‘Raised by Wolves’ Season Finale Recap: The Union of the Snake

Alright, raise your hands: Who had “android war machine gives birth to enormous flying snake monster” on their Raised by Wolves Season 1 finale bingo card? Anyone? Anyone??

Bonkers in the best way, bonkers in the same way the big twist in the series premiere was bonkers, the Raised by Wolves season finale (with the cutesy title “The Beginning”) answered virtually no questions other than “What will Mother’s baby look like?”, and even then the answer raises more questions. A snake with lamprey teeth, juiced up to giant size on Mother’s superpowered blood, despite her attempts to kill it by piloting the lander directly into the planet’s molten core with Father by her side? It is, as Mother says earlier, more than improbable, but impossible. And yet it happened, unequivocally and undeniably. Despite her “extraordinarily pleasant” coupling with her creator, Campion Sturges, deep within her own programming, something else put that baby inside her, and the serpent is the result.

There’s a lot of “it’s impossible, but it happened” going around in this episode. After discovering seemingly magical cave paintings, Paul, for example, tells his “mother” Sue that he’s been hearing the voice of Sol, who instructed him to attempt to disable the lander. Sue tells him that Sol isn’t real, that she no longer believes and Paul shouldn’t either.

But then Sol, or whatever force is out there communicating with Paul, proves it’s got the goods. Paul grabs a gun and pulls it on Sue, announcing the truth to the group: She’s an atheist named Mary, and she and her partner Marcus killed his parents and stole their faces. Paul even shoots her, apparently not fatally, before the other kids put a stop to all this. But the evidence is right there, plain as day: Paul knows things it’s impossible for him to know. What can a normal person do in the face of that?

Further impossibilities abound. Prior to the birth, if that’s what you want to call vomiting a serpent out of your mouth, Mother is attacked by one of those hooded figures who’ve been running around in rags, harassing our settlers and generally being mysterious. After she kills him, she and Father unmask him, revealing him to be a humanoid. A Neanderthal skull that this person was carrying indicates the presence of humans on this planet over a prolonged period. It’s then that Mother and Father realize what’s going on here. The creatures they’ve been capturing for food aren’t evolving into humans���humans are devolving into creatures.

“This planet has a history, Mother,” Father says. “A history I feel we are dangerously ignorant of.” Indeed, the horrific birth takes place in exactly the location where Mother had a vision of figures in black shrouds communing with a dribbling head atop a pentagonal object. Whatever history Kepler-22b has, it’s not healthy for its johnny-come-latelys.

And there are more of those than we initially thought. True, there’s no sign in this episode of the surviving Mithraics, not after Lucius jammed android eyeballs into Marcus’s mouth and split. Marcus spends the episode wandering around, veins bulging with necromancer juice, proclaiming himself king and hallucinating about Hunter and the arm Marcus tried to burn within the big pentagonal temple.

By the end of the episode his wanderings seem to have brought him no closer to Sue and the kids—by that point Mother and Father, who’d been arguing due to Father’s jealousy but who make up during their attempted snake-murder/suicide, are clear on the other side of the world—but he does run into a band of armed atheists, who’ve taken their own enormous ark-sized ship to the planet. He kills most of them, threatens the voice on the other side of one of their communicator devices, and orders the one atheist he spared to pray with him. He’s a true believer now, in himself as much as in Sol.

And I’m a true believer in Raised by Wolves. Because it’s not just that this episode is batshit, though it is—it’s also humane and frequently funny. I loved Father’s discomfort with the topic of how Mother became pregnant, mixed with a morbid curiosity that caused him to keep asking her questions about it even though he knew he wouldn’t like the answers. It’s a very human characteristic, which makes his subsequent decision to leave the group, then have his memories erased so he can rejoin them, all the more upsetting. (He doesn’t go through with it, since his chase of the hooded humanoid led him directly back to Mother, whom the being was trying to kill.)

The children, who are clearly going to be a core component of the show, are given some strong moments too. I laughed when Paul told his mouse, whom he initially believed was responsible for the voices in his head, “One word out of you and you’re going into the pit.” I like how the differing viewpoints of Campion (raised atheist, now more of a curious agnostic), Tempest (raised Mithraic, now an embittered atheist), Hunter (assertively Mithraic, even if he likes Mother and Father), and Holly (much calmer in her faith, but that almost makes her feel more devout, and much less ostentatious than Hunter) allow the show to hash out its religious arguments in a way that feels organic and character based, rather than devolving into speechified debates.

Primarily, though, I’m grateful for a show that was so consistently surprising—the biggest surprise of all being that it was a good show in the first place. Raised by Wolves is the best science-fiction show I’ve seen in years—asking big but not boring questions, using tried-and-true sci-fi devices in unexpected ways, constantly unfolding its dark mysteries before our eyes. With so little resolved in the finale, it is admittedly possible that the show will return for Season 2 only for us to discover it’s bitten off more than it can chew. But I’m all for a show that errs on the side of ambition. In that sense, Raised by Wolves‘s mission is accomplished.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Raised By Wolves Episode 10 ("The Beginning") on HBO Max