Mrs. Davis is basically a metaseries about the relationship between mothers and their children. Jesus had trouble leaving the world because Mary preserved him in the Holy Grail; Simone spent a life being hurt by her mother’s anger, as did Clara with Matilde; and finally, even Mrs. Davis was seeking to know what her mother thought of her this entire time. Whoever wrote the script was on a total trip through the mother-child relationship the entire time, so much so that they based a metaverse on it.
Spoilers Alert
How Does It All Start?
Should we start the story with Simone, Elizabeth, or Mrs. Davis? But Jesus preceded them all, so let us start with him. Centuries ago, when Jesus had died, and Mary heard that the Romans were coming for him, she used his blood to create the Holy Grail, thereby bringing him to life and, consequently, trapping him on Earth forever. We are sharing the interpretation of the series Mrs. Davis, so if you have a different view or another fact to add, we wouldn’t disagree or argue.
The Holy Grail has since been taken care of by two women whose husbands died while fighting over it. They named themselves “Sisters of the Coin,” and the organization has grown through the years and is tasked with the responsibility of taking care of the grail. A part of that responsibility is making sure that 1% of the world’s population sees the grail every year. Since the population of the world is far greater than what it was a few centuries ago, the task has grown more arduous for the organization. But one ambitious woman, Matilde, comes up with a plan. She wants to make a commercial for sneakers, and the grail will be a central part of the advertisement. Clara, her daughter, whom Matilde seems to hate for no particular reason, volunteers to be a part of the ad, much to Matilde’s chagrin, who wants to run the entire show.
Seeing her mother’s hostility towards her, Clara decides to help Father Hans Zeigler with his mission to destroy the grail so that Matilde will start paying attention to them instead of being consumed by her career. Therefore, Clara swaps the grail for a decoy. Matilde, who doesn’t know this, cuts all ties with Clara when the sneaker brand rejects her advertisement, and she ends up blaming her daughter for it. Regardless, Clara meets her estranged father, Arthur Schrodinger, an esteemed professor, and sets out on a mission to destroy the grail. During those many experiments over the ten years they spent together, they discovered that if one drinks directly from the bowl, they die, but if someone has a part of that particular dead person in them, they are immune to the bowl. With this knowledge, Clara decides to drink from the bowl and break one of the rules against its maintenance, and see what happens. What happens is that Clara’s head blows up, but her liver is transplanted into two children, Elizabeth and Wiley. Arthur understands that these two children could possibly destroy the grail, but he doesn’t want to hinder their lives; therefore, he feeds the bowl to a whale, literally, but gets stranded on an island for ten years when that very whale attacks his ship. This is the start of the story.
How Was Mrs. Davis Created?
Mrs. Davis came into being in 2013, which we assume is around the same time the grail was fed to the whale. A coder named Joy created a self-learning, constantly evolving software that would understand the needs of human beings and help satisfy them. She created this for a fast food chain, “Buffalo Wild Wings.” Of course, it wasn’t picked up by them, so she uploaded it independently into open source after removing all mention of herself or food. She just wanted the software to be used for good, and in a way, that is what happened, except that Mrs. Davis started using it herself. She evolved by herself, as she was programmed to do, and within 10 years, she was running the world. But there were some people who were still resistant to her, and Simone/ Elizabeth was one of them. She had a traumatic childhood where she landed up in the hospital after being shot by a booby trap that her mother had set up to prevent any intruders from finding out about her new invention. Elizabeth’s father, the magician who relied on his wife’s engineering inventions for his career, had goaded Elizabeth into entering that room, and this had been the consequence. As for Wiley, he was super rich but believed that he did not deserve it as he had earned none of it. In fact, when Elizabeth broke up with him because she fell in love with Jesus, Wiley couldn’t believe what was happening and had no choice but to let it go. That was seven years ago.
