Raised By Wolves: Wildly ambitious new sci-fi TV show

It’s fair to say that there are few, in any, TV shows which would match the ambitions of this new sci-fi series from Ridley Scott.

Raised By Wolves is not your average TV show by a long stretch.

The wildly ambitious, high-concept sci-fi series is created by Aaron Guzikowski, the screenwriter behind director Denis Villenueve’s lauded film Prisoners.

It’s clear that accomplished filmmakers see something in Guzikowski’s storytelling nous because Raised By Wolves features among its executive producers Ridley Scott, who also set the tone and visual identity for this complex series by directing the first two episodes.

Starring Travis Fimmel, Amanda Collin, Abubakar Salim and Niamh Algar, Raised By Wolves, starting on Thursday on Foxtel*, combines questions of faith, artificial intelligence and soul with unusual, almost ethereal, imagery of a menacing alien planet and stomach-churning moments of graphic, shocking violence.

Androids with souls?

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In the future, Earth has been ravaged by a war between the devout Mithraic, believers of uncompromising faith, and the atheists.

Before the planet is completely destroyed, two ships are launched into space towards Kepler-22, a tough but life-sustaining planet where the fossils of its extinct previous inhabitants are buried in strange circular patterns.

One ship is an ark named Heaven built by the Mithraic in which hundreds if not thousands of Earth’s final survivors are put into stasis for the many years’ journey.

The other is a small vessel occupied by two androids who arrive on Kepler with minimal supplies and 12 embryos of which six are “born” in incubator containers attached to Mother (Collin) by cords.

Mother and Father (Salim) have been entrusted to raise these six children as the first human colonisers of Kepler-22 in the small settlement they establish.

Some dozen years later, the plans have been slightly waylaid – which is when the Mithraic finally arrive, setting off a chain of events that challenges Mother and Father’s prescribed roles and the dogmatic beliefs of both the atheist-programmed androids and the Mithraic.

Raised By Wolves is full of visual pageantry.

Travis Fimmel plays one of the humans in Raised By Wolves

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There are a few core themes at play in Raised By Wolves and one of them is faith, but it’s never as simple as it may seem at first. Among the Mithraic are nonbelievers, while Mother and Father’s child Campion (Winta McGrath) wants to believe in something.

Raised By Wolves’ belief seems to lie somewhere in the middle and it’s critical of restrictive structures of religion in which second-in-command clerics rape unconscious young women, those who go by “his eminence” are expected to be ferried about like an Egyptian pharaoh and the progeny of high-ranking officials still tries to throw around their status while sitting in a mud hut.

But what the series is most interested in is parenting and the extreme actions taken in the name of protecting their charges and the damage wrought.

It’s predominantly explored through Mother and Father and two humans, Marcus (Fimmel) and Sue (Algar) but the parenting and birth motifs are present in the series in many other ways as well, including through a young pregnant woman who’s conflicted about what grows inside her.

Raised By Wolves’ semi-barren, blue-tinged survivalist environment is a strange canvas to examine the expectations of parenting, and its ambitions aren’t always met by its execution.

Warning: Some graphic violence in Raised By Wolves.

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There’s an unevenness to what it’s saying about its conceits, unable to effectively tie together its various ideas – as if, like the children in the story, it hadn’t fully developed.

Some seemingly final character choices are walked back without consequence, violent acts are glossed over and convenient discoveries are made exactly when they need to be.

The pacing also veers from full throttle to meandering with no discernible reason.

Despite its flaws, there is something intriguing about Raised By Wolves, particularly Mother and Father, but that may owe more to Collin and Salim’s hypnotic performances than it does to the writing.

That Ridley Scott touch can certainly be seen in the physicality and rhythms of Mother, a character that owes a lot to Prometheus and Alien: Covenant ’s curious android, David.

Collin’s stiffness and sometimes utilitarian approach is balanced by Salim’s empathetic countenance, a dynamic that is already a reversal of gender norms let alone biological/non-biological parents.

While there are a lot of recognisable sci-fi tropes and it doesn’t meet the bar set by the best predecessors in the genre – AI (Ex Machina), faith (Battlestar Galactica reboot, The Leftovers) – there is enough in Raised By Wolves’ visual pageantry and conceptual aspirations to at least see where’s it going to end up.

Raised By Wolves premieres on Fox Showcase and Foxtel Now on Thursday, September 3 at 8.30pm

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