Mrs. Davis Episode 103 Recap: A Baby with Wings, a Sad Boy with Wings, and a Great Helmet
Or the Holy Grail is for Women and Excalibur for Men
In this episode, we learn about Wiley’s past (and his complex relationship with masculinity), why he and Lizzie broke up, and while Simone and Wiley are searching for the Grail in Scotland, Wiley is on his own hero quest trying to win Excalibur (Excalibattle!). Directed by: Alethea Jones. Writers: Alberto Roldán, Damon Lindelof, Tara Hernandez
Wiley or What It Means to be a Real Man
The episode mostly centers on Wiley and his complex relationship with (toxic) masculinity. We learn that years ago, when he was still with Simone (then Lizzie), he was ready to inherit his grandfather’s fortune, 712 million dollars, a fortune that he was going to instantly donate to charity, only keeping for himself $85,000 to buy a cabin in Alaska for Lizzie and him. I am sure we will know more about this mysterious fortune, but the important part is that, just as Wiley was going to bequeath his fortune (I am so proud that I just managed to use the word bequeath) a mysterious cowboy named Bo enters the room and tells him that his life is a sham, and that all that Wiley thought made him the man he is today is, in fact, a lie. Wiley grew up riding horses and competing in rodeos. To this day, he still wears cowboy boots.
Wiley sees himself as the embodiment of the ultimate American male archetype: the cowboy (this show loves myths, stereotypes, clichés) but Bo tells him that his self-perception, his self-worth, all invested in this idea of a rugged man is not true. All the rodeos he won were fixed (Bo gave the bulls tranquilizers so Wiley could ride them). And even the fact that he was able to be on the transplant list to receive a new liver (we find out Wiley and Lizzie share the same liver!) is because Bo caused a rodeo accident that landed him on a hospital. For what we have seen so far in the show, it looks to me that Bo has ulterior motives here, and he is “forcing” Wiley (as in the magic use of the word “force,” when a magician makes someone believe they are making a choice when they are actually not) to put on hold a decision about the fortune by shattering his sense of self-worth and, in particular his sense of manhood. This sends Wiley into a spiral of self-doubt and decides to ride a (in)famous dangerous bull (with the hilarious name of Jezebull) to affirm his masculinity. Lizzie tries to talk him out of it, but it seems that this is when they broke up (more on that at the end of the episode).
If Lindelof’s previous show, Watchmen, used the universe created by Alan Moore and David Gibbons in the famous graphic novel to explore the issue of race in America, his current collaboration with Tara Hernandez seems intended in exploring gender roles. On the surface, the gender roles are comically stereotypical: Simone is a nun, and Wiley some sort of cowboy (hat and all), but the creators use our expectations about gender roles and reverse them. As the creators have said about Wiley himself:
Part of the fun of Wiley is that he's a character who, from the jump, 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. "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." (From Peacock press materials)
Wiley and his Resistance group of men do come out as bros (almost incels), men who struggle with their masculinity (there is no women in their resistance), but they are also sweet, almost harmless. They perform an idea masculinity, a cultural expectation of what it means to be a man, but they never take it as far as to seem misogynistic or threatening. They are Joe Rogan on the surface, but they have the sweetness of the character of Roy Kent in Ted Lasso. In most of the interactions so far between Wiley and Simone, he tries to be assertive and dominant only to be hilariously undermined (dominated) by Simone.
Strangers on a Train
In the next scene, we are back to 2023, and Simone and Wiley are on a train in Scotland following “apron man,” the person who answered the phone number given to Simone by Mrs. Davis as a clue revealing the last person to have the Holy Grail (someone called Clara). This is mostly exposition. We find out that Simone’s mom is also on the train and that she believes Simone’s father is still alive (a constant of the show: what’s real, what’s true, what’s an illusion?). We also find out that they are going to medieval town of Scone, the ancient capital of Scotland, and the coronation site of Scotland’s kings. I guess a quest for the Holy Grail is not enough and now we are adding the whole Arthurian myth, including Excalibur.
The Holy Grail is for Women, Excalibur is for Men
The rest of the episode offers another creative, funny, and weird reimagining of the Excalibur myth. Excalibur, the mythical sword of King Arthur, the sword in the stone that can only be pulled by the rightful king of England. Here we see Lindelof and Hernandez slowly weaving Arthurian mythology (the Holy Grail, Excalibur) into the show. It also plays into the discussion of gender roles in the episode: the Holy Grail is Simone’s quest, Excalibur is Wiley’s. Here, Wiley is not supposed to pull the sword from the stone, but compete in a Renaissance fair-like festival where there is a giant Excalibur sword and the winner is the one who can touch the metal of the giant sword the longest. The call it Excalibattle!. The challenge reminds me of the 1997 documentary Hands in Hard Body.
Wiley seems to see this as a way to redeem himself from his own insecurity as a man. He feels that if he wins this (arguably stupid) contest, he (at least in his mind and in Lizzie’s eyes) will be the one and true king, a real man. But why? Why does he feel so insecure about his masculinity? Well, early in the episode we find out that all his cowboy personality was not the result of his own manhood, but the product of Bo’s making (or that is what Bo wants him to believe). And we also learn that when he tried to restore his faith on his own manhood, he backed down from riding Jezebull in the rodeo from the beginning of the episode. This symbolic challenge, this stupid game, if taken seriously (and he does) will restore his sense of masculinity.