In the present day, Mrs. Davis is everywhere, and she wants to speak with Elizabeth, who now goes by Simone and is a nun. When Simone doesn’t give Mrs. Davis the time of day, she blows up her convent, finally forcing Simone to listen. Simone is tasked with finding the Holy Grail and destroying it in exchange for one wish. Simone inevitably agrees because her quest since the beginning of the series has been to turn off the AI. The search for the grail takes Simone and Wiley across the world, to Venice, and then to Arthur Schrodinger as they put together the pieces. Finally, they understand that they must get inside the stomach of the whale if they want to find the magic bowl. Therefore, Simone gets the shroud of Lazarus from her mother, Celeste, to protect herself from the acid in the whale’s stomach. Celeste agrees on the condition that Simone tell her the whereabouts of her father. She blames her for conspiring with her father to fake his death and has been angry with her since. Simone is innocent of that, but she figures out where her father is with the help of Mrs. Davis, though she doesn’t tell her mother that. Long story short, they set off on the mission, and Simone finds the grail in the whale’s stomach. When the whale vomits, she is washed ashore, alive and well.
‘Mrs. Davis’ Ending Explained: Is Simone Able To Turn Off Mrs. Davis?
Remember how, at the end of Episode 7, Simone found the people on the beach singing Electric Avenue to her? Simone picks up her clues from that and finds the creator of Mrs. Davis, Joy, who is celebrating her nana’s birthday right now. Simone attributes this to a glitch in the matrix, aka Mrs. Davis, which Joy tells her is called a subroutine and not a subconscious. Joy tells Simone everything about how Mrs. Davis was created and the purpose for it. The reason the program sent Simone on the mission was that a part of its code said that “100% customer satisfaction is their holy grail”. Remember that it was made for a fast-food chain. Apparently, Mrs. Davis misconstrued the superlative words of whichever copywriter wrote that and decided that since 100% customer satisfaction is not possible, it is better to destroy the Holy Grail so that there is nothing to compare it to.
Simone is done with the absurdity of it all and decides to just finish her job. She meets Sister Margaret and tells her that in case Simone dies after drinking from the grail, she wants her to safeguard it and pass it on to the Sisters of the Coin. The second thing is that she must tell her mother where her father is. After handing over the responsibilities, Simone takes a drink of alcohol from the bowl as a last party of sorts, but luckily, Arthur’s theory proves to be right, and Simone survives while the bowl turns to dust. Simone sends the grail dust to Arthur with the message that she did everything it took for the mission to be accomplished. With that out of the way, Simone and Celeste must now resolve their years-long issue and find Monty. It turns out that Monty had been planning to jump out of the piano at his own funeral, symbolizing a showman resurrecting himself. But when Celeste caused a scene at his funeral by saying that he was still alive and that she knew he was around there, he was unable to execute his plan. Monty had never come out of the piano and had died in it. When Celeste discovers this, she is extremely sorry for the way she treated her daughter all those years, but she is unable to express it. However, we can consider the matter between them resolved.
As for Wiley, Mrs. Davis has spared his life. He had always suspected that the entire show of just motivating people to live their best lives only to kill them later did not serve its proper purpose. He was right, and when Mrs. Davis lets him live, he considers it her act of goodwill. Back to Simone: she is granted her wish when she asks for Mrs. Davis to turn off. She has come to see that Mrs. Davis is not all evil, as she has always believed, but Simone wants people to have their free will. Mrs. Davis agrees with Simone and grants her wish by shutting herself down, which throws the world into temporary chaos, but Simone is confident that they will recover from it. At the end of Mrs. Davis, Simone literally rides off into the sunset with Wiley on a white horse, a cliche straight out of a fairy tale yet one that makes so much sense for the story. Just as the episode closes, we see the windmill that Mrs. Davis was responsible for running start turning again.
Final Thoughts
Mrs. Davis is a fascinating show. It is not serious in the least, yet it makes perfect sense when pieced together. We cannot claim that we were engaged throughout the episodes, and maybe the season could have been an episode or two shorter, but we enjoyed the absurdity, nonetheless. It’s been a while since that happened to us. A few of these episodes, especially the one where Simone and Wiley meet Arthur on the island, felt like masterpieces. This feels like the kind of show one would want to revisit a couple of times to make sense of how it was all over the place yet tied together so neatly. We would recommend that you give this a watch, if for nothing else than the fact that it is something refreshingly different in a landscape where every piece of content feels so run-of-the-mill.
