mrs. Davis episode. The shaggy-dog-joke quality of Schrödinger’s long, wild, possibly cap story is breezy and engaging, especially when Ziegler pops up to inject fun supervillain vibes into the thing. Chaplin excels as a father who’s become affectionate despite himself. Herbers makes Mathilde an insufferable piece of shit, which is exactly what she should be. I particularly liked how her failure with the commercial doesn’t slow down her emotional abuse of her daughter one bit; within two minutes of being exposed and humiliated in front of her entire order, she fires Clara for sucking at acting, as if that had been the problem with the commercial, not Mathilde being a complete idiot. This extends to her selection of British Knights, of all brands, as being the footwear of the future, maybe the central joke of the whole storyline.
There’s also a brief interlude with Jesus, who reveals he occasionally gets beaten up by visitors to his celestial felafel restaurant. What’s up with that, I wonder? You guessed it: Time to start wildly theorizing!