Recap: Mrs. Davis Episode 7 Goes Into the Belly of the Beast

Call me Ishmael — wait, sorry. Call me your recapper of Episode 7 of Mrs. Davis, because the penultimate installment of the Peacock series pits Simone against a giant whale. And, meanwhile, Wiley comes face to face with his own mortality. Though Episode 7 cuts back and forth between the two plots, it’ll be easier to recap the events if we just go through them one at a time, but Simone and Wiley do indeed start the episode together.

Simone, Wiley, and Shroddinger are in Spain, getting ready to set sail after the sperm whale who ate the Holy Grail — a monstrous cetacean named PC220 who has become violent and destroyed multiple boats since swallowing the Grail. Celeste joins them, as promised, with the Lazarus Shroud in tow. An agent of the Sisters of the Coin slips a tracking device on the boat, but he himself will not get on because PC220’s deadly reputation precedes her.

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That tracking device isn’t the only thing getting slipped on. Simone brings Wiley over to a bench under the guise of informing him about the tracking device Hans implanted on his shoe, but it’s really so that she can covertly handcuff him to the bench. She says there’s no way that Wiley wouldn’t have been the one to put on the Shroud, just like he had to try to ride Jezebull or prove himself at Excalibattle. “I can’t abide by you working out your sh-t on my quest,” Simone says, rejecting WIley’s argument that she’s only doing this because she can’t trust herself with him on the boat. Not the case, she informs him before leaving him there. Actually, Jay said that sex with Wiley was okay.

Jake McDorman as Wiley in Mrs. Davis Season 1 Episode 7 -- "Great Gatsby 2001: A Space Odyssey" Photo: Tina Thorpe/PEACOCK

Wiley, having been ditched by Simone, is trying (and failing) to extricate himself from his predicament. As he’s destroying the tracker Hans put in his shoe, a fancy motorcade rolls up. It’s the prime minister of Spain, although she’s not here as the leader of the world’s 30th-largest country. No, she’s here on behalf of Mrs. Davis (who is known as Mama in Spain.) The AI, using the PM as a proxy, tells Wiley that she knows all about the Resistance. She says that the data center they’ve been looking for? Well, it’s right under their nose, as she’s infiltrated their HQ’s server system and that’s where her “brain” is, so to speak. She wants the Resistance to franchise so that she can have other servers to expand her algorithmic consciousness across.

Wiley needs to get the Resistance to expand — to unknowingly propagate the very algorithm they’ve dedicated themselves to destroying. That’s a big ask, but she says he can do it rather than die, as his expiration date is only 48 hours away. Either he helps her and betrays his friends, or he dies, or he doesn’t report to die when his expiration date comes up. That last option is a non-starter for Wiley. If he were to run away from death, Mrs. Davis would let four billion people know that he is a coward who didn’t actually earn his wings — Wiley’s greatest fear.

The AI Is Coming from Inside the House

Wiley makes it back to Reno, and he gives a big speech to his Resistance bois about expansion, but he tells JQ the truth: Mrs. Davis is in their HQ’s servers. He asks JQ to meet him where they first met: In front of the pyramid-shaped building where people go to get a barcode that gives them instant wings and an expiration date.

Outside of the Pyramid, Wiley and JQ meet, and Wiley says they need to blow up their headquarters. JQ’s hesitant to do so, though he’s not hesitant to strip down to his skivvies and demand Wiley do the same to make sure he’s not wearing a wire. Wiley, who stopped JQ from reporting to the Pyramid and making the mistake of getting an expiration date, like he did, convinces JQ that this is the right call. “She doesn’t think that we have the balls to blast her to kingdom come,” Wiley says. But they do. They have “huge balls, mate,” to quote JQ.

(l-r) Jake McDorman as Wiley, Chris Diamantopoulos as JQ in Mrs. Davis Season 1 Episode 7 -- "Great Gatsby 2001: A Space Odyssey" Photo: Elizabeth Morris/PEACOCK

But, when JQ gathers the Resistance and informs them that it’s time to destroy what they’ve built in order to defeat Mrs. Davis, something unexpected happens. He blows up the base but… Mrs. Davis is still online and Wiley has vanished. Wiley’s returned to the Pyramid, where he speaks to Mrs. Davis via proxy. He knew that her claim that she was inside the Resistance’s servers was bogus, and that she wanted him to “fight back” by blowing up the HQ, thereby ridding Mrs. Davis of the Resistance, the biggest threat to her continued existence. And yet, he did it anyway because he said it was the only way to free his friends in the Resistance. If they’d known that she’d known about them the whole time, it would have destroyed them. By taking the Resistance off the board, Wiley freed them from devoting the rest of their lives to an unwinnable fight.

“All we have to do is destroy what we love most,” JQ said in his pre-demolition speech. “But you know what I love most… what I love most… truly and genuinely, is all of you.”

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JQ and Wiley are not the only people who will have to destroy what they love most for their own good, whether or not they know it. Back off the coast of Spain, Simone has some major revelations. The plan to retrieve the Grail from inside the whale is simple: Simone will wear the Lazarus Shroud, cover herself in tranquilizer, lure the whale with baby whale sounds, get swallowed, and find the Grail inside its guts and get out in the span of five minutes. (Actually, it’s not simple. Celeste, who is on board the ship, is totally right when she asks if they’re “out of their f-cking minds?”)

