What to watch
Sci-fi horror. This daring but drawn-out series is produced by film director Ridley Scott, and his fingerprints are visible all over it.
The showrunner may be Aaron Guzikowski, but the cold and bleak worldview Scott established in Alien (1979) and pushed to its grim limits in Alien: Covenant (2017) is front and centre in Raised by Wolves and dominates his collaborator’s input.
The show starts with an intriguing premise: two androids, Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim), land on Kepler-22b – the closest habitable planet outside our solar system.
A war on Earth between atheists and religious zealots, the Mithraic, has destroyed the planet, and the androids have been sent by an atheist scientist to raise 12 human embryos and restart society anew. Soon a Mithraic spaceship also shows up, leading to fresh conflict.
The first few episodes offer engaging twists and turns, as Mother and Father’s personalities start to develop and we’re introduced to a high-ranking Mithraic couple, Marcus (Vikings’ Travis Fimmel) and Sue (Niamh Algar), and their son, Paul (Felix Jamieson), who might be a messiah.
Shot near Cape Town, the show makes good use of the misty Stellenbosch mountains and Southern Africa’s distinctive quiver trees to create a suitably alien landscape.
Collin gives an astonishing performance, with often contradictory emotions flickering across her face that take Mother from sympathetic to scary in moments, while Salim and Algar provide the heart and humanity. The rest of the characters, unfortunately, aren’t well developed so it’s difficult to feel invested in them.
As more and more mysteries and weighty themes are piled on in each episode, the show loses momentum and the plot gets scattered in so many directions that it’s hard to see how everything can be resolved in a satisfying way.
And after spinning its wheels for about four episodes, the show’s finale packs in a bunch of bonkers ideas, which might tempt you to continue watching or put you off altogether, depending on your appetite for sci-fi tropes. 2020. 10 EPISODES. 16VL.