Raised by Wolves (series): Ok, might be tough for non Sci-Fi fans

For me whenever I see the name Ridley Scott I am at least going to dabble into whatever it is that is involved. This is a certain amount of fanboi-dom on my part because to state that everything the man does is good would be wrong IMO. A lot of what he does is absolute crap and that may or may not be directly his fault.

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Just the first 2 episodes are directed by Scott and for the rest he is there as an executive producer. I can't help but feel at least a little that this was a marketing ploy so they can say "directed by Ridley Scott!" on all of their adverts and this technically isn't a lie.

This is not a new series. I was released in 2020 but unless I have accidentally been living under a rock in that year and the two that followed, I don't recall there being much talk about it. While watching the episodes I guess I can kind of understand why that is. The story is just "ok." It's not particularly compelling and honestly, not a lot happens. The visuals are also just ok, with some of the green-screen work looking decidedly fake at times.

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The story, in a shell, here is that there are two android creatures named "mother" and "father" who have decided, either by their own volition but most likely programming, to bring some fetuses to some planet that doesn't exist IRL to raise them and have a go at revitalizing the human race after massive war on Earth made living there untenable.

They do not have actual emotions but they do adapt certain humanistic traits at times in order to try to relate better to the humans that they raise. They make a lot of mistakes, some of which don't seem to make much sense because they at times are seen as being able to readily determine the toxicity or radioactive qualities of things simply by being near them, but at other times they are totally taken by surprise when something has a detrimental effect on the humans in their care.

Mother is a type of android called a Necromancer, and has a powerful array of weapons at her disposal, so powerful that at times she cannot control them and therefore she has to warn the children to not look at her and stay away from her when she is "weaponized."

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She can fly, she can scream some sort of sonic weapon that vaporizes all sorts of animals in its path, she has silver surfer skin that cannot be penetrated by bullets, and she is basically an unstoppable force. The downside is that she has so much power that this apparently overpowers her empathy and she can end up destroying the very things she is charged with protecting. Therefore she only gets weaponized when she absolutely must.

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I couldn't help but chuckle a bit at the wonderfully diverse group of children on the show and then I remembered that this was released in 2020, so this was probably required. It has no impact on the story and there is no preaching about modern-day issues, so this is good.

The first couple of episodes where it is being explained what the situation actually is and how dire it is, well, those are good. We are also briefly introduced to some of the remaining humans and their spaceships and then we get roped into a fight between the necromancer and these humans, which she easily wins.

This was all a lot of fun but then the typical series dulldrums kind of kick in because from that point forward we don't really have a lot else to focus on and instead we have both sides spending hours and hours and hours bickering with one another and also preparing for a fight that will undoubtedly happen at the season end that I haven't even gotten to yet.

This leads to "Jack being a dull boy" and I found myself frequently searching around my living room for something else to do in order to pass the time during the 47 minutes out 55 that are dedicated to rather pointless verbal arguments between child and android parent, soldier to superior, and even android to android. Then 7 minutes of so of actual story-moving substance happens. This begins right around the episode 4 mark and it was really disappointing to see.

"I've seen six episodes, and worry that the momentum drags. This is the kind of show where two sides fight, and then spend half a season preparing to fight again.

-- Darren Franich

The acting is solid including by most of the child actors in the cast, which are member of all casts that I normally dislike. So I will give credit where it is due.

There is an underlying theme of religion and atheism battling it out with one another and this also being a major reason why the Earth was embroiled in combat previously. The androids seek to raise the children with no religion and over time realize that this is not so easy to do and how it is complicated, difficult, and at times impossible to control them with stories. I think there is some reflection of the writers' own opinions in there but this is some of the more interesting dialogue that happens.

The stupider dialogue is the kids and android parents endlessly arguing about rather trivial things such as what they will eat and how it is or is not safe for them to roam around outside the camp and other such things that I personally find annoying. Some may like it though, maybe it is just because I don't have kids.

Should I watch it?

Just as I suspected, they really try to push the fact that Ridley directed this and even talked about how he did Gladiator, The Martian, and Alien in the words on screen.

He has very little to do with the making of this show and was likely pad a big amount to have something to do with it just to use his name.

But as to whether or not you should watch this I can only really recommend it if you are both a sci-fi fan, and you have nothing else on your viewing plate at the moment. This is the only reason why I am watching it and I am only somewhat invested in the story despite my best efforts. There are serious pacing issues and it is clear to me that the producers has a 90 minutes story and some executive was like "ok, but how can we make it 10 hours long?" and that's exactly what they did.

It annoys me when series do this and I honestly don't understand their motivation for doing so. Had this been a mini-series it could have been awesome but instead I think the scores on Meta, RT, and IMBD are inflated by fanbois who would never mark down anything that Ridley Scott has anything to do with.

_{strangely, despite being an HBO original it is not available to stream on HBO Max, it can be legally streamed on AppleTV by renting, Amazon Prime with a sub, or on Tubi for free with ads... lame}