Raised By Wolves

 Thanks to having some access to HBO, I've checked out the first episode of Raised by Wolves, a science fiction show that feels like it's an adaptation, but is in fact an original work. It's odd, in this day and age, to feel like that distinction is important for genre television. A little over a decade ago, my sense was almost always that television was original stories, with film being the medium for adaptation. But today, after Game of Thrones, the idea of adapting novels to TV has really caught on, especially for books of a longer variety. My favorite sci-fi show in recent years, The Expanse, is an adaptation of (the first two-thirds) of a novel series (apparently the last trilogy takes place long after the first six books, so it was a natural stepping-off point).

In a strange way, not being an adaptation introduces a sense of trepidation - TV shows often go off the rails after starting with a bold and solid few seasons, and there's a certain comfort to knowing that a series is already known to conclude well, and that all it needs is a proper translation. Indeed, Game of Thrones is a great example of this - once the showrunners ran out of novels to adapt, the general consensus is that the quality of the show took a nose dive.

That's all sort of meta-commentary, though. Let's talk about Raised By Wolves.

I think one of the reasons it comes off as an adaptation is that this seems to be introducing some heady stuff.

We begin with narration from Campion, a human child who is born (of a sort) and raised on Kepler 22B, a distant planet. Earth is no longer habitable, and there's a division between two factions: the Mithraics and the Atheists. Mithraism, if you're unfamiliar (I only know about it because of an Early Medieval History class I took in college) was a popular religion in the waning days of the Roman Empire, and historians generally think that it stood a good chance of spreading across Europe if Christianity hadn't spread faster. It's not obvious if this is an alternate timeline or a far-future in which Mithraism was rediscovered, but what we know is that the Atheists lack the power and resources to launch a true ark-ship to take humans to this new world, and so instead they send two androids, known as Mother and Father, along with human embryos for the androids to grow in artificial wombs.

The world they arrive on is not lifeless - there are planets and the massive bones of serpents. Mother and Father technologically gestate the embryos and ultimately raise the children on this world.

One of the oddities of the world is a large number of sink-holes that seem bottomless, and it's into one of these that the first of the children to die falls. Mother and Father try to do their best to educate the kids and protect them, instilling in them a fervent distrust in anything resembling religious faith, but despite their efforts, the other children succumb to some kind of wasting disease, and in the end, only 12-year-old Campion is left.

When Father spies a Mithraic ark-ship orbiting the planet, he intends to signal them to ensure Campion survives - their mission to found a new human colony cannot continue, as there is only one male human left, and so he does this to at least protect their one remaining child. Father's attempt to access their ship - which was stuck about fifteen feet down one of those sinkholes, almost ends in disaster due to a fraying rope, so Father resolves to try again later, but then Mother confronts him about what he intended to do. Father is unable to persuade her, and she kills him, impaling him on the teeth of the giant serpent skeleton near their settlement.

However, Campion goes into the ship and manages to contact the Mithraics, who arrive not much later. Mother attempts to pass herself off as a human (taking the name Lamia, which is a monster out of Greek myth,) but her ruse is fairly transparent, and the Mithraics who have arrived there resolve quickly to take the boy.

This, though, seems to activate some deep-hidden power within Mother, which allows her to horribly kill two of the Mithraics. She then steals the last one's shuttle and goes up to their ark-ship, where she seems to be able to make people explode with a scream. She forces the ship into a collision course with the planet and then takes a group of children from within the ship back on her shuttle, arriving back at the settlement when the ship - which may contain the last of humanity aboard - crashes into a mountainside.

There are... about a million unanswered questions here. But the show strives for an I think achieves a mythic feel to it (the pilot at least is directed by Ridley Scott, who's pretty good at this sort of thing).

What I find really interesting is the possibility for unconventional mythological homage. While much of this does seem to be fairly Biblical in inspiration - two parentless adults raising what is meant to be the first of a new humanity in a, for a time at least, untouched world, not to mention a big ophidian motif - I'm really curious to see to what degree Mithraic mythological references are worked in.

It does also seem pretty grim - and we'll have to see how draining that is as the show goes on. But I'm definitely curious, which I think is a pretty important thing to evoke in a pilot.