Mrs. Davis Episode 104 Recap “Beautiful Things That Come with Madness”
Or Why Being Married to Jesus is Complicated
Jay asks Simone to put the Grail quest on pause and sends her on a side mission to Rome. Wiley’s kidnapping by a mysterious priest exposes an even larger conspiracy. By the end of the episode, a reality-shifting perspective is introduced and we are left asking ourselves “What the…”
Are you Saving Yourself for Marriage?
The episode begins with Lizzie (before becoming a nun) hooking up with Jesus (you read that right). We basically get the backstory as to how Lizzie became Sister Simone. The show takes the relationship between Simone and Jesus quite literally. We’ve discovered in the previous episode that, for Lizzie, her encounter with Jesus was love at first sight, and the show explores what that relationship would look like if Jesus were actually alive. Betty Gilpin, Andy McQueen (who plays Jay/Jesus), and the creators of the show, recently talked about the way they approached this relationship in a Hollywood Reporter story:
Gilpin says she had questions about how she and McQueen should approach the onscreen romance. “When I first talked to Damon and Tara about Jesus being my boyfriend, I was thinking way too metaphysical about it. I was like, ‘Oh, it’s like dating an orb, or, she’s in love with the ocean,'” she says. “And they were like: No, she’s in love with a guy named Jay. This is her boyfriend. It’s no different than if she were in love with a guy she met at work, he just happens to be Jesus.” So, Gilpin and McQueen approached the relationship as an authentic one. “I realized that the more personal and real and intimate that Andy McQueen and I made their relationship, the more relatable or palatable maybe it is.
This might sound like a stretch, and even blasphemous to a lot of Christians, but we have famous examples of nuns who have expressed their love for Jesus in terms that walk (and sometimes cross) the very thin line between spiritual and carnal. The most famous example that comes to mind is that of the 16th-century Spanish nun and mystic Santa Teresa de Ávila (I know, as a Spaniard, I am biased), who wrote famous poems expressing her love for God using language similar to that of secular love poems, filled with anguish and passion. She was also prone to mystical visions of God, which she often described in terms of a tension between agony and pleasure… see for yourself:
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it
She also wrote another poem (“Vivo sin vivir en mi/I live without living in myself”) in which her expression of love is so passionate that she finds herself in an in-between space that it is impossible to inhabit (and, at the same time, the only place she wants to be):
I live without living in myself / and in such a way do I hope/ that I die because I do not die.
I live now outside of myself / for I die of love / because I live in the Lord / who claimed me for himself / when I gave him my hear / I put in it this sign: / I die because I do not die.
This divine prison of love / with which I live / has made God my captive, / and my heart free / and to see God as my prisoner / causes in me such a passion / that I die because I do not die.
And if that is not enough evidence as to how far the relationship between a nun and God can go, nuns are literally (ok, symbolically) married to God, and they wear a ring to prove it. Below, you can see a fairly recent profession of vows by a novice nun that perfectly mimics a wedding (with her father walking her down the aisle, while she wears a wedding dress. She is going to be married to Jesus.
The show does make a pretty bold choice by being so explicit in its representation of the love between Simone and Jay but it is not without historical precedent. The show is only making explicit (and having fun with it) what has been historically implicit. The scene in episode 3 when Simone tells Wiley that she is “praying” is pretty funny because it becomes clear really quickly what she really means by “praying.”
And the Holy Spirit
In the next scene, we are back to the present timeline (2023), with Simone going to the hospital after the Excalibattle competition looking for Mathilde LaFleur, the woman connected to “apron man,” who will lead Simone to the Holy Grail. In the previous episode, Simone thought this woman was Clara, the last person to hold the Grail, but we found out that she is not. Before Simone gets to talk to Mathilde, she is stopped by the group of mysterious women dressed in business suits that she saw the night before “birthing” the grail in a bizarre ceremony. They ask her what she is doing and stop her from talking to Mathilde (I guess we will have to wait to know who she is and what her role in this whole story is). As I said in my previous post, this group looks to me like some modern version of the Knights of the Round Table but, in following with the inversion of gender expectations in the show, here the knights are women who, instead of armor, wear business suits (the uniform of modern knights?). I guess we’ll find out soon.
Simone then gets led by a pigeon (the Holy Spirit!) to go see Jesus in the metaphysical café (Lindelof did something very similar in The Leftovers S1 Ep103 which also involves a pigeon/Holy Spirit guiding one of the main characters). Jay asks Simone to take a pause on her quest for the Grail and do a little unusual side mission for him. She needs to go to Rome, and ask at one specific bakery for a cake (it will be revealed to be a king’s cake) that she needs to bring… to the Pope!.... in Rome!
As a Spaniard, this was quite funny to watch because this cake is typical in Spain and it is eaten on January 6th to celebrate the Three Wise Men bringing presents to Jesus (this is also the day Spanish children receive presents). A traditional King’s Cake hides a baby Jesus, and the one who gets Jesus when the cake is distributed also gets to be crowned King for the day (the ‘game’ is usually rigged and the adults make sure one of the little children gets baby Jesus, but don’t tell anyone…). This is also similar to New Orleans’s Kings Cake.
