The Dizzying ‘Mrs. Davis’ Refuses to Settle for Simple Weirdness
Mrs. Davis is a case of “too much” being a good thing—until it isn’t. Damon Lindelof’s latest (co-created by Tara Hernandez) follows a nun battling an omnipotent A.I. while searching for the Holy Grail, and even that summary only skims the surface of its myriad interests and influences, among which one can also count Lindelof’s Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen. The show is a million different things at once, which is initially exhilarating. Alas, that heady buzz doesn’t last, dissipated by a story where each fantasticality winds up being a little bit less fantastic than the last.
Describing Mrs. Davis is a challenge by design, since Lindelof and Hernandez have constructed their eight-episode Peacock affair (April 20) as a kitchen-sink sci-fi smorgasbord that self-consciously revels in clichés. The story begins in 1307 Paris with a cadre of badass women slaying those who seek the Grail, a prologue that’ll be revisited, and wildly re-contextualized, in ensuing installments. But things truly take place in an alternate present that’s been wholly transformed by an omnipotent artificial intelligence app named “Mrs. Davis,” which guides and controls humanity (via Bluetooth earpieces) for its ostensible betterment. Mrs. Davis has bestowed mankind with a reality supposedly free of war, famine, unemployment, and divisions. She’s a benevolent techno-mother (or, to put it in Orwellian terms, Big Sister) that’s fixed our broken world.
(Minor spoilers follow.)