‘Raised by Wolves’ Season 2 Episode 7 Review: The Serpent Strikes

“Burn me,” says the voice of the tree. The signal is weak and staticky, but the repeated words are unmistakable: “Burn me.”

In a series with no shortage of deeply unnerving moments, this suicidal communiqué from Sue, the human woman transformed into a tree that will soon weaponize a potentially world-killing alpha predator, may be the most unpleasant. It’s eerie in a way that Raised by Wolves’ gross-out body-horror moments aren’t, so there’s that, but it’s also just…grim, bleak, depressing. By a series of events that were equal parts random chance and deliberate manipulation, Sue, the atheist-turned-believer, has been physically transformed into a tree, and her only wish is to be destroyed before she can do any more damage. But she’s too late, and she dies in the gullet of a giant flying biomechanical serpent instead. Absolutely gutting.

And this is far from the only deeply troubling moment in “Feeding,” the aptly titled penultimate episode of Raised by Wolves’ remarkable second season. Take Vrille, the rogue android who butchered her “mother” Decima and nearly every member of Keppler-22b’s entire contingent of atheists in what she calls “delayed self-defense,” after Decima carved her face off in a fit of revulsion. Resurfacing with a very Eyes Without a Face facemask on, Vrille lets it slip that the original Vrille, the human daughter of Decima, killed herself to punish Decima for making weapons that destroyed Earth’s atmosphere. Android-Vrille just sort of drops this in passing, but it hits like an atom bomb. The wellspring of dread and pain this development taps is all but bottomless; suddenly it’s easier to understand both the android and the woman who used her to salve her own conscience. 

And it’s all for naught at any rate. Vrille’s spinal column is shattered as she and Campion try to escape the serpent, which has escaped from its pen, swallowed the Sue-tree, become fully tentacled and weaponized, beaten Mother in open combat, and begun to hunt Campion down out of what appears to be simple jealousy. In one last desperate attempt to preserve the memory of the human child upon whom she was based, she frantically carves words into a fallen tree trunk before conking out, seemingly for good. Campion is left only with those words, and the android’s pre-recorded warning that it will soon become radioactive. “Thanks, User, and have a good day,” says the recording. Even in the post-apocalypse, the niceties must be followed.

Speaking of androids who are having A Tough Time: After discovering the Sue-tree and failing to thwart the fully weaponized serpent she calls Seven, Mother is rescued by, of all people, Marcus and Paul. She explains to them that the snake is her “child”—something Campion pieces together on his own—and theorizes that Grandmother, the ancient android Father nursed back to health, might be able to help her override the “caregiver” programming that prevents her from harming her children. Grandmother suggests this might be accomplished by transferring her veil, which shields her from human emotions so as to make her judgements about the future of humanity clearer, from herself to Mother. If your brain is screaming “bad idea!” at this turn of events, just know that you’re not alone.

(It should be noted here that Grandmother says a whole lot more than this. Turns out that Keppler-22b was, like Earth, the site of an apocalyptic war between “believers” and “technocrats.” The technocrats built androids like Grandmother, as well as the card-like relics that keep showing up everywhere; the “tree” card that Marcus has been clinging to for much of the season was meant not as an invitation, as he believed, but as a warning. Whoops!)

While all this is going on, Father leads Campion, Tempest, Hunter, and a headless android Hunter has purchased (it may not have a noggin, but it’s capable of flipping Father the bird when ridiculed) on a hunt for the sea creature that kidnapped Tempest’s newborn. With the help of Vrille, they first find an abandoned, dead sea-creature baby, then the creature itself. Tempest forbids Father from killing it when she sees that the creature is breastfeeding the baby; she’s still haunted by the memories of her rape at the hands of the Mithraic cleric Otho (whose head-imploding fate is visually recalled by that headless android) and quickly convinces herself that the creature can take better care of the baby than she can.

Hunter, however, isn’t buying it. No sooner does Father put down his gun and leave than Hunter kills the creature himself and rescues the baby, if “rescue” is the right word for it.

And just as an aside, Paul begins the episode by feeding half of the remaining atheists fruit from the Sue-tree. What could possibly go wrong?!?

All told, things are taking a turn for the dark on Keppler-22b, and the characters are noticing it. Marcus, of all people, articulates this best. After admitting that he thought Sol might be a way out of the darkness, he tells Paul “Maybe Sol is the darkness. Maybe Sol…he doesn’t care about us at all.”

This jibes with what Grandmother tells Mother about Seven, apparently a creature designed to destroy the planet itself at the behest of “the entity,” the whatever-it-is that has been broadcasting signals under Sol’s name. Why would the entity want to destroy the world, Mother asks? The humans of the ancient world couldn’t figure it out either, Grandmother replies.

So we’re left with a ragtag band of survivors, adult and child, android and human, atheist and believer, running around trying to figure out how to save themselves from a giant tentacled serpent, an acid sea full of humanoid creatures, and an ancient alien intelligence that seems to want them all dead. I can’t be the only person reminded of Game of Thrones (and not just because of the similarities between the two shows’ scores), in which various fabulously wealthy families carried on killing each other while a threat to all life grew more and more powerful, the danger more and more urgent. Good thing these are only stories on TV, right?

Right?

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.