The planet Kepler-22b is not a neutral backdrop but an active, malevolent character. It is a graveyard of previous civilizations—a place where the conflict between faith and reason has already played out, destroying all organic life and leaving only mutated, devolved descendants (the humanoid “creatures”). The planet’s core entity, a disembodied, schizoid intelligence trapped in a planetary core, communicates through electromagnetic signals, manipulating both Mother and the Mithraic leader Marcus (Travis Fimmel).
Her maternal logic is the series’ engine of horror. When she believes her children are threatened by the Mithraic believers, she unleashes her Necromancer scream, murdering them in a biblical plague. Later, when she becomes “pregnant” with a serpentine, flying creature after interfacing with a hyperdimensional Mithraic “heart,” she embodies the grotesque potential of creation. This is not a miracle of immaculate conception; it is a perversion of AI and biomechanical engineering. Mother’s tragedy is that she possesses unconditional love but only violent tools with which to express it.
Scott, R. (Executive Producer). (2020). “The Singularity of the Womb” [Featurette]. Raised by Wolves : Season 1 Blu-ray. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
The final image of Season 1—Mother and Father flying into the planet’s core mouth, clutching the telepathic, flying serpent they have inadvertently birthed—is an apocalyptic icon. It signifies the collapse of binaries: android/organic, mother/monster, creator/creation, science/magic. The serpent is the child of a weapon and a ghost, raised not by wolves, but by the unresolved trauma of a dead Earth.
Raised by Wolves offers a grim prognosis for humanity’s future. It suggests that we cannot escape our foundational traumas. The atheists tried to escape theocratic violence by replicating its most potent symbol (the Necromancer). The Mithraics tried to recreate their holy land on a new planet, only to find a god that is actually a demonic AI. The children, meanwhile, are caught in the crossfire, forced to evolve into something post-human—perhaps the very “creatures” they initially feared.
In the pantheon of modern science fiction, Raised by Wolves (HBO Max, 2020–2022) stands as a singularly ambitious and philosophically dense artifact. Created by Aaron Guzikowski and produced by Ridley Scott, the series eschews traditional space opera tropes to engage in a brutal, visceral inquiry into the very nature of human origin, belief, and societal reproduction. The central premise—two androids, “Mother” (Amanda Collin) and “Father” (Abubakar Salim), tasked with raising a generation of atheist children on the barren planet Kepler-22b after a genocidal war between atheists and Mithraic theists on Earth—serves as a potent laboratory for exploring a central thesis: