But take heed of Joy’s words to Simone, who tracks her down thanks to that repetitive glitch we kept hearing when she’d talk to the app via proxy, culminating in that big serenade of “Electric Avenue.” (That’s where Joy lives.) Mrs. Davis isn’t a she, Joy says, but an it. Algorithms aren’t a form of life; they’re code. They don’t have subconsciouses; they have subroutines. They don’t have mothers; they have coders. It’s not just that the quest Mrs. Davis assigned to Simone is dumb; it’s that all algorithms are “super dumb.”

This is the kind of energy we need in 2023, as our tech and business overlords try to convince us that AI is learning, growing, and experiencing organisms capable of replacing virtually all human endeavors. They’re just moronic computer programs that plagiarize Wikipedia and make pictures of fake people with 17 fingers. That’s it! Algorithms are not inevitable, and they don’t have intelligence, not any more than Pong was an Olympic table-tennis champion.

The episode’s problem — the whole show’s problem, in fact — is that its valuable insights kind of begin and end there.

I reviewed the season (series?) finale of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

Hold on, I’m getting a message from a hidden resistance cell dedicated to thwarting the onslaught of AI. A top-secret organization called the WGA? Anyway, they say that Jason Ning and Jonny Sun wrote this episode of Mrs. Davis and that without union screenwriters, everything any of us have ever read, written, or posted about television shows like Mrs. Davis would not be possible. Huh, sounds like those writers should be paid and treated fairly. Something to consider!

I reviewed last week’s episode of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

It can be said without fear of contradiction that this is the least zany episode of Mrs. Davis yet. Except for the part when David Arquette goes undercover as a nun. Or the scene where Jesus permits Simone to fuck her ex-boyfriend. Or the deal when a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged unlocks a secret chamber with a Star Wars trash compactor–style security mechanism. Or the reveal that there’s a fully accurate replica of the office with the secret chamber and trash compactor on a soundstage in Altadena. Or the lengthy animatic depicting how Simone’s dad rigged a corpse to be dissolved in acid and ooze a wave of viscera all over the set of a local morning show in Reno. Or the way good sex warps you to Jesus’ restaurant right in the middle of it — no matter how half- or fully naked you are at the time.

But yeah, other than that? Pretty straightforward stuff!

I reviewed today’s episode of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

“Would you two prefer to keep on wildly theorizing, or may I continue on with the story?” I get the impression this question, asked by Dr. Schrödinger of his visitors Lizzie and Wiley, has been on Mrs. Davis co-creator Damon Lindelof’s mind for a long time.

On the one hand, wild theorizing has kept him in business. Large portions of the fanbases of Watchmen,The Leftovers, and especially Lost spent week after week frantically guessing, even passionately arguing, what would happen next. From water coolers to internet forums to social media to speculative articles on, well, websites like this one, theorizing generates buzz and maintains interest.

At any rate, Mrs. Davis is a wildly theorizing kind of show. Lindelof and his co-creator and showrunner Tara Hernandez have, in this respect at least, truly committed to the bit. From episode to episode, from storyline to storyline, from scene to scene, occasionally from line to line, the show is a constant deluge of “everything you thought you knew was wrong,” much more so even than Lost.

But it’s also much funnier in how it does this than Lost was. On that show, the mysteries were serious business. On Mrs. Davis, by contrast, the whole thing is one big metatextual tap dance atop the fourth wall. This isn’t a show that simply has big twists and turns, nor even a show about having big twists and turns — it’s a show about how its big twists and turns are inherently ridiculous.

I reviewed episode five of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

As a final side note, and speaking as a very lapsed Catholic, I’m also grateful for how this enables the show to sidestep a nagging question: Why become a nun, of all things? Without getting into the weeds about it, the Catholic Church’s actions and beliefs are real things that have had real pernicious effects in the real world. Yes, it’s fun to watch a beautiful woman in a nun’s habit ride motorcycles and kick ass, but it’s less fun when you consider what the church she belongs to believes in and/or has covered up. Lindelof already played fast and loose with a problematic institution, policing in the United States, to the detriment of Watchmen; I’m happy to see him and his colleagues write their way out of doing something similar this time around by making Simone’s commitment romantic rather than ideological in nature.

I reviewed the third and fourth episodes of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

I wish Mrs. Davis had the courage to just be the thing, not be a thing about being the thing.

I’m covering Mrs. Davis, the new series co-created by Damon Lindelof, for Vulture, starting with my review of the first two episodes.