'Raised By Wolves' Season 2, Episode 1 Review: 'The Collective'
In which Marcus finds a new family and Mother finds a new home.
The second season of HBO’s deeply weird space opera Raised By Wolves starts off after a short time jump that ends up feeling quite jarring after all this time. Season 1 ended in chaos and madness, and I admit I was a little foggy on the details heading into the Season 2 premiere.
Indeed, it might be helpful to read my brief recap of Season 1 (I include a video for those who prefer more detail) since so much weird shit happened.
In Season 2, Episode 1—'The Collective'—Mother and Father have made their way to the tropical zone on the planet Kepler-22b. Here, they’ve been welcomed in to an Atheist Collective run by a powerful AI, something not all the Atheists are thrilled about.
Spoilers, obviously.
The Atheists are also not thrilled about a Mithraic Necromancer joining their ranks, let alone her “adopted” Mithraic children. The children, including Mother and Father’s ‘firstborn’ Campion, are returned to them when they arrive, having made it all the way with Sue in spite of the gunshot wound she sustained when the voices in Paul’s head told him she wasn’t his real mother. He shot, but didn’t kill, his fake mother.
When he sees her again in the Atheist compound, he shuns her. She is impure—a fact that seems more important to Paul than the fact that she killed his parents. They weren’t particularly good parents.
When the children and Father are sent out to find food for the Collective, which is far more abundant here than their previous home, Paul and Campion find a strange box covered in Mithraic symbols.
They talk of the prophecy—a prophecy Paul sees himself at the center of, though Campion seems in many ways the more likely candidate. Paul, like his fake father, has delusions of grandeur. Campion is of humbler stock.
Elsewhere, Father and Vita find a cave covered in markings made, presumably, by the ancient race of humans that inhabited (and still does, in far fewer numbers) the planet, long ago. They also find what Vita thinks are toys. Strange, broken objects that Father wants to take back to analyze.
Mother is tasked with a different job: Teacher to a class of the Collective’s youth. The Atheists have apparently abandoned the nuclear family in favor of collective childrearing, and Mother will be the childrens’ guide—it is her calling, after all. At least when she’s not on a murderous rampage.
While the people of the Collective aren’t always friendly to the newcomers, they are run by an AI—called The Trust—who Mother refers to as her “sibling” because it, too, was designed by Campion Sturges, her ‘creator.’
It’s not really how you’d picture a computer, consisting largely of swirling fog in a long tube.
The two speak, and Mother reveals that she has been feeling shame, or something like shame. She’s made parts of her coding private, an act The Trust finds troubling.
Mother lies to Campion and the others when she tells them that her baby died—rather than telling them that it was a flying serpent that’s probably going to come back and kill a bunch of people.
During her class, as she and the little kids paint eggs, one of the children colors a green snake. Mother, who is also called Lamia now, tells the child that he doesn’t have to make his egg scary. “It’s not scary, it’s beautiful,” the kid responds, adorably. “All living things are beautiful.”
There are layers of meaning here. For one thing, the snake Mother birthed is anything but beautiful. But also, Mother and Father aren’t “living things.” There’s an unspoken judgment hidden behind the child’s words.
King Marcus, The Holy
Marcus was left alone in the frozen wastes but he’s able to down a passing Atheist ship using his crossbow. He immediately embarks on what appears to be a suicide mission. When he spots the Atheist convoy he speeds toward it, intent on crashing headlong into his old allies.
The Trust stops him, taking control of his vessel. Not one to be taken down so easily, Marcus pulls out a pistol and blasts the controls to the ship. It crashes into the acidic waters of the ocean below and begins to sink. Not a fun way to die.
Marcus has no intention of dying, and uses some kind of laser grappling gun to latch on to a nearby stone outcropping. He tries to pull the ship to land but it’s slow going and he’s forced to pull himself over the acid water in a feat that I must say defied several laws of physics. We’ll suspend our disbelief.
From here, Marcus makes his way to some caves where he finds a golden sun painted on the wall and, naturally, takes it as a sign from Sol that he’s to build a church here and convert every last one of the Atheists on the planet to the Mithraic religion he now believes in so fiercely. Perhaps this is how he’ll win back Paul’s affection, given he’s one of the only people on Kepler-22b who isn’t an atheist now.
Earlier in the episode we saw some slaves working for the Atheists. They make an escape attempt but have bombs strapped to their chests. When Marcus notices what’s happening after one of the slaves is blown to smithereens, he races down to help. One of the slaves is an android, and he digs out a piec from her shoulder that can be used as a key to the bomb vests. He frees the human woman and, reluctantly, her android “daughter” taking them both back to his nascent church.
The woman is a Mithraic and is quickly wooed by Marcus’s zealousness, though he’s less certain about keeping the android around. The woman’s name is Decima and she’s a quantum gravity engineer who spent her life building the ark that the Atheists comandeered.
All told, this was an exciting return to the bizarre world and story of Raised By Wolves. It’s such a peculiar science fiction world, hovering somewhere around the periphery of Ridley Scott’s Alien universe, but with a lot more religion and zealotry thrown into the mix.
Scattered Thoughts:
It was cute when the kids find the hologame board and start playing Necro Slayer—a game that makes Mother uncomfortable enough to say “It’s not very realistic, is it?” It kind of is, though.
Campion is the only kid who had a major growth spurt. Actor Winta McGrath sprouted up an extra foot and looks and sounds so much older. Paul, by contrast, hasn’t aged a day. Still not quite as shocking as Anthony LaRusso’s growth spurt in Cobra Kai. Griffin Santopietro is almost unrecognizable in Season 4.
Speaking of Campion, it’s really cute how badly he wants a pet. He can’t have his mouse, but he finds an egg that he hopes to hatch so he can be a momma bird. He should probably not tell Mother about this. Her own experience with hatchlings is not so great.
Apparently you should never stick your hands into the stomach of a Necromancer android. It will kill you in a truly horrifying manner.
What did you think of the Season 2 premiere of Raised By Wolves? Let me know in the comments below!
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A good summary.