There’s an old short story by Clive Barker, the creator of Pinhead and the writer-director of Hellraiser, that I think about a lot. It’s called “Pig Blood Blues,” and you can read a pretty beautiful comics adaptation by Chuck Wagner, Fred Burke, and Scott Hampton right here. Go ahead, take a few minutes, I’ll be here when you get back.

Anyway, old Clive, he wrote a line in this story that was frequently on my mind while watching this final episode of Raised by Wolves’ extraordinary second season. The line goes like this—

“This is the state of the beast…to eat and be eaten.”

I won’t get into who in the story says it and why—that’s for you to discover—but I will say that there’s something so perfectly fatalistic in that line, something that sums up so much of what goes on in this season finale. The beast, of course, is humankind, and it’s their—our—fate to kill each other until some larger force comes to kill us all.

I reviewed the season finale of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

So we’re left with a ragtag band of survivors, adult and child, android and human, atheist and believer, running around trying to figure out how to save themselves from a giant tentacled serpent, an acid sea full of humanoid creatures, and an ancient alien intelligence that seems to want them all dead. I can’t be the only person reminded of Game of Thrones (and not just because of the similarities between the two shows’ scores), in which various fabulously wealthy families carried on killing each other while a threat to all life grew more and more powerful, the danger more and more urgent. Good thing these are only stories on TV, right?

Right?

I reviewed last week’s episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Raised by Wolves is, among many things, a work of ferocious body horror. The human—and android—body is a grotesque battlefield on this show—bleeding white goo, erupting into hideous tumors, sprouting growths that surround the victim like a cocoon, giving birth through multiple orifices, removing and consuming weaponized eyeballs, evolving and devolving into terrifying creatures, you name it. At the climax of this episode, aptly titled “The Tree,” it seems like we have a brand new body-horror image to add to the list: Sue’s transformation into a fucking tree.

I reviewed today’s episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

And there you have it! A narratively and emotionally complex episode, filled with far-out sci-fi imagery, fueled by powerful performances from Amanda Collin as Mother and Aasiya Shah as Holly (my God, the way she sobs when Marcus returns to her) among others, raising far more questions than it answers yet still delivering the goods from a storytelling and image-making perspective—all amid a bestiary that seems to be growing by the day. Raised by Wolves, folks. Isn’t it something?

I reviewed the most recent episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

When reviewing a particularly bizarre episode of television, you always run the risk of blowing things out of proportion. The breathless prose you might adopt in order to describe what you’ve watched is a cliché unto itself at this point, and it’s a safe bet that someone out there is making genuinely outré work that puts any given hour of a streaming drama to shame. So I’m going to try and restrain myself when talking about “Control,” the fourth episode of Raised by Wolves’ second season, once I get past saying this: holy Jesus, that was bat-guano crazy.

I reviewed the second episode of Raised by Wolves‘ increasingly odd and percussive second season for Decider.

[Morrisey voice] “Robot with a chainsaw, I know, I know, it’s serious.”

Actually, it’s not serious at all. It’s fucking wild, is what it is! Like, show of hands: Who thought Raised by Wolves would one day show Father, the clinically mild-mannered caretaker android responsible for the fate of the human race, battle a robot with a chainsaw for an arm to the death amid a cheering crowd? Hmmm…I’m not seeing any hands raised!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

If you thought Raised by Wolves was going to be shy about showing us its big snake, think again. The second episode of the show’s second season—released simultaneously with the premiere—delivers on the batshit promise of the Raised By Wolves Season 1 finale in a big way. Not only does the giant flying snake return, it becomes the central focus of the entire plot, as the whole atheist Collective sets out to seek and destroy the beast. I’m guessing that this will be a taller order than they’ve anticipated, but hey, this is Raised by Wolves—I’ve been wrong before, and I could be wrong again.

I reviewed the second half of Raised by Wolves’ two-part Season 2 premiere for Decider.

The show continues to be a rare beast, a meditation on the human condition that doesn’t dwell on the whole what-it-means-to-be-human thing that drags down so much android-based SF. (We’re all human, we know what it means!) It’s strange, it’s mysterious, it’s funny, it’s gross, it’s impeccably acted, it’s beautifully shot by director Ernest Dickerson—it’s Raised by Wolves, and I’m glad it’s back.

I’ll be covering Raised by Wolves Season 2 for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

I forgot to mention this, but I appeared on the Raised by Wolves podcast Crazed by Wolves to discuss the show’s wild first season. Enjoy!

I appeared on the Crazed by Wolves podcast to discuss the first season of everyone’s new sci-fi fave Raised by Wolves—listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Primarily, though, I’m grateful for a show that was so consistently surprising—the biggest surprise of all being that it was a good show in the first place. Raised by Wolves is the best American science-fiction show I’ve seen in years—asking big but not boring questions, using tried-and-true sci-fi devices in unexpected ways, constantly unfolding its dark mysteries before our eyes. With so little resolved in the finale, it is admittedly possible that the show will return for Season 2 only for us to discover it’s bitten off more than it can chew. But I’m all for a show that errs on the side of ambition. In that sense, Raised by Wolves‘s mission is accomplished.

I reviewed the wild season finale of Raised by Wolves for Decider. What an unexpected pleasure this show turned out to be.

