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.