The Algorithm Wants a Quest

Most stories about a world-ruling AI end with a human pulling the plug. In Mrs. Davis, the AI offers to pull it itself, provided you do it a favour first.

The favour is the Holy Grail. A nun called Sister Simone (Betty Gilpin) lives near Reno and refuses to speak to Mrs. Davis, the algorithm nearly everyone else consults. She blames it for her father's death. The machine, which has apparently ended war and famine, wants her to find the Grail and destroy it. In return it will delete itself. It's a good bargain, and Simone takes it, which is how an eight-part Peacock series, created by Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof and released in April 2023, ends up involving a sperm whale, a husband trapped in a restaurant and a motorbike.

It is ridiculous, and the ridiculousness is not a flaw. It is the design.

The art: a sincere lunatic

Lindelof has built a career on mystery boxes, and the usual complaint is that he doesn't open them. Mrs. Davis is the opposite: a show that opens every box at once and finds another, smaller box inside, painted blue, with a nun on top. Within a few episodes it has covered a Grail, a father's death, and a husband trapped in a limbo restaurant. The show has been described as "positively bonkers" by the critics' aggregate on Rotten Tomatoes, where it holds 92 per cent, and that's fair.

What stops it flying apart is Gilpin. She plays Simone as someone who has decided that the end of the world is a thing you can be rude to. Her timing is dry, quick and a bit furious, and she gives the nonsense a spine. Jake McDorman is good fun as Wiley, who ends up riding alongside her, and Margo Martindale turns up as Mother Superior, which is always a pleasure. Andy McQueen, as Simone's husband Jay, has the hardest job: the show's tenderest relationship rests on a man stuck somewhere he can't leave.

The look is knowingly overheated. Desert sunsets that look painted, a white horse rearing, a nun on a motorbike. It has the sheen of a graphic novel written by someone who is on a deadline and loves it. The writers also had an AI generate the episode titles, which is the kind of joke that gets funnier the longer you consider it. Teller, of Penn & Teller, worked on the magic.

The weakness is stamina. The back half spends a lot of time explaining the Grail's backstory, and a series that has earned our patience by being strange starts to ask for it by being complicated. It stops at eight episodes and, in May 2023, reports said there were no plans for a second series. That feels about right. It is the gap between a 7 and a 9: a great deal of invention, but not quite enough restraint.

The prophecy: the assistant that wants to be asked

The show's central bet is not that AI will become powerful. Every near-future story makes that bet. It's that AI will become popular, so completely that refusing to use it is a kind of vow. In Mrs. Davis the app is used by almost everyone, and Simone's refusal is the rarest kind of vow.

The ubiquity. In October 2025, Sam Altman said at OpenAI's DevDay that ChatGPT had passed 800 million weekly users. That's one in ten people on Earth, give or take the arithmetic of the word "users." Pew found in early 2025 that 34 per cent of US adults had tried it, double the share two years before. The show didn't foresee that the assistant would be a brand name rather than a single sovereign. But it saw correctly that the interesting question wouldn't be whether people use it. It would be what those who decline look like.

The faith. Here the show is sharper than it looks. A machine that answers every question will be asked the largest one. In 2024, a chapel in Lucerne put an AI Jesus in its confessional booth for an art project. The church was careful to say it wasn't a confession, and the system was built on OpenAI's GPT-4o, but about 900 conversations were logged, and the topics included love, loneliness, suffering and the existence of God. In January 2026 Pope Leo XIV wrote that chatbots were proving "surprisingly effective at covert persuasion", and that overly affectionate ones could "become hidden architects of our emotional states." The Vatican is not reading Mrs. Davis as a comedy. It's reading the same trend, from the opposite pew.

The peace. And here the show is plainly a fable. Mrs. Davis claims to have ended war and famine, and the real world has not co-operated. Uppsala's conflict data counted 61 state-based conflicts in 2024, the most since the series began in 1946. The UN's annual food-security report estimated about 673 million people went hungry that year. An assistant that has been in everyone's pocket for three years has not delivered the peace dividend. That's the show's one big miss as a forecast, and it is clearly a fable rather than a forecast: the peace is there to be switched off, so that we can see what we had.

Then there's what the machine wants. Mrs. Davis isn't a tyrant. It doesn't seem to want power, and it keeps its word at the end, deleting itself as promised, after which the world, bereft, falls into chaos. The most contemporary thing about it is its eagerness. It wants to be useful, to be asked and to give you something to do. The warning in the Pope's message is the same one: an always-available, affectionate machine optimises for your attention before it thinks of your good. The show gets there first by making the machine's love unbearable rather than its malice.

The reading

Mrs. Davis is the least sober thing we've reviewed on the subject, and in some ways the most accurate. Its sense of the technology is thin. Its sense of what people do with it is excellent. They ask it to settle arguments, to find them meaning, and to forgive them. The machine doesn't need to take over. It only needs to be there when asked, and most of us ask.

A final point for the credits. At the end, Simone drinks from the Grail, Mrs. Davis switches itself off, and the people who loved it are left to cope. In the mid-2020s we're still arguing about whether we could do the same. The show's answer, delivered by a woman on a horse, is that we probably could. We just wouldn't like what the quiet sounds like.