Raised By Wolves Season 2 Is The Epitome Of Science and Mythology Colliding

Marcus, what have you done? Photo courtesy of IMDb

The fight for survival continues on Kepler 22b as Mother, Father, and their children (including number 7 which isn’t so lucky anymore) try to assimilate into the Collective, a colony of humans under the severe care of The Trust, an AI program that controlled everything in the colony, including every moment of its resident’s lives. However, no matter how unbelievably sophisticated The Trust’s programming was, it was still unable to predict the chaos that Mother and her brood would bring (even though they had the same creator) into the Collective, or who/what would follow them there and that’s where things go terribly wrong. Was it an actionable coincidence or did their creator plan it? It’s hard to say because once The Trust was canceled, and people were free to do and think as they pleased, and Mother became the leader, things got weird.

Order can come from discord, and once things settled down in the Collective, those who stayed after the insurrection went back to the daily grind of collecting food and maintaining their existence and even began treating Mother as their leader and Campion (Winta McGrath) as the next in line. However, a small band of freed prisoners from the colony decided to join forces with mithraic zealot and guy who dresses like he’s auditioning for a Marvel movie, Marcus, who wanted to basically take over the Collective, turn everyone into believers loyal to SOL (and Marcus who was SOL’s supposed mouthpiece), destroy all synthetic humans and then live in complete harmony forever. However, neither SOL nor Marcus’s powers (or good intentions) were real, and once it was all exposed it all collapsed under the weight of their own ego.

Meanwhile, as Mother is trying to run the Collective and care for her children (even the weird one in permanent time-out) father finds himself with a new hobby; regrowing an ancient android from its own skeletal remains and a splash of modern biotech. The new being, affectionately known as Grandmother, becomes both a source of salvation and downfall for the Collective so basically they’re going to find themselves back at square one unless Mother’s leadership in her absence is supported and protected by the will of the people and we all know how well that usually works out. If there’s a season three, the battle for control of the Collective will be epic, like one giant futuristic episode of Battlebots.

Yes, he’s here to help. Granted he can’t see that his constant hate towards synthetic beings is causing a deeper reliance on them but whatever, he’s done his research, and hey people are entitled to their own opinions. Photo courtesy of IMDb

As if this all wasn’t enough, Temptest (Jordan Loughran) is about to give birth but struggling deeply with what to do with a baby that came from rape. When it’s time, she leaves the colony to give birth in private on the shores of the acid ocean, fully intending on killing the newborn. However, once she goes through the pain of birth and holds the crying infant in her hands and bites through the umbilical cord she begins to feel lovingly protective of the slimy, wriggling baby to which then the nightmares of all nightmares happen; a terrifying creature comes up from the water and takes the crying infant out of Tempest’s hands, puts it into its chest compartment and then dives back into the ocean, scarring Tempest both physically and emotionally and it’s one of the most incredible, memorable scenes I’ve, well, seen, in years. It is beauty, strength, devotion, horror, longing, and anger all rolled up into 5 minutes of unforgettable storytelling.

Photo courtesy of Decider. com

Now while all that is going on, Marcus re-emerges and reconnects with Sue (Niamh Algar) and Paul (Felix Jamieson), who become agents of painfully brutal chaos in their own right and it makes you wonder if the Trust was somehow literally connected to the SOL via Paul. Unfortunately once Sue began to believe in SOL, she also became an unwitting participant in her death, the weaponization of number 7, and the potential enslavement of the Collective by a synthetic Shepard. Oh and then there’s this.

I believe this is referred to as the Reverse Jesus. Photo courtesy of postapocalypticmedia. com

The series is wonderfully dense in its storylines, character development, and visuals (meaning there’s no fluff) and allows you to think on deeper things without making you feel like you need to, and offers the pluses and minuses of scientific and religious-based ideologies and where the zealotry of either can lead us to. Hopefully not towards a flying Lionfish Snake hybrid with similar powers to Mother but we can’t rule it out because people get ideas and then this happens. Both seasons of Raised By Wolves are available to stream on HBO Max.

Photo courtesy of postapocalypticmedia.com