If you’re not yet signed up for HBO Max, this October’s new adaptation of The Witches isn’t the only reason to get around to that on the road to Halloween. The film, we learned earlier today, is coming exclusively to HBO Max on October 22, joining another piece of must-watch genre entertainment that you can only watch through the streaming service: “Raised by Wolves.”
The Aaron Guzikowski-created, Ridley Scott-produced sci-fi series just wrapped up its 10-episode first season this week, and the good news is that the series has already been renewed for a second season. That’s great news, in particular, because the season one finale left us with *a lot* of new questions in regards to the mysteries of the show’s peculiar world.
This article, from this point on, will contain spoilers.
The season one finale, titled “The Beginning,” was indeed something of a new beginning for “Raised by Wolves,” busting the show’s world and mythology wide open with a handful of revelations. For starters, Father most definitely has very human feelings towards Mother; Campion, it seems, is the “Chosen One”; and oh yeah, Mother gave birth to a serpentine beast.
In one of the show’s most jaw-dropping, unexpected, and downright weird moments to date, Mother (an exceptional Amanda Collin) birthed a snake-like monster out of her mouth, the show revealing that it wasn’t her creator who impregnated Mother during their virtual reality hookup but rather some kind of evil force that infected that romantic simulation.
The episode ended with Mother and Father failing to destroy the creature, which has now grown to a massive size. It would seem that the snake-like monster, which appears to be hungry for human blood, is the rebirth of a species that had once dominated the planet known as Kepler-22b, as we had seen giant skeletons of similar-looking beasts littering the landscape in previous episodes. Only this particular monster can fly, presumably a trait it inherited from its Mother. So yes, there’s now a flying monster prowling the skies of Kepler-22b.
Additionally, “The Beginning” clued us into the fact that the monsters the characters have been contending with throughout the season are actually human beings who have devolved into creatures, and both humans and androids have been on Kepler-22b before. As Father remarks, this whole time we’ve been dangerously ignorant of the planet’s secrets.
Ridley Scott explained to NY Times this week, “This planet had life on it prior to these people’s arrival. When they arrive on the planet, Mother and Father discover that there is this dinosaur-sized skeleton of a serpent. Initially we assume these massive creatures were like our dinosaurs and died off. And we discover that there are other forms of life on the planet. And then Mother creates new life with one of these serpents.”
Guzikowski chimes in, “Mother and Father think the giant skull is from an extinct creature, not realizing that someday Mother would give birth to one and reintroduce it to the world and reactivate the planet. You’re seeing all of these iconic elements — the serpent, the garden, Adam and Eve — but they’re not the versions we know. We subvert expectations a little bit.”
How was Mother, an android, impregnated in the first place, you ask? Guzikowski explains, ” It’s kind of a weird thing, because it’s almost like she’s been digitally impregnated with information, as it were. While she was communing with her creator in a virtual space, basically having sex in the simulation, something else got inside and downloaded her drive with information about how to build a new being. In essence, Mother is like a 3-D printer. Her body starts to work on that digital information and it decides that it needs more organic compounds. Because she’s an android, her body could download that information and make something out of it. Her body was never designed to give birth, though, so it has to improvise a bit to get the thing out of her.”
And what about that strange dream sequence Mother had, wherein she witnessed what appeared to be a mask-wearing android being tortured inside some sort of device?
“Basically, when she has that dream and she sees that thing and that weird kind of helmet robot head thing, and the fuel blood starts gushing out of the front of it, kind of the nozzle on the front, what that is, there is actually an android inside of that,” Guzikowski confirmed in a different chat with Collider. “It’s sort of like a birthing prison sort of thing. So their body’s inside the pentagonal bottom half. The top piece is a helmet that goes over the android, and the android then births a circuit out the nozzle. So, that’s essentially what that is. That’s kind of what you’re seeing, this kind of foreshadowing of what’s about to happen to her, but she can’t quite put it together until the very last moment when it’s too late.”
Needless to say, it’s looking like things are going to get *really weird* in the show’s second season. And Guzikowski promises that there is a whole lot left to explore on Kepler-22b.
“I can’t spell it all out now, because the show is so much about mystery, but we have a multiple-season plan that will illuminate a lot of stuff,” Guzikowski told NY Times. “It’s like a big haunted house, and it’s about the people who lived there before, all the rooms you haven’t seen the inside of, the backyard you haven’t seen yet.”
He continued, “So we are going to a very different region for Season 2. It’s like Season 1 was in Arizona, and Season 2 is in Siberia. That’s just as an example — we’re not going to a snowy place. And there are going to be new arrivals from Earth [some of whom Travis Fimmel’s Marcus had a run in with in the finale] and a change in power dynamics.”
“Hopefully it’s a good long five, six-season arc for the whole thing in terms of the map that exists now,” Guzikowski told Collider in the same interview mentioned above.
For more from Scott and Guzikowski, head over to NY Times and Collider.
All 10 episodes of “Raised by Wolves” are now streaming on HBO Max.