We’re deep in the weirdness now. The penultimate episode of Raised by Wolves‘ remarkable first season takes the show’s characters and the world they inhabit in increasingly strange directions. Body horror, splatstick comedy, visions of some unimagined past replete with mysteries—the austerity of the early episodes has been replaced by something far messier, but in its way, just as interesting.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Raised by Wolves‘ first season for Decider.

When you’re eight episodes deep into a show as immaculately crafted as Raised by Wolves, even a single new note in a familiar performance opens up whole new realms of possibility. That’s certainly the case in “Faces,” one of the show’s strangest and least predictable episodes to date. Pivoting off powerful turns by Amanda Collin as Mother and Travis Fimmel as Marcus, it radically upends the status quo, yet it does so in a way that feels like it was organically grown from the soil provided by these two fine actors. The madness makes sense.

I reviewed episode eight of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Raised by Wolves Episode 7 (“Faces”) concerns itself primarily with the trials and temptations of Campion, stuck in that silo, and Marcus, the man who put him there. Both face thorny issues of truth, faith, identity, and personal ethics. And both are haunted by paranormal entities, as if they didn’t have enough to worry about.

I reviewed episode 7 of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

“I’m not one who wants,” Mother tells Tempest, one of the children in her charge. “I’m one who serves.” Turns out she’s only half right. Mother was indeed designed to serve her human creators, first as a weapon of war, then as a caretaker for the children meant to restart human civilization.

But as we’ve seen thus far in Raised By Wolves, she does want. She wants to protect those children and she wants to serve well—those are a given. But her time reliving her buried memories in the crashed Mithraic ark’s still-functional simulation has taught her to want something else: her creator, Campion Sturges. Just before she was deployed, Sturges buried her memories of him deep down inside, so she wouldn’t experience the pain of separation. Now she’s been reunited with him, in electronic spirit anyway, and she treasures every moment. She even steps into her digital past to share a kiss with him before the simulation ends. It’s so achingly romantic you forget one of the participants isn’t human.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

“I have never been prouder of anything in my life than I am of you,” the man says.

“You’re more pleasing than I imagined,” says the android, when the man gives her back her eyes.

“I please you?” he replies, seemingly grateful beyond words to hear it.

I single out these lines in episode five of Raised by Wolves (“Infected Memory”) because they’re so swooningly romantic to hear—but they’re not the voices of lovers speaking to one another. The android is the man’s creation, and the man is preparing to send her from his side forever, in hopes that she will preserve a kernel of humanity rocketed from a dying world. That’s Raised by Wolves for you: constantly tapping wellsprings of emotion where you least expect to find them.

I reviewed episode five of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Four episodes in and I’m willing to stake a claim: You’re not going to find a better show this strange September than Raised by Wolves. Using hoary old sci-fi concepts—androids, aliens, harsh desert worlds, war-torn dystopias—it seems to have tapped into deep new veins of vitality in each, something I wouldn’t have thought possible in a prestige-TV format. But I suppose that just goes to show you that the death of prestige TV has been greatly exaggerated.

I reviewed episode four of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Can you trust someone who’s been programmed to lie to you? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, at least as far as Raised by Wolves is concerned. The show’s third episode (“Virtual Faith”) is deeply concerned with the issue of honesty at odds with people who are programmed—whether technologically, religiously, biologically, or by virtue of their role in a family—to be less than honest. When do their lies cease to be white and start to be actively destructive?

I reviewed episode three of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Well, this is a relief: Episode two of Raised by Wolves is really, really good, too.

And thank goodness. After the effusive, even bombastic praise I heaped on the pilot, boy oh boy would there have been egg on my face if the show were a one-hit wonder that fell apart immediately thereafter! Fortunately, there’s no such problem. Smart, surprising, tense, austere, and still rooted in remarkable performances, “Pentagram” lives up to the promise of the premiere.

I reviewed episode two of Raised by Wolves for Decider. Another winner.

First, an exclamation: Holy shit.

Second, an explanation: I had low expectations for Raised by Wolves. No, scratch that: I had no expectations for Raised by Wolves. You have to understand that I went into this show almost completely cold—no trailers, no advance reviews, nothing. All I knew is that it was an android show directed by Ridley Scott…and that’s where my expectations started to crater. Android-based science fiction is, for me, a big fat zero; I’ve never understood the compulsion to examine What It Means to Be Human over and over and over when we all experience exactly what it means all day every day for our entire lives. Love, joy, fear, suffering—like, we get it. I don’t need Alex Garland to serve me a sexy robot to figure this shit out.

More specifically, I’m deeply indifferent at best to the work of Ridley Scott, the big-time film director and now fairly frequent television producer who directed the series premiere from a script by creator Aaron Guzikowski. With very few exceptions (primarily Alien) I find Scott’s style simultaneously fussy and flaccid, its slovenly storytelling overcompensated for by strange aesthetic flourishes (think of his shaky frame-rate action/horror scenes from the likes of Gladiator and Hannibal) that convey no useful information or emotion. He’s had his name on some stuff I like a great deal, executive producing the masterful first season of AMC’s extraordinary survival-horror show The Terror for example, but that’s about it.

So. A show from one of my least favorite sci-fi subgenres, from a director in whom I have no faith as a rule? I’ll be honest: If I hadn’t been getting paid to watch it, I would have given this one the proverbial hard pass.

Boy, am I happy to be wrong.

I’ll be covering the new HBO Max series Raised by Wolves for Decider all season, starting with my review of the Ridley Scott–directed series premiere. All I can tell you is go into this as cold as you can, because wow.