From Decider.com
https://decider.com/2020/09/25/raised-by-wolves-episode-9-recap/
RAISED BY WOLVES S1 EP 9: UMBILICAL
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Raised by Wolves’ Episode 9 Recap: What to Inject When You’re Expecting
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splatstick comedy, visions of some unimagined past replete with mysteries—the austerity of the early episodes has been replaced by something far messier, but in its way, just as interesting.
Let’s focus on Mother first. It’s fascinating to watch her grapple with the impossible reality that she has a fetus growing inside of her. She’s sure of it, her caretaker programming confirms it, but she lacks the vocabulary—or the “human empathy,” to quote an initially skeptical Sue—to refer to it with the tenderness we associate with expectant mothers, for better or for worse. Her voice is always android-clinical, and she tends to describe the fetus in a way that makes it sound like an alien parasite, desperate to feed.
Which requires a food source…which is where Otho the explosive-helmet-wearing rapist cleric comes in. Discovered wandering around the wreckage of the Mithraic ark by Tempest, with his guardian android’s severed head stowed in a backpack, Otho is subdued by Mother and used as an ambulatory food source for her fetus, with a tube slowly sucking the blood out of him and into this new life form. It’s not the swift execution Tempest wanted to conduct, but she seems to see it as a fitting enough punishment eventually. The shots of Otho following Mother, Sue, and the children (who all reunite, with the kids literally putting themselves in the line of fire to protect Mother from Sue) like a dog on a leash provide the episode with dark comic relief.
Then things get really strange.
After discovering several metal cards bearing simple designs—parents and children, the Mithraic “Sol Invictus” sun symbol, et cetera—in a place where no humans or androids have been known to inhabit, Mother further discovers that the cards contain some kind of technology. When she decides to scan one, she’s greeted with a vision from what I take to be the ancient past. Unseen beings obscured by their black robes gather around a pentagonal stone, atop which the head of some kind of creature spits out liquid goop. It’s a bit like if the Sith from The Rise of Skywalker got together to pay homage to the baby from Eraserhead.
But when Mother emerges from her vision, she discovers that Otho has turned the tables on her, reversing the flow of plasma and gaining some of her preternatural strength and invulnerability in the process. This new, hulked-up Otho makes short work of the group’s defensive efforts and is about to carry Tempest away until Holly intervenes, offering herself in lieu of the “impure” unbeliever Tempest and holding out a holy relic, a tooth allegedly belonging to the mythical Roman founding father Romulus, as proof. (Romulus and his brother Remus were raised by a wolf. Get it???) This gives Tempest the opportunity to seize Otho’s leash-android head from his backpack and chuck it away, triggering his helmet to squash his head like a grape. This is somehow funnier than it sounds.
And then there’s Marcus, for whom things are not going well. He no longer hears the voice of Sol. He’s lost the children, and his wife and son, and Hunter and Father. He straight-up murders the guy who was on guard duty when the latter pair stole their landing craft and fled, more for questioning Marcus’s command than for letting his guard down. And Marcus’s dubious grasp of Mithraic beliefs—he claims to have prayed for the souls of the impure people he’s killed, something a true Mithraic would never do—confirms for his lieutenant Lucius that he isn’t who he says he is at all. A fight ensues, and Lucius beats the tar out of him, ultimately taking out the weaponized android eyes Marcus wears in a pouch around his neck and force-feeding them to him. I expected lasers and explosions, but no, all that happens is that the defeated Marcus dribbles out some liquid goo of his own.
What happens now? It’s doubtful that the season finale will solve the mystery of Kepler-22b—something that becomes a lot more difficult when Paul, now hearing voices himself, torches the metal cards that might contain more information about the planet—much less resolve the interpersonal drama in under an hour. It’s likely it will fire even more mysteries at us, in fact. From that incredible pilot and its shocking conclusion onward, Raised by Wolves has opened several new doors every time an old one closes. I’m excited to peer through.
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