Mrs. Davis: How [SPOILER] Completes The Show's Saddest Trinity
Contains spoilers for "Mrs. Davis" Episode 7, "Great Gatsby: 2001: A Space Odyssey."
For a show about a nun, Peacock's "Mrs. Davis" isn't overtly literal or proselytizing when it comes to Christianity. Rather, faith is regarded in the series as a strange, surreal thing. For one, Simone (Betty Gilpin) gets hot and heavy with Jay/Jesus (Andy McQueen), who moonlights as a fry cook at an inter-celestial falafel restaurant. He answers to the boss man in the back room, hidden behind a door marked "Employees Only."
At least it seems like the big man upstairs is behind the hidden door. "With the references to the boss, of course, we believed people were going to assume that once we make the Jay reveal of being Jesus Christ that the boss clearly is going to be his dad," series co-creator Tara Hernandez told Syfy. "We're conditioned to believe in patriarchy."
In Episode 7, it's revealed that the boss is actually Jay's mom — the Virgin Mary — undermining the traditional, male-centric idea of the holy trinity. "This is a show about mother and child dynamics," Hernandez continued. In keeping with that dynamic, the Virgin Mary became part of an alternate trinity that also included Celeste (Elizabeth Marvel) and Mathilde (Katja Herbers).
Mrs. Davis created a trinity of tragic maternal figures
The synopsis for Episode 7 of "Mrs. Davis" is the sort of bonkers word salad viewers have come to expect from the eccentric series. In the penultimate episode, Simone wears the Lazarus Suit to hunt for the Holy Grail inside a giant whale. There, she encounters her mother-in-law, the Virgin Mary, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo.
Mary admits to Simone that she is the architect of the Holy Grail, which is Jesus' skull preserved with pitch and amber, fashioned into a bowl. "I created this cursed object out of selfishness," she explains, which has condemned Jay to a life trapped in the otherworldly restaurant. "Customers can come and go, and my son is stuck here in the chasm between life and death. He knows no peace, and that is my fault."
For co-creators Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof, Mary was "yet another mother on the show who felt responsible for her child's pain," as Hernandez put it to Syfy. Indeed, throughout "Mrs. Davis," mommy issues abound. One of the main sources of tension in "Mrs. Davis" is the relationship between Celeste and Simone, owing in part to a childhood crossbow incident. When Simone's father, Monty (David Arquette), disappears following a vat of acid trick, Celeste is convinced that Simone is covering for him.
Meanwhile, the parallel mother-daughter relationship between Mathilde and Clara (Mathilde Ollivier) is similarly plagued by trust issues and estrangement. It's poignant that Celeste and Mathilde finally come face to face in the same episode in which Mary appears. Mary completes the guilty, tortured mother trifecta, resulting in a trinity that wholly suits the themes of "Mrs. Davis." As Hernandez put it, "It felt so right to the story we were telling."