As a Spaniard, this part of the episode is also a little annoying because it is clearly not filmed in Rome but in my hometown of Barcelona. I was happy to see my hometown (I miss Barcelona a lot), but it was also very distracting. I guess not all shows can have that Succession budget! The main scenes are filmed in front of Santa Maria del Mar, my favorite church in Barcelona (yes, I prefer it to Sagrada Familia!). But I am digressing… This quest gets complicated (I won’t get into all the details here), and Mrs. Davis helps Simone complete the task, although she does not give the cake to the Pope and decides to eat it herself in an act of defiance to her husband/Jesus due to jealousy. She eats it with such fury that, in fact, she chokes on the little plastic baby Jesus inside the cake. She seems to act that way because Simone realizes that Jesus has sent other women who also have a “special” relationship with him on the same mission before he sent her, and Simone is now jealous. I guess if you are going to take the love/carnal relationship between Simone and Jesus seriously, Simone also needs to acknowledge that there are other nuns in the world and that she is, in fact, in a polyamorous relationship. I know it sounds weird (that’s the nature of this show!), but I think it is setting up a crisis in the already complicated love triangle between Lizzie/Simone, Jay, and Wiley.
Wiley, the Pope’s Doppelgänger, and the Divine-like Nature of Mrs. Davis
As part of the episode, we also see that, after winning the Excalibattle, Wiley has been taken prisoner and brought to a dungeon underneath the Vatican where he also meets… the Pope’s dopplegänger. There are serious The Man in the Iron Mask movie here, but it is revealed that the Pope was tempted by Mrs. Davis (which in Italy is named ‘Madonna’). As the imprisoned Pope says to Wiley, “Why not? She is always there, and not just for the Pope, for all of us.” There is something temptingly democratic about Mrs. Davis, as a god-like figure accessible to all. God operates in mysterious ways, Mrs. Davis is a text or a call away. That temptation might have caused the institution (or some rogue priests like Hans Ziegler?) to replace him with a dopplegänger. I mean, if the Pope doesn’t believe in God anymore, what’s the point of keeping him, right?
We also learn that the priest who kidnapped Wiley, Hans Ziegler, is also searching for the Holy Grail and seems fixated on Wiley’s sneakers, to the point that he tells him “I will free you as soon as you tell me who gave you those shoes.” What’s the deal with those sneakers? Why are they so important? Wiley is also not pretty non-plussed about the whole situation. He thinks is all part of the algorithm scheme to create some sort of fake quest. And he might be onto something. What’s up with all the meta references, stereotypes, and clichés, it’s almost like the whole world is a world created by the algorithm, created from references from the real world, mixed with references from literature, art, films, tv shows, etc. It’s almost like for the algorithm ALL information is just data, but the algorithm cannot make distinctions between real data and fictional data, King Arthur and Indiana Jones are as real as Pope Francis. It echoes the piano image from the previous episode: to find a piano Mrs. Davis finds ALL the pianos.
In the meantime, JQ and the rest of the Resistance/Fight Club plan a mission to rescue Wiley, but they end up at a different location in France where JQ finds a storage room filled with the sneakers that Mrs. Davis gave to Simone to give to Wiley. Again, what’s up with the sneakers!!!! Also, this crew is fun to watch because they are so over-the-top dumb that they are kind of harmless and sweet.
Wiley and the imprisoned Pope manage to knock out Priest Ziegler and escape from the dungeon. The rightful Pope is recognized again.
Is Simone Merlin? What’s Up with the Sneakers? What is real? What is True?
In the final scene, Wiley wakes up Simone, who is in the hospital after almost choking to death after eating the King’s cake. Wiley calls her Merlin (is she Merlin?), and tells her they are in the Vatican. He and the Pope are buddies now, and they show Simone a tape that becomes a huge cliffhanger. What we see if the beginning of the first episode, the scene in France in the 14th century with the female Templars protecting the Holy Grail… we find out that the girl who is left to take care of the Grail is Clara, but we also realize that the whole thing is… a commercial… for the sneakers that Wiley is wearing. The ad ends and then, in the same tape, the actress who everyone thinks is Clara (I know it is getting very confusing) talks to the camera addressing Father Hans Ziegler and threatens him with releasing the video with the ad and also letting people know what he has done with the sneakers… and then she shows the camera the Holy Grail…
So what is with that ad? Is it all fiction, a simulation? What is real? What is true? What do you think? The episode ends with Simone yelling “WHAT THE …”
Notes:
Jonny Sun wrote this episode. I love his book Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too: A Book and it is great to see how his sensibilities translate into this show.
There is something very strange as to how reality and fiction seem to mix here (JQ mentions that “Bourne” is a legend as if he were a real person and not the character of a film.
Every time Simone says the word “mother” to Mrs. Davis, “it” goes into a 1042 (not sure what that code means). Some theories on Reddit mention that this could be because the mother wrote the algorithm and every time Simone says mother the algorithm thinks it might be refereeing to her actual mother. We’ll see…