HBO’s Raised By Wolves – A Review
- by admin
- in Uncategorized
- posted September 14, 2020
Ridley Scott’s Raised By Wolves has arrived without little fanfare on HBO Max and is the perfect antidote to my lockdown boxset viewing. A breath of fresh air, RBW feels original, is highly engaging, and is visually very captivating, a Sci-Fi show that is highly cerebral and well-thought-out.
We are literally thrown into the thick of things and introduced to what appears to be the show’s two principal characters, Mother and Father – two androids tasked with birthing, raising, and nurturing a clutch of human embryos on an unknown inhospitable alien planet. The backdrop is man has been a war for centuries to devastating consequences with very few survivors and mankind’s continued survival is dependent on the success of their mission.
The androids, Mother, and Father appear to be from the same lineage as other humanoid androids in Ridley Scott’s interconnected Aliens and Prometheus universes (Bishop and David). Quirky and programmed to be as human as possible but possessing the curious flaws of being slightly emotionally off-beat, overly single-minded, and obsessive as only machines can be. Both are wonderfully portrayed by Amanda Collins and Abubaker Salim respectively, making for an odd couple. Father appears to be more forgiving of the two robots, Mother is obsessive in her dedication to raising her young and pretty early on provides glimpses of her unrelenting nature. We discover she is a force to be reckoned with as human interlopers led by Travis Frimmel’s Marcus character (who is allied with the human zealots) experience to deadly consequences when he attempts to remove the last surviving child of their settlement; Campion (played by Winta McGrath).
Part one down, I’m hooked. Many themes crop up in the first episode – what it means to be human, consciousness, existentialism, religion, belonging, survival, status in society, being an outcast.