Mrs. Davis
As a maker of high-class genre television, Damon Lindelof has created one stone-cold masterpiece, one immensely watchable but profoundly flawed work, and one absolute turkey. The funny thing is how little consensus there is as to which is which.
From where I’m standing, The Leftovers, the surreal exploration of grief on a global scale created in collaboration with Tom Perrotta, is an all-time top-15 show, full stop. Lost is a sexy, spooky, Zeitgeist-dominating work of science fantasy, partially undone by its conclusion’s goofy dorm-room spirituality. And Watchmen is a misbegotten exploitation of the graphic novel, with its crackerjack cast, score, and commitment to genuinely bizarre imagery negated by Lindelof’s almost childlike insistence on punishing all the bad guys and turning cops into an anti-racist vanguard, a concept far more outlandish than a floating naked blue guy who can teleport to Mars.
I’m happy to report that compared to all three of its predecessors, Mrs. Davis is shaping up to be a very minor work. No, really, I mean that as a compliment! It’s just a fun story about a roguish nun with a grudge against stage magicians who gets recruited to find the Holy Grail to shut down the kindly artificial-intelligence algorithm that has conquered humanity. You know, the usual!
Beginning with its Sam Raimi–level gory opening sequence, which features a female Knight Templar who kills an enemy soldier by leaping through the air and impaling him through the skull with the sword already sticking through her body to protect the secret of the Grail, Mrs. Davis is firmly in that everything-and-the-kitchen-sink mode of image- and moment-making. The difference, based on the first two episodes at any rate (Peacock dropped the first four today), is that it’s not really about anything else.
Sure, there’s some religious stuff sprinkled in there — very lightly, considering the main character’s profession — and there are the standard streaming-TV-drama concerns about the evils of the algorithm. But if you came for the simple pleasures of watching Betty Gilpin ride a motorcycle in a nun’s habit while bad guys try to catch her with a giant butterfly net or else they’ll blow up her beloved white horse with a suicide-bomber vest without wanting to think too deeply about any of it, then my friend, you’ve come to the right place.
Gilpin stars as Sister Simone, a nun who lives in a happy and supportive convent in the middle of the great southwestern nowhere. When she’s not making jam with her sisters to sell at a farmers’ market and supporting the convent, she works for … well, it’s unclear exactly who she works for, but it appears to be a secret society dedicated to exposing the criminal misdeeds of magicians and illusionists, operating out of a felafel joint. Simone’s contact there is her ex- (or possibly still?) husband Jay (Andy McQueen); their boss is unseen and vaguely threatening; her boss at the convent, the Mother Superior (Margo Martindale), is surprisingly understanding about the whole situation.
One of the big tricks the show pulls near the start to get you in the what-the-fuck mindset Lindelof and co-creator Tara Hernandez (a veteran of the Big Bang Theory universe) want to cultivate is showing us a whole anti-magician mission by Simone: She rides up on horseback from the middle of nowhere in full nun regalia to expose the fact that a gory car crash involving an unfaithful husband and his decapitated would-be one-night stand is all a shakedown by a trio of stage magicians. The sequence is so disorienting, Simone’s behavior so initially inexplicable, that when you finally get the explanation for it all, it’s like scratching an itch on the small of your back.
Simone’s grudge against magicians is easy to explain: She was raised by a pair of them, Monty (David Arquette) and Celeste (Elizabeth Marvel), who used her as a ringer to help dupe the audience of their act. Their bitterness towards one another nearly gets young Simone, then called Lizzie (played by Stella Grace Fitzgerald), killed when she accidentally triggers a crossbow booby trap set up by Celeste, the brains of the operation, to keep Monty away from her latest magic-trick designs. It’s intimated that Monty died due to a work-related accident, too, though we haven’t yet seen how that went down.
Ah, but there’s another factor at play here, both allegedly in Monty’s death and in Simone’s isolation from the world. At some point between 2013 (when a sailor played by Ben Chaplin got shipwrecked) and 2023 (when he gets rescued), a seemingly benevolent, seemingly omnipotent algorithm calling itself Mrs. Davis — her personality is much like that of a sweet, nurturing kindergarten teacher, hence the moniker — came out of nowhere and transformed society. Depending on who you believe, either she eliminated famine and war by granting everyone who interacts with her their fondest wish, or she merely fooled everyone into thinking she did away with famine and war because they were too busy going on little quests she sends them on in hopes of earning digital wings as a reward — total global gamification, in other words.
