Raised by Wolves review: “Feeding” gives snake-baby its moment to shine

We’re back for another review of Raised by Wolves! After being relegated to peeking out of its cave for the occasional cameo the past few weeks, snake-baby is taking center stage this time around. We also get the follow-up to that insane acid sea creature kidnapping of Tempest’s baby last week. There’s much to talk about, so let’s get right into it.

As always, this review will contain SPOILERS. If you haven’t watched this week’s episode of Raised by Wolves, go do that, then come back to reflect with us on how the laws of nature mean nothing and androids have souls.

Raised by Wolves review: “Feeding”

This episode felt tighter and more focused than some of the previous ones, as character paths converge and several major plotlines dominate the proceedings. Last week’s episode, “The Tree,” gave us two huge cliffhangers: Sue had been transformed into the tree of knowledge from Mithraic prophecy and Tempest’s baby was stolen by a humanoid creature from the acid sea. It was a heavy ending, and “Feeding” takes those plot threads and runs with them.

The episode was balanced pretty evenly between the two plotlines, starting with Marcus (Travis Fimmel) and Paul (Felix Jamieson) grieving the loss of Sue. Paul brings those creepy, fleshy fruits from the tree-that-is-his-mom to the Atheist colony and tells everyone they’re good to eat. People have a bonanza while Paul shudders and eventually runs away because the sight of people eating fruit that that fell off his mom-tree is sickeningly horrific. And hey, I was right there with him. It’s pretty nasty.

Things start to get really interesting when Mother (Amanda Collin) finds out what’s happening. After finding the tree of knowledge and realizing what happened to Sue, Mother flies back to the colony and chases everyone away from the fruit, even plucking one away from her youngest adopted daughter Vita (Ivy Wong). Vita is sent to the medical bay for scans, and since we didn’t find out if there are adverse effects of eating the fruit this week, that’s a mystery I’m watching out for in the season finale.

Just then, snake-baby starts raising a ruckus from its cave. Mother takes the fruit and goes to check on the serpent child of her heart…but it has an unexpected reaction to the fruit. The serpent finally breaks down the doors of its cage, eats all the fruit left in the colony, and then soars through the air toward the tree of knowledge.

It’s good that Raised by Wolves hasn’t spent all its time on the snake-baby (or “Number Seven”) this season, but I was glad to see it rise to the forefront this week. Its link to Sol represents one of the show’s biggest mysteries, and finally we started to understand what it all means.

Marcus and Mother team up

At the tree of knowledge, Marcus and Paul finally break with their Mithraic faith. “I wanted so bad for Sol to be the answer, a way out of the darkness. But maybe Sol is the darkness,” Marcus tells his son. It’s a powerful moment, and felt like the right way for Marcus to start this huge character pivot.

But it’s too little too late. As Sue’s voice creepily comes over their radio, begging them to burn the tree, Number Seven appears on the horizon. We then get the full horrific truth: the tree of knowledge exists for the serpent, not for any faithful Mithraic followers. The serpent devours the entire tree (RIP Sue), roots and all, and “weaponizes.” The result is…insane. Snake-baby becomes a Cthulu-like horror, sprouting octopus tentacles from around its head and growing pelvic fins reminiscent of a nurse shark. Mother appears and tries to scream it to death…but her programming seizes up. Her caregiving protocols still recognize snake-baby as her child, even though it is now undeniably a monster. It zaps her with its own electrified voice, sending her plummeting to the ground before heading off and going on a rampage.

When I think back on season 2 of Raised by Wolves, this aerial confrontation is going to be one of the defining moments of the season. Visually, it’s stunning, and it represents a really important character moment for Mother, who realizes she physically cannot kill Number Seven. The fact that she has this reckoning in the same episode where Marcus loses his faith in Sol makes “Feeding” a major turning point for the two biggest characters of the series. It’s perfectly timed to justify their subsequent team-up, as Marcus and Paul help Mother back to the colony so that she can be reprogrammed.

It also started the avalanche of every one of our main players finding out that snake-baby is actually Number Seven, who Campion and the rest all believed didn’t survive childbirth. Mother confesses it to Marcus and Paul; Father (Abubakar Salim) informs Tempest and Hunter; and Campion pretty much figures it out on his own. While it does feel a little convenient that everyone got that info all in this one episode, it also levels the playing field for our main cast to go into the season finale knowing exactly what’s going on. We’ll allow it.

