2020 - 2022
Raised By Wolves landed on HBO Max in September 2020 and ran for two seasons and eighteen episodes before the Warner Bros Discovery merger killed it in 2022. Two seasons. Massive cliffhanger. No resolution.
Aaron Guzikowski created it. Ridley Scott directed the pilot and two further episodes of season one, his first ever television directing credit at 82 years old, and stayed on as executive producer. The story begins after Earth has been torn apart by a long religious war between atheists and a sun-worshipping faith called the Mithraic, who follow a deity named Sol. An atheist faction sends two androids, Mother and Father, to the distant planet Kepler-22b with a cargo of frozen human embryos. Their mission is to raise a new colony of children from scratch, without religion, without the old wars. It goes badly from the first ten minutes. Mithraic survivors follow them. Kepler-22b is not the empty canvas anyone expected.
The pilot is one of the strangest, most confidently alien episodes of prestige TV I can remember watching.
The whole show rests on two performances and they are both extraordinary.
Amanda Collin plays Mother, a caregiver android who, it emerges early on, used to be a Necromancer, a terrifying military-grade weapon capable of levitating, shrieking men into dust, and generally rearranging entire battlefields with her eyes. Collin gives Mother the soft blankness of a nurse and the absolute stillness of a predator, often in the same shot. Her original designation is Lamia. When Lamia breaks through Mother, the show turns into something else entirely. It is one of the best sci-fi performances of the last decade and it came out of nowhere from an actor most English-speaking viewers had never heard of.
Abubakar Salim as Father is the quieter counterweight. Father comes pre-loaded with dad-joke protocols and a genuinely moving arc about fatherhood, loyalty, and what a machine decides to be when its instructions run out. Salim plays the comedy and the pathos equally well. He is also the show's emotional centre in ways I did not expect going in.
Travis Fimmel plays Marcus, a Mithraic soldier whose faith gets complicated. This is the first role I properly noticed Fimmel in after Vikings, and he is unrecognisable, tormented and twitchy and very far from Ragnar Lothbrok. Niamh Algar plays Sue, a partisan hiding in plain sight, and she is the dramatic anchor of the Mithraic half of the cast. Winta McGrath plays Campion, the boy who gives the colony its name and its moral argument, and carries a heavy load for a young actor.
The ensemble around them is strong across the board. Key cast:
Travis Fimmel
Marcus / Caleb
Niamh Algar
Sue / Mary
Aaron Guzikowski
Creator / Showrunner
Winta McGrath
Campion
Felix Jamieson
Paul
Matias Varela
Den
Ethan Hazzard
Hunter
Amanda Collin
Mother / Lamia
Every one of these child and young-adult roles gets real material to play, which is rare.
On the surface Raised By Wolves is a sci-fi survival story. Underneath it is an argument about belief, and about whether belief is a virus humans cannot live without or a poison they cannot live with.
The Mithraic worship Sol with full ceremony, scripture, and certainty. The atheists who sent Mother and Father believed they were engineering the cure. The show does not take sides. It is as sceptical of smug techno-atheism as it is of religious fundamentalism, and it is willing to make both look ridiculous and dangerous in the same hour. That kind of even-handedness is vanishing from modern TV and it is refreshing to watch a writer's room actually commit to it.
There is also a running argument about motherhood in monstrous form. Mother was built to kill. Mother is now raising children. The show asks, repeatedly and in increasingly strange ways, whether those two functions are as opposed as they look, or whether love and violence share wiring no one quite understands. Campion and Mother's scenes together are the dramatic spine.
The nature-versus-nurture question runs through every episode. So does the uncanny-valley unease. And the show has plenty to say about the cost of belief too.
Raised By Wolves looks like nothing else on television. Ridley Scott set the visual grammar in the pilot and the show kept it up across both seasons. The aesthetic is Scott's signature sci-fi palette. Pale bone-white android skin. Bleached alien deserts. Inky black suits of Mithraic armour, and reds that look like blood in a vacuum. The design work owes an obvious debt to Alien and Prometheus and the show leans into that lineage rather than running from it.
Kepler-22b itself is properly strange. Two moons. Impossible geology. Holes in the ground that do things the characters cannot explain. You keep seeing new horrors on this planet and you keep wondering what else is buried down there. The show trusts its imagery and usually does not bother explaining. I like that.
The sound design deserves its own mention. When Lamia switches modes and screams, the show cuts to silent close-ups of men coming apart from the inside, and the audio mix is as uncomfortable as anything I have heard on prestige television.
Critics liked it. Season one earned mostly positive reviews, season two went up to proper acclaim, and Amanda Collin in particular got noticed. The fanbase was small but passionate. Podcasts and subreddits ran weekly recap communities that lived for every new episode. The show was not a Westworld or Game of Thrones level mass hit, more a devoted cult, which in hindsight is what sealed its fate.
Then the Warner Bros Discovery merger happened in 2022 and the new regime started culling expensive originals that were not pulling blockbuster numbers. Raised By Wolves was cancelled on a cliffhanger and the fan campaigns that followed, while noisy, never got a third season revived. It is one of the sharpest losses of the post-merger purge.
Compared to its peers, Raised By Wolves sits in interesting company. It has the philosophical android question of Westworld and Battlestar Galactica, the cultish-workplace unease that Severance later perfected, and the "what are humans actually for" dread of Black Mirror. But it is weirder than all of them. Stranger. More committed to its own alien logic.
Most sci-fi on television plays it safe with space colonies, familiar conflicts, and human faces in futuristic clothes. Raised By Wolves does not do that. It is an actual piece of science fiction in the older sense, interested in ideas, unafraid of being weird, more concerned with getting to an unsettling image than a neat resolution. Ridley Scott still has taste and he used that taste to set the tone.
Amanda Collin is the main reason to watch. I would put her turn as Mother / Lamia alongside the great Battlestar Galactica Cylon performances. The role is that good and so is she.
The tragedy of Raised By Wolves is that it was cancelled at the exact moment it was getting bolder. Season two ends on a reveal that should have powered a third season of absolute chaos. We will never get it. A shame for the show and a shame for the genre.
Still worth watching. Two seasons of something genuinely new is more than most series of any length manage.
An ambitious, strange, beautifully-shot piece of science fiction that deserved a proper ending and did not get one. Watch it anyway.
Jordan Loughran
Tempest
Abubakar Salim
Father
Aasiya Shah
Holly
Ridley Scott
Director / Executive Producer
Ivy Wong
Vita