Mrs. Davis

My god this is a weird show. Granted, you kind of know you’re in for something a little left of center when you’re dealing with a Damon Lindelof series. Sometimes to awesome effect, like with Lost, The Leftovers and Watchmen. And then, like with Mrs. Davis, to a weirder, less satisfying effect. At times. Honestly, it feels a little like a drunk person wrote this show. Such is the all-over-the-place, repetitive structure of this seemingly ad-libbed show about a magic-busting nun who is literally married to Jesus and is battling a global AI while trying to track down the holy grail. Shit is truly nutz — as if you can’t tell that from my one-sentence description. And while, yes, it’s incredibly uneven, it is also incredibly original and stuffed full of wonderful ideas. And bizarreness. And tons of shrugs while trying to track what the actual fuck is going on.

I’m trying to think of what this series reminded me of, and I keep coming back to novels. Not one in particular, but something between the freewheeling comical spirituality of Tom Robbins and the oddball battle between tech and human nature of a Philip K. Dick book. And perhaps a little of the karmic black comedy of Vonnegut. Not bad company to keep, I suppose. Though to say any of the writing or narrative is as sharp or as penetrating as any of that is giving it way too much credit. There are many cul-de-sacs and dead ends just kind of built into the story. Something from which The Leftovers also suffered, truth be told, though that was a much more sprawling, twenty-eight episode series that underwent a pretty seismic tonal shift after its first season. To find the same issues in an eight-episode, limited series is less forgivable. It feels as though they had so many ideas — most of which are fun, funny or at the very least interesting — that they couldn’t decide which to pursue. So they pursued them all and then just kind of chopped the crap out of things in the edit. Or realized they’d bit off more plot than they could chew and just let stuff drop. For instance, it’s supposed to be Sister Simone’s (Betty Gilpin) mission to debunk “fake” magic and magicians. There’s an incredibly detailed backstory explaining why she’s doing this. We see one funny instance of her pulling off an intricate trick to expose some Vegas magicians and their non-magic magic. It’s actually a really clever scene. But then it just gets forgotten about. This thing that defines her. It’s really a strange decision.

Honestly, I’m not certain what the “A” plot is here. There’s just so much going on. But the underlying narrative tells us that the world has been brought into harmony by this AI called Mrs. Davis. Folks walk around with earpieces in and talk to Mrs. Davis as like a Siri on steroids. The AI’s existence and the transparency it provides in peoples’ lives just makes everything perfect. I guess? But essentially people seem to live to serve the AI, or at least depend on it for any and all decision making. It becomes a literal god to the citizenry as they defer to this all-knowing algorithm. All while Simone (formerly Lizzy Abbott) is married to the actual son of god (whom she visits in what I think is basically an empty falafel restaurant in her head?) and makes a deal with Mrs. Davis that if she, Simone, can find and destroy the Holy Grail, Mrs. Davis will turn itself off. She is bolstered by a band of anti-Mrs. Davis rebels led by an ex-boyfriend, Preston Wiley (Jake McDorman). And, like I said, a ton of stuff happens. Goofy, goofy stuff that at times feels like a drug trip, or something that perhaps AI truly came up with when fed a bunch of random words. Just as a taste, a large part of the narrative revolves around British Knights sneakers. It’s a nod to the whole Holy Grail quest (King Arthur was a British Knight, get it?), but goes so far beyond that, I can’t even describe it. So much so that it comes all the way around to this uncanny thing where you wonder if what’s going on actually happened in actual US history. And not just this alternative universe in which Mrs. Davis obviously takes place. It’s impressive that it had me Googling things to make sure what I lived through in my life did or didn’t really happen. That’s dedication to a bit. Even if that bit is just plain wacky.

Gilpin and McDorman are great. I do find Gilpin’s nun character a little confusing in her motivations sometimes, but that’s a writing thing and not an acting one. It’s weird to see David Arquette after all this time, and it makes me wonder if they had allowed the dude to not be the twitchy dufus he usually played if he could have projected the warmth and sadness he does here and had a better career. I’m just not sure what the audience for this show is, though. Who they thought it might appeal to. There aren’t a lot of folks like me who would put up with the volume and whiplash WTF velocity at which this show operates. There are exploding heads and people going into whales and a portrayal of Jesus (Andy McQueen) that I imagine would also make some peoples’ heads explode. Again, it’s like a grab bag of fun and interesting ideas, a good number of which don’t really seem to connect successfully. Some of which, I think, could have connected better in a book that could give them some air. Some space. But, instead, the eight episodes are just crammed with this mass of brain-numbing zaniness. And really quiet scenes of Simone chatting with her husband, Jesus, in a dimly lit cafe while he makes her some grub. I think? Ultimately, there are a lot of fun ideas here. Too many ideas. Or at least too many to follow, care about and understand fully. I’m curious to see if anyone else on planet Earth watched this show, or if I’m the only nut silly enough to follow Lindelof into insanity.