https://decider.com/2020/09/17/raised-by-wolves-episode-7-recap/
RAISED BY WOLVES S1 EP7:FACES
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‘Raised by Wolves’ Episode 7 Recap: I’m a Sol Man
Poor Campion. After pulling a gun on the Mithraic soldiers who’ve successfully stormed his camp, he’s imprisoned in the camp’s food silo (with a creature carcass dangling right above him) while the Mithraic reprogram Father to be a loyal servant and tie up Mother for interrogation. He’s disgusted with what he sees as the hypocrisy of his captors: “Is that what Earth was? Just a bunch of lies? Did any of you tell the truth about anything?”
“Not really, kid,” Marcus replies before exiting.
Well, that’s a down note to get started on.
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.
While stuck in solitary confinement, Campion receives a visit from Tempest, giving him food and telling him to just go along with the Mithraics’ plan to baptize him; she’s an expert at going through the motions without really believing.
But Tempest isn’t Campion’s only visitor in that silo. The ghostly figure of Tally returns, appearing ominously behind him and skittering across the ceiling and walls like an insect. She hands him an ersatz blade made from a serpent tooth and tells him to kill himself, so that he can reunite with all his dead siblings. Campion wonders why she’s the only one of those dead kids he can see—is it because she fell down one of the serpent holes while everyone else succumbed to radiation sickness? We get no answers, only more intriguing questions.
Eventually Campion agrees to the baptism rite. Everything’s going fine, until he notices that the new Mithraic church they’ve been building on settlement grounds has used the gravestones for his late siblings as construction materials. He runs, stabbing the first person who grabs him in the arm—only to discover that it’s Father, or rather the thing that used to be Father, who carries him back to confinement. But there’s a glimmer of the old Father in him still, which manifests at first as a twitch in his trigger finger, which earns him “Trigger Finger” as a nickname among the Mithraic.
As for his counterpart, Mother endures quite a bit of grilling from Marcus…who she knows is not who he says he is. One bit of information I’m particularly grateful for here is the revelation that Mother has known this from her first glimpse of the man. She tells him that she recognized his facial scars as a tell-tale coverup of the face tattoos that the atheists gave their child soldiers. “Is that why you didn’t kill me?” he asks, thus plugging up one of the show’s plot holes, i.e. Mother leaving Marcus alive in the first episode while she was busy frying most of his comrades.
When Marcus finally grows weary of Mother, who first threatens and then actually does try to out him as an imposter to Lucius, he and Father cart her away to be tossed down one of the serpent pits. But the voice that has repeatedly instructed him not to kill her, at one point saying that if he lets her live he “will be king of this world,” returns with a vengeance. He powers through it and instructs Father to toss Mother down the pit, but Father’s itchy trigger finger snags the rope before she can plummet to her doom, and she’s able to crawl back up and escape.
Which is easier to do than you might think, because Marcus is busy having a knife fight with a mirror-image version of his pre-surgery self. It’s a very video-game moment, dueling with a doppelgänger who anticipates and echoes your every move, but actor Travis Fimmel’s performance makes it work—the combination of his wild eyes and sneering mouth makes it seem like everything that happens to him is both a shock and completely expected.
The real surprise comes when Marcus makes it back to camp, bleeding from a brutal wound to his gut. Sue, who’s been at her wits’ end with the man—for leaving Mother alive for so long, for not immediately abandoning the Mithraic once they were reunited with their “son” Paul, for enjoying his newfound position of authority too much, and especially for pushing Paul to the ground when the boy interrupted him as he tried to clear his head of those pesky voices—starts treating him. But Marcus says they’re not going anywhere. The prophecy about an orphaned boy in an empty land who will lead humanity to Sol’s paradise? It’s not Campion, he says. Nor is it Paul, who is an orphan even if nobody but Marcus and Sue (and Sol) knows it, and who has built a seemingly prophetic model of the fabled city of Mithras out of rocks. “It’s me,” Marcus says. He was an orphan, as Mother had guessed. He’s hearing the voice of Sol. He’s found his destiny, and nothing’s scarier than a man who believes that.
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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