Mrs. Davis Episode 101 Recap "Mother of Mercy: The Call of the Horse"
A Quest for the Holy Grail and the Algorithm that Took Over the World
Mrs. Davis Episode 101 Plot: A nun is forced from her quiet life at the convent when an all-powerful artificial intelligence, known as Mrs. Davis, enlists her to complete an epic quest. There are so many pop culture references that your head might explode (as well as a horse and a lot of strawberry jam). Also, the subtitle for this recap was generated by ChatGPT after I fed it the text of the recap…not bad…
Once Upon a Time… the (Women) Knights Templar
The episode begins in France on Friday, October 13th, 1307, on the infamous date that signaled the beginning of the end for the Knights Templar. A few Templars are burned at the stake while a mob gathers around with the camera focusing on a group of women. The next day, a group of soldiers tries to arrest that same group of women for collaborating with the Templars and are asked for the location of the Holy Grail. An interesting twist here is that the group of women is revealed not to assist the Templars but are the REAL Templars. In the ensuing fight, only one of the Templars survives and is instructed by Ermengard, the leader of the group to protect the Grail and take it to “our Sisters across the sea it to the other side of the ocean.” Ermengard seems to refer to Ermengarda of Oluja who joined the Templars in the 12th century and became a central character in the S.J.A. The Knight Templars book series, where Ermengard is a female preceptrix of the Knights Templar). We even get a glimpse of what might be the Grail, but we are not sure if it is the cup she takes or something inside.
The gender reversal as to who the Templars were seems to echo not only Tara Hernandez’s role in the creation of the show but also Damon Lindelof’s efforts to work with a diverse group of creators, something he already did in Watchmen. Here, the creators talk about applying a “female gaze” to the story and to the characters, which includes this gender reversal as well as subverting the expectations of who are the main characters and the role that women (and men) will play in this story.
Here, we also see how the show is trying to fit within popular culture narratives about the Templars and the Holy Grail as recently portrayed by Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) as well as in its adaptation. There is also a funny hint to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
In terms of the actual history of the Knights Templar, this is what Sharan Newman, one of the most important scholars on the history of the Templars has to say about the reality of the demise of the Templars on that famous date in her book The Real History Behind the Templars (2007):
I have often heard that our superstition about Friday the Thirteenth being an unlucky day stems from the arrest of the Templars. It’s very difficult to trace the origin of a folk belief. It does seem that thirteen was an unlucky number long before the Templars, and there are traditions that Friday is an unlucky day, perhaps stemming from Friday being the day of Jesus’ crucifixion. I haven’t been able to discover when the two beliefs were joined. It was certainly unlucky for […] the Templars. In fact, [the Templar’s] world was shattered in the predawn hours of the next morning, Friday, October 13, when the Temple in Paris was invaded by agents of the king. All the Templars that could be found in the kingdom of France were, all at once, in the same moment, seized and locked up in different prisons, after an order and decree of the king. […] In France, we know that fifty-six Templars were burned at the stake. Many more died in prison between 1307 and 1312, as a result of torture, deprivation, and, possibly, outright murder. The remaining French Templars were either sent to monasteries or prisons and swallowed up, as far as history is concerned.
Cast Away…
In the next scene, we meet a castaway, an obvious and fun reference to the Tom Hanks movie… they don’t even try to disguise it. After figuring out a way to send a DIY rescue flare, the castaway is finally rescued after ten years of being lost. The scene helps the series set up the world of the show also in 2023 and in a world that is more or less like ours although with a big important difference our castawy (standing for us, the viewer) is going to find out: during the 10 years the castaway has been lost, Mrs. Davis, a powerful algorithm, has taken over the world and eliminated any other form of social media. A woman on the ship that rescued the castaway then tells him how Mrs. Davis has changed the world:
“There is no famine or war, all who want a job have one, she has healed and united us and given purpose to the purposeless, the world was broken when you disappeared but the algorithm fixed it. […] She know you, she knows all of us, she know what we want, she knows what we need and all you have to do is ask.”
