‘Raised by Wolves’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: Lifeforms

Let’s list some lifeforms, shall we? Just for fun, let’s run down all the varieties of creature, organic or synthetic, that appear in this single episode of Raised by Wolves. For starters, you’ve got the humans, refugees from the great planet-destroying conflict back on Earth. Some are atheists, some are Mithraic believers, and though you’d be forgiven for thinking they were two separate species based on how they talk about and treat one another, they’re all part of the same big ol’ human race. 

Then there are the androids, which come in several forms. There’s Mother, a necromancer model—a living weapon who’s staged a coup by shutting down her sibling, the supercomputer called the Trust, and taking control of the atheist colony herself. Many of the atheists have apparently fled rather than submit to her rule, and given her increasingly frightening behavior—she spends a scene torturing the human who was the Trust’s chief interlocutor—it’s hard to blame them.

Next up: Father, the generic service model. Mother’s mad at him for spending too much time pursuing his own interests, “fight[ing] and tinker[ing],” instead of caring for the pivotal next generation of humanity. What he knows and she does not is that he’s been caring for a third android, an ancient one, recovered there on planet Keppler-22b. That android’s nature is mysterious, though it can apparently fly and glow and show humans like Tempest an ultrasound of her fetus. It’s also literally shrouded in mystery insofar as a veil covers its face.

Android number four? That would be Vrille, the childlike model owned by Decima. Once a true believer in (and romantic interest of) Marcus, the human who gained superpowers after being force-fed Mother’s weaponized eyeballs (it’s a long story), Decima is increasingly skeptical that Marcus is the man she believed him to be. Not that it winds up mattering much: Vrille, whom Decima had believed she’d killed for betraying their location to the atheists, returns and slaughters every Mithraic she can get her hands on, Decima included. And, like, she takes her time with it, mutilating Decima’s face to reduce it to the same skeletal ruin Vrille herself now sports. It’s nasty!

But wait, there’s more! (That’s kind of the catchphrase for this show at this point, isn’t it?) There are critters galore in this series, and that’s not even counting the giant serpent to which Mother gave birth at the end of Season 1, who doesn’t appear in this episode. There are certainly giant serpent skeletons, though, one of which greets Marcus as he descends into the depths of one of those dodecahedron temples that apparently dot the planet’s landscape.

Beyond that skeleton, he finds a tunnel behind a pile of human(ish) bones. At the end of that tunnel? An extremely well-preserved humanoid corpse, which, when triggered by fumes released by his allegedly bogus tooth-of-Romulus artifact, instantly devolves into one of the crawling creatures that factored so largely into the show’s first season. (Marcus just shoots this one in the head and escapes.)

Are the humanoid creatures that swim in the acid sea related to their apparent ground-based counterparts? Who knows? But one of those sea creatures comes into play in a big way, after Sue has an hallucination of leeches while caring for her adoptive son Paul, who’s been encased in a disgusting cocoon and is apparently being transformed into a snake. (???) With the help of Campion, Sue lures a sea creature to the shore, knocks it out, and extracts several leeches. The leeches in turn free Paul from his prison, seemingly without much lasting damage. (We’ll see how long that lasts, of course.)

Is that everything? Well, that depends on how you categorize the voices that Sue hears at the end of the episode. She had already resigned herself to “praying” to “Sol,” which she believes is not a god at all but an alien transmission; now the transmission appears to be talking back, and she’s promised to do anything it wants in exchange for Paul’s health. 

Separately, Father succeeds in his search-and-rescue mission for Holly, the young Mithraic true believer, who is brutally abandoned by Decima in the woman’s ill-fated escape attempt from Vrille. Father uses the Mithraic prisoner Lucius for help, promising him free rein to dispatch Marcus and his followers however he likes. The followers were already killed by Vrille, so that’s water under the bridge, but Father kind of reneges on his word and insists Lucius hold his fire until Marcus can be brought back to the colony. This is done to spare the feelings of Holly, which is understandable, but it also seems like an extremely bad idea to let Marcus live an extra minute, given the havoc he wreaks wherever he goes.

And there you have it! A narratively and emotionally complex episode, filled with far-out sci-fi imagery, fueled by powerful performances from Amanda Collin as Mother and Aasiya Shah as Holly (my God, the way she sobs when Marcus returns to her) among others, raising far more questions than it answers yet still delivering the goods from a storytelling and image-making perspective—all amid a bestiary that seems to be growing by the day. Raised by Wolves, folks. Isn’t it something?

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.