For nearly five decades, Ridley Scott has consistently explored the fundamental question of what it means to be human in a world that often feels incomprehensible. From the dystopian industrial landscapes of Alien to the neon-drenched existentialism of Blade Runner, Scott’s science fiction has always been about more than just spaceships and futuristic technology. He uses those elements to examine humanity, making us confront our fragility and occasionally appreciate our preciousness.
A New Hope… or a Lost Opportunity?
Scott’s upcoming post-apocalyptic thriller, The Dog Stars, promises to continue this tradition. Based on a novel by Peter Heller, the script follows survivors attempting to rebuild life after civilization collapses, with isolation gradually giving way to the possibility of human connection. It’s another Scott story about humans grappling with what remains after the systems they depended on have vanished.
If that sounds like your kind of Ridley Scott science fiction, there’s a good chance you somehow missed Raised by Wolves.
What is “Raised by Wolves” About?
Raised by Wolves is one of the best examples of Scott’s unique brand of science fiction television, even though he didn’t direct every episode. Created by Aaron Guzikowski and executive produced by Scott, Raised by Wolves opens with two androids — Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) — arriving on the distant planet Kepler-22b with a handful of human embryos to raise a new generation in the wake of Earth’s destruction. From there, the show becomes something much weirder than a simple survival story as each newly revealed layer only raises more questions.
Raised by Wolves feels like the TV version of Scott’s obsessions. The series is riddled with ancient mysteries, artificial intelligence, religious fanaticism, questions about creation and an almost constant anxiety over whether humanity is actually capable of building a better world. It also looks incredible, with the kind of enormous, alien landscapes and unsettling production design that makes you feel like you’re watching a lost Scott movie stretched into a TV series.
To understand exactly how mesmerizing the show can be, you only need to look at Amanda Collin’s terrifying, utterly captivating performance as Mother. In the pilot — directed by Scott himself — the seemingly docile, latex-clad android is revealed to be a repurposed “Necromancer.” She transforms into a weapon of mass destruction, floating above the ground in a rigid, metallic, almost Christ-like pose, capable of reducing her enemies to bursting sacks of blood with a single, deafening sonic scream. It is a staggering sequence that instantly establishes the show’s tonal signature: hauntingly beautiful, uncompromisingly brutal, and unapologetically weird.
The series never takes its foot off the gas, leaning heavily into surreal imagery and thematic paradoxes. We watch androids, which were programmed as staunch atheists to protect their human children from the religious zealotry that destroyed Earth, slowly develop their own forms of faith and irrationality. “Belief in the unreal can comfort the human mind, but it also weakens it,” Mother coldly warns her children early on, a line that drips with irony as the ancient mysteries of Kepler-22b begin to unravel her rigid logic. Whether it’s the biomechanical birth of a giant flying serpent or the unsettling devolution of the planet’s indigenous creatures, Raised by Wolves commits to a level of hallucinatory science fiction that studios rarely dare to greenlight.
A “Westworld” for Our Times
Raised by Wolves also makes for a fascinating companion to Westworld. Both series are interested in artificial intelligence, consciousness, humanity’s relationship with its creations and the possibility that the beings we build might ultimately understand the world better than we do. But where Westworld became a puzzle box, Raised by Wolves was much more interested in making its mysteries feel genuinely unknowable. You weren’t necessarily supposed to have all the answers. Sometimes the fun was realizing that the universe was far stranger than you initially assumed.
The show’s ambition is also what makes its cancellation so frustrating. Much like Westworld, HBO Max pulled the plug in 2022 after just two seasons of Scott’s series, leaving the story unfinished. The cancellation came amid the Warner-Discovery merger, and in 2026, Scott Free Productions executive David W. Zucker again pointed to that corporate upheaval as the reason a planned third season was abandoned.
Watching Raised by Wolves today might come with the unfortunate knowledge that you aren’t getting the ending the creators intended, but I’d argue that’s not a reason to avoid it. If anything, the show’s brief run is proof of how rare truly uncompromised science fiction is; it deserves to be remembered for the height of its ambition, not the abruptness of its ending.
With The Dog Stars on the horizon, it’s clear Scott hasn’t lost his edge for bleak, beautifully strange storytelling. There’s no better time to revisit Kepler-22b. Raised by Wolves might be an unfinished story, but its breathtaking weirdness is still impossible to find anywhere else on television.
Source: Polygon
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