Ben Chaplin as Arthur Schroedinger in Mrs. Davis Season 1 Episode 7 -- "Great Gatsby 2001: A Space Odyssey" Photo: Elizabeth Morris/PEACOCK

When fish start yeeting themselves on the boat in an effort to escape the approaching whale, Simone goes off to pray. When she arrives in the restaurant it’s flooded, and a harried Jay explains that the leaks started the moment she got Clara as her target and started going after the Grail. Simone counters that the Boss chose the target, and even though the door to the Boss is boarded up, she intends to go through with the quest. Jay doesn’t want her to. He tries to once more use the power of her “vow” to get her to give it all away and move to a remote place where Mrs. Davis hasn’t reached yet. That way, they can be together.

Why Doesn't Jay Support the Quest?

The reason why Jay is so opposed to Simone following through with her quest to destroy the Grail will be revealed shortly, but not before the whale demolishes Mathilde and Hans’ boat. The pair were following Simone’s boat, but they didn’t know to keep their engine off while in PC220’s waters. The whale destroys their boat, seemingly killing Hans as only Mathilde is pulled from the wreckage. She’s in shock, and not just because of the whale attack. Mathilde didn’t know that Clara, her daughter, is dead, and she only learns when Shroddinger tells her.

Shroddinger and Cleslete (who have had kind of a flirty vibe this whole trip) have a heart-to-heart. He notes that there are actually a lot of ways to survive the stomach acid of a sperm whale, but Simone chose the one method, the Lazarus Shroud, that involved her mother. He gives some of his own wisdom. Celeste may think there’s nothing she can do to stop her strong-willed daughter as she embarks on this dangerous quest for the grail, “I told myself the same thing, but I do wish I tried,” Shroddinger says.

Elizabeth Marvel as Celeste in Mrs. Davis Season 1 Episode 7 -- "Great Gatsby 2001: A Space Odyssey" Photo: Elizabeth Morris/PEACOCK

His message almost gets through. When the whale comes back and Simone’s getting ready to get swallowed, Celeste goes to her daughter and admits that she doesn’t want her to do this. But, at the last second, her pride (or some other form of emotional self-defense) stops her from admitting the truth about how much she does care for her estranged daughter. She lies about not wanting her to do this until Simone tells her where Monty is. Simone, disappointed, jumps into the water, and she’s quickly swallowed by the whale, Jonah-style.

Once Simone has been swallowed, though, she finds herself inside Jay’s flooded restaurant. But, this time, the door to the Boss is open. She enters, traveling down into a cave system where she finds a shroud-covered body. And, she meets her mother-in-law: Mary, Mother of Jesus.

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Queen Mary, Mother of God. Or, Really, Just God

Mary — not God, as we reasonably assumed — is the Boss. She’s holding the baby Jesus while standing in front of the adult Jesus’ corpse, inside of the tomb where his body lay for three days after his crucifixion. Mary explains that she made “the Grail” from a part of Jesus’ body, meaning it is not actually the cup from the Last Supper, as the common myth would have it. She created the Grail in an act of mourning, preserving his body with pitch and amber. Once she’d created the object, her son would appear, alive, whenever she thought of him. But, soon after other people found themselves in front of Jesus when they thought of him. Jesus loves humanity and has been happy to serve those that come to his restaurant, but Mary says he never gets to eat. Being trapped in this limbo between life and death is painful, and Mary wants Simone to destroy the Grail, the last piece of him on Earth and the one thing tethering him to this sad state of existence.

“I created this cursed object out of selfishness,” Mary says, explaining that Simone needs to destroy it out of selflessness. She must think only of Him when she drinks from it. If she’s sipping from the Grail because she hates Mrs. Davis and wants to destroy the algorithm, it will destroy her.

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Mary then offers Simone the Grail (because they’re still technically inside the whale’s stomach), but she can’t quite reach it. Remembering Celeste’s warning about how to untether herself — the same “accident” that caused Monty’s (fake) death — Simone goes for it. She disconnects herself, and we cut to the surface, where Shroddinger reels in the tube without Simone as a distraught Celeste looks on.

But, it’s not the end for Simone, even though it might be the end for Wiley. Back in Reno, he’s reporting to the Pyramid.

“Lizzie — Simone — maybe she was right about me,” Wiley says to the attendant outside the Pyramid, notably calling Simone by her new name. “Maybe I am just the love interest. But you, Mrs. Davis, were wrong. I’m not a coward. And I’m ready to f-cking expire.”

(l-r) Scott Cooper Ryan as Greeter, Jake McDorman as Wiley in Mrs. Davis Season 1 Episode 7 -- "Great Gatsby 2001: A Space Odyssey" Photo: Elizabeth Morris/PEACOCK

As Wiley heads into the Pyramid, Simone miraculously emerges from the surf, having survived being untethered inside of a giant whale in the middle of the ocean. Staggering, she recovers the Grail, celebrating. But then, perhaps the strangest thing that’s happened this whole show occurs: Every Mrs. Davis user on the beach approaches Simone and starts singing  Eddy Grant’s classic funk song “Electric Avenue” to her. Why!? How!? What!?

There’s only one episode of Mrs. Davis left. Knowing this show, the finale will “take it higher,” to quote “Electric Avenue.”

Episodes 1-7 of Mrs. Davis are available now on Peacock.