Anyway, Simone wants nothing to do with Mrs. Davis, or Her, or It, as she insists on calling the algorithm, as she blames it directly for her father’s death. Living in the convent is a convenient shield from the algo’s far-reaching influence.
But that shield soon shatters. For reasons that soon become apparent, Mrs. Davis is fixated on Simone, one of the few people left on Earth who refuses to interact with her. The algorithm pings Simone’s picture to the entire population of the American West in an attempt to force her to make contact. When Mrs. Davis uses her pawns to get the convent shut down, Simone is given little choice but to comply.
Eventually, anyway. It turns out that in addition to her anti-magic group, there are other secret societies at work here: a group of “Sprocketsâ€/Big Lebowski–esque Hollywood Germans who want to know where “it†is — Simone has no idea what they’re talking about — and another group, led by her childhood friend Wiley (Jake McDorman) determined to take Mrs. Davis down by any means necessary.
The gist is this: According to Wiley and his teammate, the preposterously Australian JQ (Chris Diamantopoulos), Mrs. Davis has “Chosen One’d†Simone. This is a procedure by which people are given a quest full of clichés (“Algorithms love clichés,†JQ says) that they and they alone can fulfill to save the world. It’s been done to tons of people tons of times, apparently. In Simone’s case, it means dodging the Hollywood Germans and finding the Holy Grail, or as JQ describes it, “the most overused MacGuffin ever.â€
By the time the second hour wraps up, we’ve got a whole lot of quest overlap. Mrs. Davis, you see, is the next target Simone has been assigned to take out by the anti-magic outfit. In order to accomplish this, Simone agrees to go on Mrs. Davis’s quest on the condition that Mrs. Davis shut herself down permanently after it’s completed. This would also fulfill the needs of Wiley’s anti–Mrs. Davis group … or would, if it weren’t for the fact that they were collaborating with the Hollywood Germans the whole time and may all be a part of Mrs. Davis’s “force†— a term of art magicians use to describe the way they make their marks’ choices for them while tricking the marks into believing they’ve chosen for themselves. It’s all designed to be maximally disorienting, and hey, it works.
I’m not sure the same can be said for Mrs. Davis as a whole. The zaniness of it all is fun, if you’re into that, or if you’re into Lindelof’s brand of it. Gilpin is one of the most magnetic presences the small screen has seen in the past decade. The whole secret-society element plays almost like a loving satire of Lindelof’s own work on Watchmen; JQ’s speech in a glitchy audiovisual chamber, with words projected over his face to partially mask his appearance, feels very much like a comic inversion of Looking Glass’s interrogation of a suspect in his weird little triggering-imagery pod.
But — and maybe this is just Hernandez’s background in Sheldon’s World coming through — the dialogue. Ugh, the dialogue. Calling it “Whedonesque†is a shorthand that comes so readily to mind that I’m instinctively suspicious it’s reductive in some way, but I’m sorry: Responding to someone telling you they need you to find the Holy Grail by saying “The what now?†made me cringe so hard my teeth started to hurt. From Wiley asking Simone if she thought a dangerous motorcycle jump he made to help them escape the Germans was “cool†to her making fun of his hideout’s goofy acronym, there’s a constant drumbeat of quippy “so that happenedâ€â€“style dialogue that undercuts any sense of real emotional or physical stakes.
Perhaps more importantly, given the admittedly minor-feeling nature of the project, it puts the show’s inherent strangeness in sneer quotes. Instead of just being a story where weird, outlandish shit happens and you just roll with it — a story very much like Kill Bill, referenced frequently by everything from the spaghetti-western themes in composer Jeff Russo’s score to the physical presence of a statuesque blonde ass-kicker in a cool primary-color outfit riding a motorcycle on a quest to take down the figure she blames for all her problems — it becomes a story about stories in which weird, outlandish shit happens, constantly commenting wryly on this fact as things unfold. It gets to the point where when you come across something that’s really funny (an abandoned processing plant for hippopotamus meat) or dreamlike (a field full of pianos as far as the eye can see), you’re waiting for someone to oh-so-knowingly crack wise about how silly it is and ruin the moment.
I wish Mrs. Davis had the courage to just be the thing, not be a thing about being the thing. That’s a quest I’d be happy to see Sister Simone complete.