Raised by Wolves review: “King” is a shockingly horrific test of faith

It’s time for another review of HBO Max’s Raised by Wolves, the weirdest, boldest, most occasionally gruesome sci-fi show on the air right now. Will snake-baby get to show us more about how he’s really a big cuddle-bug and not interested in vivisecting people with his rows of pointy teeth? Will Mother and Father reconcile their android marital problems after the return of her Necromancer powers led to the shutdown of the Atheist super computer? Will Marcus Drusus and his flock of Mithraic zealots find some new path forward now that they’ve been ousted from their previous hideout?

Only on this show can all those seemingly outrageous plotlines exist coherently. Raised by Wolves doesn’t answer all our questions this week — this is a show that feels like it’d fit well in a cinema archive next to Lost, because for every answer it gives it always introduces new questions. Some plotlines are missing almost entirely this week or relegated to minor mentions, but what does happen warrants plenty of discussion.

As always, this review contains SPOILERS for this week’s episode, as well as the preceding episodes.

Raised by Wolves review: “King”

Last week’s episode, “Control,” served up a couple of big mid-season shifts, and “King” spends a lot of time dealing with the fallout. Mother shut down the Atheist Trust and has taken up de facto leadership of the colony, Marcus and his followers are off spelunking into forgotten ruins, and everyone is readjusting.

There are a few crises of faith that form the core of “King,” and the biggest centers around Sue (Niamh Algar). Last week, her kind-of-adoptive son Paul (Felix Jamieson) was infected by a biobomb in the Trust’s scheme to kill Marcus (Travis Fimmel), which led to a scaly growth coming out of his skin and cocooning him. The episode begins with a flat declaration that he has less than 24 hours before the cocoon totally dissolves all the human parts of himself. Mother (Amanda Collin) doesn’t seem too perturbed by this — the data shows Paul…might evolve into a snake? Again, this is Raised by Wolves, so anything is on the table.

Obviously this makes Mother think of her snake-baby and she gets a twinkle in her eye imagining all the evolutionary links, but Sue’s having none of it. She pushes herself to the edge, reconnecting with her own previously sidelined faith in a search for any possible way to save the boy who’s come to be her son. Algar has always been great in this role and I’ve felt the show has underutilized her character this season, so it’s nice to see her get some deeper material. This was really her week to shine and she did a fantastic job. The scene where she hallucinates the leeches is a standout, and a great dose of claustrophobic sci-fi horror.

But oh, it wasn’t even close to the most horrific stuff from the episode. Raised by Wolves has a tendency to be slow and brooding and ask big questions that lull you into a sense of thoughtful security…and then crank the gore and violence up to 11 right when you least expect.

This week Marcus and the Mithraic discover another pentagonal temple like the one from season 1, except it’s cracked open, allowing them access to the giant tunnel into the heart of the planet. Believing it represents a trial that could give them the secret to finding/planting the tree of knowledge, Marcus descends into the tunnel…and then all hell breaks loose.

Remember Vrille (Morgan Santo), the android who got her face chopped off last episode and then hurled herself off a cliff to escape the Mithraic? Well, she survived, and she is not happy about what happened. Or particularly stable. Her massacre of the Mithraic might be the most terrifying horror sequence in the show’s entire run. I kid you not, I found myself squirming in my seat and saying “Oh god, no,” repeatedly as she literally butchered the zealots one after another. Director Alex Gabassi said in the behind-the-episode featurette that he wanted to give every actor in the Mithraic flock a good death, and oh boy did he succeed.

It’s an excellent sequence that leads to Vrille killing her “mother” Decima (Kim Engelbrecht) by slicing her face off to help her “understand what it’s like to be [her].” Brutal.

We need to give a nod to actor Aasiya Shah (Holly), who is with the Mithraic for this sequence. While everyone had their moments to shine, Shah really stole the scene. Raised by Wolves has a large cast and at times Shah and some of the other younger actors have lingered in the background, but this week she really got a chance to use her acting chops and the episode was much better for it.

However, despite Raised by Wolves’ fantastic production values, there continues to be minor editing oversights that knock me out of the narrative at times. This week it was Sue and Campion’s quest for leeches. How did Sue and Campion know to bait the aquatic humanoid creatures that live in the acid sea who were only discovered for the first time a couple episodes ago? The colony previously had no record of them. A line or two of dialogue would have solved that, but instead it’s glossed over without so much as a mention. Then, after Sue barely manages to pluck two leeches off an unconscious creature before it awakens, the very next shot is her back in the lab with a whole tray full of them. I could totally buy it if she and Campion continued baiting other creatures….but the show needed to make that a little clearer so it doesn’t feel like an inconsistency.

Raised by Bullet Points

• We didn’t see a lot of the android that Father revived this week, but what we did see was pretty cool. I loved the tonal voice that is being used for that android and am looking forward to seeing more of it next week. But my god was that ultrasound that popped onto its mask during the scene with Tempest creepy.
• The tension between Mother and Father was great. I got chills when he said “I feel we’re becoming too human to be the parents our children deserve.”
• The scene where Mother is torturing Cleaver was another standout. She was a lot scarier in this week’s episode, and it’s interesting to see her use the torture room willingly now that she’s in control of the colony, compared to her reluctance earlier in the season. Plus, the way the camera cracked to show Cleaver’s glasses breaking was brilliant.
• Did you catch the glimpse of the giant, toothy worm in the tunnel that Marcus went down? Are they the creatures that have made these tunnels we’ve seen throughout the show? It seemed to be staying where it was in order to lead Marcus to the right offshoot tunnel, so presumably this means they has some connection to the Sol “signal,” right?
• Speaking of Marcus, that being that revived and then devolved when it was exposed to the nanobots from Romulus’ tooth was really intriguing. Is the devolution something that was forced on the humanoid inhabitants of Kepler-22b? That tooth talisman came from Earth, so whatever the connection is to Sol, I hope we learn more about it.
• Lastly, Sue promising she’ll do “anything” to Sol if it helps her save her son is pretty ominous. While Raised by Wolves can be kind of on the nose with its religious allegories at times, this one was really effective. There’s something terrifying about the idea of praying to a “divine” being…knowing that it’s actually a real thing and has an agenda that is very likely not in your long-term best interest. We got hints that Sol is going to make Sue hold to that promise next week, and I’m excited to see where it leads.

The verdict

All told, this was another very solid episode of Raised by Wolves. It had the series’ trademark blend of big sci-fi questions mixed with shocking horror, which is as effective as ever. “King” upped the tension from last week’s game-changing episode. If it wasn’t for the same sorts of minor editing inconsistencies that have been a recurring issue, I’d have very few complaints.

Grade: B+

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