Mother seeks help from the Grandmother android we saw last week, and we get some more information about the serpent. Apparently Sol used something like this in ancient days on Kepler-22b in an attempt to destroy the planet. We don’t know why the alien signal known as Sol wants to destroy Kepler-22b, but at least now we have a hint about its motives. Last time around the planet survived, but whatever went down seemingly caused humans to devolve into the creatures that now haunt the wilderness and the acid ocean. It doesn’t bode well for whatever showdown lies ahead.

Grandmother offers to give Mother her facial veil, which will cloud her sensors enough to let her override her caregiving program. That…sounds like it could very easily go wrong? Let’s just hope Campion and the rest of the kids aren’t around when she tries to put down snake-baby.

The hunt for the missing baby

The rest of “Feeding” centers around the hunt for Tempest’s child, which was abducted by a sea creature last episode. There’s a lot of inter-family drama between the various adopted kids and Father going on here, and every actor does a great job.

Hunter (Ethan Hazzard) develops a submersible drone that Tempest (Jordan Loughran) outfits with skin from one of the sea creatures so that it can survive underwater. The handful of underwater shots we get are very cool, but the group doesn’t get any closer to finding the baby.

They do, however, cross paths with Vrille (Morgan Santo), the android who murdered the Mithraic as payback for them slicing off her face. Vrille is now sporting a white mask that made me think of Jason from Friday the 13th, but hey, she really just wants to be accepted. Holly (Aasiya Shah) very understandably doesn’t want anything to do with Vrille, since she was the sole surviving witness of the slaughter a few episodes back. But Vrille claims she heard a baby crying down the beach, and offers to help find Tempest’s missing child. Of course they can’t refuse her help.

The search for the baby then gets into some seriously weird territory. First the group finds an empty cave that has the corpse of a sea creature infant inside. That should have clued us in about what’s to come, but it was still terrifying nonetheless. After Vrille runs off and Campion (Winta McGrath) chases after her, Tempest, Hunter, and Father finally do find the baby, and uh…it’s classic Raised by Wolves weirdness. The sea creature is breastfeeding the baby in a cave.

Upon seeing this, Tempest has a sudden change of heart. She decides, hey, maybe this sea monster should just have the baby. It looks like it’s doing an okay job. Father goes along with it, because he’s an android and it’s not in his programming to force Tempest to do something against her wishes. But Hunter can’t believe what he’s hearing, and I’m with him. We’re talking about leaving the baby with a literal sea monster. How do we even know its milk would sustain this baby? What if it happens to get some acid droplets on it? There are so many reasons why this is a horrible idea, and Hunter thankfully voices some of them by saying Tempest isn’t thinking straight about it.

Ultimately, he goes against her wishes, shoots the sea creature, and retrieves the baby. Tempest refuses to take it from him, so Hunter is now seemingly the surrogate caregiver for the child. While I can appreciate the drama here, it felt a little forced. Just last episode Tempest seemingly had a huge change of heart when she actually held the child for the first time. Now she’s saying that when she looks at the baby she’s reminded of the father, who raped her while she was in stasis. While that is totally fair and a point the show has handled well, it felt inconsistent with the way she acted last episode. It amounted to two heel turns for the character over the course of as many episodes. Father agreeing also felt forced considering that he and Mother have time and again gone against their children’s wishes if it meant safeguarding the future of humanity on Kepler-22b. How leaving a human baby with a sea monster doesn’t violate those protocols is beyond me.

All that aside, this was a great episode of Raised by Wolves, and set us up for what looks to be an exciting season finale next week.

Raised by Bullet Points

• Vrille dying in Campion’s arms was pretty heartbreaking, although I’m glad that plot thread won’t be going on too long. The pair of them discussing whether androids can have a soul was pure science fiction at its best.
• Apparently snake-baby is hunting for Campion, because it’s jealous that he is Mother’s favorite child. While the seeds for this were planted earlier in the season, it wasn’t really made clear how Mother came to that conclusion. A slight oversight that nonetheless jarred me out of the episode.
• Travis Fimmel’s acting continued to be fantastic in this episode. Marcus’ struggle with grief and his crumbling faith was portrayed so well.

The verdict

“Feeding” was another episode of Raised by Wolves that encapsulated all the series’ weirdness and epic sci-fi glory. The serpent finally took the spotlight, and we found out that the tree of knowledge is actually snake food. There were eerie parallels in the episode title between the serpent eating the tree and the sea creature feeding Tempest’s baby; I always appreciate that kind of intentional thematic work.

But unfortunately, the episode has the same kind of small oversights that have plagued this season, such as Tempest’s sudden heel turn or Mother somehow omnisciently knowing snake-baby’s jealous agenda. It was a solid episode, but those things prevented it from being quite as great as it could have been.

Episode grade: B

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