Back to the Future in Reno
We finally meet our main character, Sister Simone, in the next scene, as she helps a poor schmuck who is getting scammed by a group of magicians in quite a complex scheme. The scene is a clear homage to Back to the Future, when Marty McFly crashes the Delorian as he goes back in time to 1955. A couple of things become clear in this scene: Sister Simone, played by Betty Gilpin, is our magnificent heroine (she arrives riding a white horse like a female Clint Eastwood, and she has an ax to grind against magicians. When the victim of the scam realizes the people who claim to be cops are actually con artists, Sister Simone says “worse, they are magicians.” We will find more about this particular problem with magicians later, but I think it speaks to Sister Simone’s obsession with debunking magic as a fake and dangerous substitute for “the real thing” which to her seems to be faith, religion, a real mystery in the world, as sacredness that magicians fake for a profit (although as we will see in upcoming episodes, there is more to it).
Here, we also find the first time Sister Simone makes the point that Mrs. Davis is not a “she” but an “it.” Naming her and, in particular, giving her such an innocent-sounding name (which Tara Hernandez explained as being the name of her second-grade teacher… more on that later) can create the illusion of an A.I. having a personality, or even make it feel human, and that illusion is actually quite problematic, as the disturbing conversation between the NYTimes technology reporter Kevin Voose and ChatGPT a few weeks ago made clear. In fact, if you ask ChatGPT why does not have a personal name this is what it will answer:
Here we also meet Jay, who works at a diner and provides Sister Simone with her magician’s targets. Technically, there is a boss in a back room who provides the names, but we do not get to see this secret “boss,” but I am pretty sure we will learn more about this mysterious figure later in the show. We also learn that Mrs. Davis is somewhat responsible for the death of Sister Simone’s father.
Nuns Just Wanna Have Some Fun
With Dolly Parton’s Heaven is Just a Prayer Away song in the background, we get to meet Sister Simone’s congregation, a fun group of nuns who have a great time eating together, playing baseball, making strawberry jam, and celebrating Sister Simone’s birthday. The nunnery, Our Lady of the Immaculate Valley, is somewhere in Nevada. We also meet the Mother Superior, played by Margo Martindale (who also worked with Lindelof in The Leftovers). When presented with her birthday cake and asked to make a wish, Sister Simone declares that she doesn’t want to wish for anything since all she wants is right there. The show keeps making these references to the nature of faith, belief, magic, and religion, which are a staple of Lindelof’s work. Sister Simone, for being a nun, a devoted member of a religious order, seems to have a hard time with anything that she considers false belief, be something as apparently innocent as magic, or as disturbing as an all-powerful A.I. This scene also establishes a pretty standard Joseph Campbell monomyth structure: we have a reluctant hero who has everything she needs and will have to be forced to leave home in order to begin her journey (in this case, her quest).
The day after her birthday, while Sister Simone and a group of nuns are getting ready to leave the nunnery to sell strawberry jam at the local market, a mysterious visitor (a former nun?) arrives on a helicopter and picks up the Mother Superior. The nuns, on their way to the market, are tricked by Mrs. Davis, who uses a complex setup involving shaved ice to get to speak to Sister Simone, who refuses to do so. The scene involves a crazy explosion of the strawberry jam jars all over the nuns. As I said, this show really goes for broke.
You Are All Fired!
When they return to the nunnery, the Mother Superior gathers all of the sisters and, in another pop culture wink (this time to Trump’s The Apprentice), she fires them all (with the briefcase and all) and lets them know that she has sold the nunnery. Sister Simone realizes that Mrs. Davis has also gotten to the Mother Superior. Slowly but surely, Mrs. Davis is using her (its!) power to force Sister Simone to talk to her (it!). Before she leaves the nunnery, Sister Simone visits her horse (the one she was riding early on in the episode). As we will see, the horse will play a very important role in forcing Sister Simone into starting her hero journey.
The Nihilist Club and Max Mad Fury Road
After all the nuns leave the nunnery, Sister Simone goes to an all-you-can-eat buffet and after another attempt by Mrs. Davis to contact her, this time using two creepy-looking twins, she is abducted by a group of leather-wearing Germans that are clearly inspired by the nihilists in the Big Lebowski, accent and all (watching this scene reminded me of the funny exchange they have with Lebowski “Ve believes in nossing, Lebowski. Nossing. And tomorrow ve come back and ve cut off your chanson,” but I am digressing.
The mysterious German group tells Sister Simone that “they are looking for the same thing she [Mrs. Davis] is.” I think it is safe to assume that they are also looking for the Grail. In order to get her to help them find what they want, they show her a live feed of her horse, which they have captured and rigged it with explosives.