The whole Arthurian mythology brought back fun memories from college. One of my professors, Victoria Cirlot, was a Medieval scholar and an expert on the myth of the grail, and wrote extensively about it. And her father, Juan Eduardo Cirlot, was also a famous medieval scholar who had an impressive collection of swords and wrote a seminal dictionary of symbols. This is all to say that the class on medieval literature I took as an undergraduate finally paid off (25 years later!). I had to look over my notes for the class, long story short, but my dad surprised me a couple of years ago by sending me scans of ALL of my college notebooks, but I am digressing….
The legend of the Grail as we came to know it, can be traced back to the 12th century work Perceval, the Story of the Graal (purists do prefer the word Graal) by Chrétien de Troyes. This is the first work were we find a reference to a quest by the central character, the Knight Perceval, of an object, the Grail, although it still doesn’t have the overtly Christian symbolism that will have later. For that, we have to wait for Robert de Boron’s 13th century trilogy, Joseph d’Arimathie, Merlin, and Perceval. Robert de Boron’s work made the connection between the Grail and the cup used by Jesus during the Last Supper and later by Joseph of Arimathea to collect the blood from Christ’s wounds as he died on the Cross. The idea of the grail probably has older, pre-Christian origins, but it is the Arthurian myth that brings together the notion of a quest for a secret object and folds it into Christian symbolism.
The Arthurian legend, with the Holy Grail, Excalibur, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, seems to represent, by the sho’s own acknowledgement, the ultimate myth of western culture, so pervasive in literature, art, film, pop culture in general, that has become a cliché (“a cliché all day, man” says to Wiley one of the members of the Resistance). But that’s what makes it so powerful, there is something archetypal, hidden deep into our unconscious, that makes these myths powerful. I am not sure if Lindelof and Hernandez are using Carl Gustav Jung’s understanding of symbols, myths, and archetypes, but the show seems to say that if you take these clichés seriously, they have the power to be transformative. The scene almost seems to take the mythology of the grail not from its original literary sources, but from the way it has been portrayed in films such as Indian Jones and the Last Crusade:
In the Meantime… Strange Rituals Take Place…
While Wiley is trying to redeem himself (or his masculinity) by holding onto Excalibur, Simone goes to follow who she thinks is Clara, the last person who, according to Mrs. Davis, has held the Holy Grail. She follows her and a group of women (dressed in business suits… they could be the Knights of the Round Table protecting the Holy Grail, but instead of the armor, they wear business suits?) to a lake where they perform a strange ritual dance and then, using some sort of sacrificial dagger, extract what it looks like the Grail we saw in the first episode from the fake pregnant belly of one of the women. These androgyn figures, women dressed as man, give birth to the Grail. The scene reminds me of some of the rituals described in the fantastic 2012 book by Anna Fedele Looking for Mary Magdalene. The book, is an ethnographic account of alternative pilgrimages to Catholic shrines in contemporary France that are dedicated to Mary Magdalene or house black Madonna statues. Fedele did field research in Italy, Spain, Britain and the United States and she reinterprets Catholic figures, sites, and symbols “according to spiritual theories and practices derived from the transnational Neopagan movement.” In her own words, her book
pays particular attention to the life stories of the pilgrims, the crafted rituals they perform and the spiritual-esoteric literature they draw upon. Among other questions, the book examines how rituals, as for menstruation and menopause, are invented; what effects they have and what they can tell us about rituals in general; why this kind of spirituality is increasingly attractive for Westerners and is related to The Da Vinci Code; and how anthropological literature has influenced the pilgrims. Among these pilgrims spirituality is lived and negotiated in interaction with each other and with their readings. Jungian psychology, Goddess mythology and "indigenous" traditions flow together into a corpus of theories and practices centered upon the worship of divinities such as the Goddess and Mother Earth and the sacralization of the reproductive cycle. The pilgrims' rituals present a critique of the Roman Catholic Church and the medical establishment, as well as of contemporary discourses on gender.
I might be reading too much into it (if this wasn’t already clear from my lengthy recaps!), but it seems to me that Lindelof and Hernandez are working some of these ideas into their interpretation of the Arthurian myth and the Holy Grail.
Love at First Sight. Undeniable. Forever.
At the end of the episode, we find Simone trying to report back her findings to Wiley only to discover that Wiley made a deal sometime ago with Mrs. Davis to get “wings” a way to achieve status in a world dominated by the algorithm, a dealer which he paid a steep price: his own life. In order to get the wings he had to sacrifice his life the the algorithm at an unspecified date. He tells Simone that he did it in order to recover a sense of manhood, of purpose because he had lost it the day he was not able to ride the Jezebull. He felt that she stopped loving him that day because he was a coward.
But Simone tells Wiley that this is not true, that he is not a coward, and that she was the one who saved him from a terrible accident or death by praying for his life that day. That was the day she met Jay/Jesus at the metaphysical café, and it was “love at first sight, undeniable, forever.”
The episode ends with Wiley winning the contest (although he also ends up in an ambulance after he is struck by lightning after cursing Jesus and God for stealing his girlfriend)… only to find out that he is not in a real ambulance and that he is being kidnapped by a mysterious Catholic priest (who we briefly encountered earlier in the episode).
Notes:
Now that we have been introduced to the Arthurian myth, I wonder if we are going to see Merlin
I also wonder who is their religious scholar consultant… I want that job
I am still impressed as to how the show manages to be incredibly silly on the surface, while still discussing issues such as (toxic) masculinity, love, technology, and faith, to name a few
Just started watching Mrs. Davis (have seen 5). Thanks for these great recaps! So much going on with this show! "Manna" Donuts indeed...