from Decider.com
https://decider.com/2020/09/10/raised-by-wolves-episode-5-recap-infected-memory/
RAISED BY WOLVES S1 EP 5:INFECTED MEMORIES
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‘Raised by Wolves’ Episode 5 Recap: Building the Perfect Beast
“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.
The centerpiece of the episode is, effectively, Mother’s origin story. We see how she was a Mithraic weapon of war, incapacitated and slowly reprogrammed by atheist leader Campion Sturges (Cosmo Jarvis), a handsome turncoat from a prominent Mithraic family. We learn that the two established a bond of real love before Campion switched off Mother’s memories of him in order to spare her the pain of their separation. The reprogramming takes some time—at one point she instinctively snaps the neck of a baby Sturges hands her, only to discover that the baby was just an android and it was all a test—but in the end she becomes the destroyer-turned-nurturer we’ve gotten to know.
As interesting as all this is, the real meat of the matter is the way we learn about it in the first place. Mother retrieves these memories after plugging herself back into the Mithraic ark’s simulation machine at one of the crash sites—to which she was led by the same apparition of her dead “daughter” Tally who previously appeared to Paul and Father. (Unless I’m getting my mysterious figures mixed up; more on that in a bit.) Mother spends much of her time this episode berating Father for being too easily distracted—at one point he nearly loses Paul and Campion down a serpent pit where they’ve spotted a creature eating fungus clinging to its side, which they hope they can retrieve and eat themselves—so to watch her drop everything (she was supposed to be scouting for more creatures to hunt) in order to chase down a ghost is quite jarring.
Could it be that she believes Tally is somehow still alive and preserved in youth, since her body was never recovered? Or is she more sentimental herself than she gives herself credit for, as her happiness and optimism after recalling her memories of Campion Sturges would seem to indicate?
In the Mithraic camp, Marcus has been made their new leader, over the strenuous but eventually abandoned objections of Justina (Susan Danford), the highest-ranking surviving cleric. But hey, when you’ve heard the voice of Sol directly, as Marcus’s loyal comrade Lucius argues Marcus has, that kind of trumps the usual hierarchy, right? Little does Lucius know that Marcus is internally struggling with what he heard, choosing to blame it (rather unconvincingly) on the aftereffects of the “earwig” sonic weapon the previous leader used on him.
But as the Mithraic continue to search for the missing children, Marcus meets another man amid the wreckage of the ark who believes he’s heard the voice of Sol: the rapist who impregnated Tempest. Wearing a medieval-like confinement helmet that will crush his head if he attempts to remove it or escape from his “LEASH” android guard, this one-time higher-up in the faith argues to Marcus that while he was already a rapist before he heard Sol’s voice, that doesn’t mean he didn’t hear it like he says he did. Not very reassuring.
When the Mithraic group finally tracks down the kids’ electronic locator devices, the mystery deepens. The locators have been relocated to a cave inside a massive serpent skeleton—the route to them rigged with booby traps—and woven into a necklace. Suddenly the resident of the cave, a shrouded figure who moves like greased lightning, snatches the locators right out of the Mithraics’ clutches and parkours his way up and out of the cave. Turns out this being, human or otherwise, has made a map of the entire area (including carving holes in the serpent’s skull to correspond with stars in the night sky) and has been watching the missing kids at Mother and Father’s compound.
I have no idea, and that’s an exciting feeling. Now that we’ve reached the halfway point of the season, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this episode is another taut, compelling outing. Amanda Collin is delivering one of the year’s most riveting performances as Mother, a killing machine who’s been programmed into humanity’s last hope and who has yet to successfully reconcile those two sides. Abubakar Salim’s Father brings pathos to the equation as an android who struggles to find uses for himself now that he’s been superseded by Mother’s violent side. Travis Fimmel’s gravelly, wild-eyed Marcus, meanwhile, provides a rich contrast with the prim demeanor of the androids; he’s convincingly a man living on the edge of both deception and sanity. And now the show has begun to throw Lost-style mysteries into the mix? Consider me sold. Raised by Wolves is a contender for the best show of the year, and I hope it continues to prove its mettle.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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