She is able to escape and receives the help of her old boyfriend Wiley, a mixture of Wiley Coyote, Evel Knievel, and Tyler Durden from Fight Club (the Brad Pitt character). The following scene is another bonkers and hilarious motorcycle chase with obvious Mad Max: Fury Road vibes with some shades of Terminator, but veering towards the ridiculous, with the German crew trying to chase them in sidecar motorcycles. The scene includes a stunty moment where Wiley and Sister Simone jump through a sprinkled pink donut as part of the chase… see below…
As I said, this show is going for broke in terms of jokes, gags, and references. The playful nature of the pop culture references is also so obvious that this is what Lindelof himself has to say
Tara and I have a common vernacular, but I definitely come much more from a sci-fi and fantasy background," Lindelof says. "And Tara is familiar with all of that so we can talk about the Terminator movies or Fight Club but her level of influence is much more akin to whether we can make fun of that stuff so there's a sense of ironic love and appreciation filtered through the show. I love Fight Club so I wasn't really willing to kick it in the shins, but in talking to Tara, that energy is actually really important. So how about we throw a little bit of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade into the blender with Fast Five or Fast Six and John Wick? It's both pretentious and popcorn, and both of us like both of those things."
Screwball Comedy in the H.A.T.C.H.
Wiley and Sister Simone are able to lose the Germans in the Nevada desert and hide for a moment in a hatch, a clear self-referential joke to the famous hatch in Lost, although in this case, this is a H.A.T.C.H. hidden access tactical camouflage hideout (as a big fan of Lost this joke really got me).
What will become increasingly clear here is that Wiley is not the hero and Sister Simone is not the woman in need of rescue. We quickly will see that Wiley, with all his Fight Club hyper-masculinity, mustache included, and Sister Simone, a nun who lives in a nunnery making strawberry jam are books that cannot be judged by their covers. The show will quickly subvert those surface expectations in cheeky but fun ways. As the creators of the show have discussed, what makes Wiley interesting, as well as his relationship with Sister Simone, is that
Wiley is constructed as someone who believes that he is the hero of the series, and then struggles with the ultimate revelation that he is actually the love interest. "It required an actor who got it because that's not a meta construct, it requires a certain degree of simultaneous courage and humility, but most importantly, a sense of humor," says Lindelof. The series employs a female gaze not only when bringing Wiley to life, but with all of the male characters. "We look at men in our show differently," Jones explains. "There's a toxic masculinity with these characters but Tara and I had a blast riffing on new ways to play in that heavily masculine space. Everyone on the team worked to sort of defang these guys and imbue them with this unassuming sweetness.
Nun Wick
In another funny moment, Wiley takes the detonator from Simone (she was able to take it with her when she escaped from the Germans) and tells her that there is no way that the detonator is real. To prove his point, he pushes the button… only to then realized that he had killed the horse. And here we have a very John Wick moment, although instead of a dog is a horse. Simone goes back to the diner to meet Jay to get another magician target to quell her fury, but she finds out that the only target left for her is Mrs. Davis a dangerous all-knowing, and all-powerful enemy. It is clear to Simone that she is going to have to meet Mrs. Davis…
Meeting the Oracle and Beginning the Quest
Sister Simone goes to a local school (the school she actually went to, and where she was told early in the episode that she should go if she decides to meet with Mrs. Davis). In what looks like a kindergarten classroom, Simone meets a teacher, who asks her to sit on a rug on the floor (“the kids do their best listening during circle time”) and then puts on airpod and tells Simone that she is going to act as a proxy between Mrs. Davis and her. The whole scene has very Matrix vibes (when Neo meets the oracle). In the scene, Mrs. Davis (through the school teacher) tells her that she needs to do something for her and, in exchange she can ask for anything she wants (with the exception of resurrecting the dead, she can offer her pretty much anything she wants). What Mrs. Davis asks Simone is that she needs her to find the Holy Grail. Simone accepts only with one condition, if she finds it, Mrs. Davis will turn herself (itself!) off.
And we are off to the races… Sister Simone’s sacred quest, her hero's journey, and the rest of the series has only begun.
Episode 101: "Mother of Mercy: The Call of the Horse"
Writers: Tara Hernandez & Damon Lindelof
Director: Owen Harris
Fantastic article with great insight. I feel like I understand Mrs. Davis's references to religion so much better now. And the homages as well. Through your elucidation, you've lifted me from my plight of confusion toward clarity.