from Decider.com
https://decider.com/2020/09/25/raised-by-wolves-episode-8-recap/
Raised By Wolves S1 Ep 8: Mass
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‘Raised by Wolves’ Episode 8 Recap: Mothers and Fathers
When you’re eight episodes deep into a show as immaculately crafted as Raised by Wolves, even a single new note in a familiar performance opens up whole new realms of possibility. That’s certainly the case in “Faces,” one of the show’s strangest and least predictable episodes to date. Pivoting off powerful turns by Amanda Collin as Mother and Travis Fimmel as Marcus, it radically upends the status quo, yet it does so in a way that feels like it was organically grown from the soil provided by these two fine actors. The madness makes sense.
Take Mother for starters. Badly wounded, she staggers to the wreckage of the Mithraic ark in search of a potential remedy. She finds it in the form of Karl (Carel Nel), a magnificently designed medical robot with serious C-3PO vibes. With his help she discovers some kind of android tumor growing in her abdomen, accelerating her blood loss—but when she tries to remove it, her caretaking programming kicks in, preventing her from doing so. The only choice is to provide the tumor with an alternate fuel source.
Mother does this at first with Karl’s “brothers,” a suite of medical robots destroyed in the crash. When they run low, a chance encounter with a creature offers her a new alternative: good old red carbon-based blood. This, of course, should be the first sign that something is really wrong here.
When pregnant teenager Tempest arrives at the ship, having escaped the Mithraic camp and in search of Mother, we realize just how wrong things have gone. The blood on Tempest’s scratched-up hands triggers an almost vampiric reaction in Mother, who winds up screaming at Tempest to stay away in her nearly-weaponized voice. Here is where Collin shines: There’s an edge of blind panic in the way she screams, as if she’s racing to stay ahead of her own desires.
When she plugs back into the sim in search of her creator, Campion Sturges, she learns the extent of those new desires. Whoever or whatever this ghost in the machine is, he tells her she’s now part of what had been the big plan all along: the future of humanity, growing inside an android. All the children she’s cared about so much? “Just a rehearsal,” he says, “all to prepare you for this.”
But Mother, who’s still programmatically devoted to those children, doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want this child, if a child is indeed what it is. “Noooooo!” she screams, and this time it’s shrill and fragile and vulnerable, like she is child unable to see around the corners of her immediate distress, her whole world deformed by her immediate trauma. You have to have Collin’s command of her face, body, and voice as instruments in order to make this work the way she does. It’s remarkable.
So too, in its own way, is the ongoing transformation of Travis Fimmel’s Marcus. Recovering from a wound of his own, he’s about halfway convinced he’s the messiah, and the other half convinced he’s going crazy. A nightmare in which he peels his own face off would certainly point toward the latter conclusion.
As time passes, though, it becomes increasingly clear that Marcus is starting to believe he truly is the chosen one—and that Sue, his wife and, like him, an undercover atheist (as a flashback to their arrival at the ark reminds us), is growing estranged from him at a rapid pace. Things come to a head when he catches his “son” Paul helping the imprisoned Campion and grills him, with a gentle but absolutely merciless tone, about whether he and “Mommy” are planning anything or keeping any secrets. It’s a nightmarish scene to watch, simply because of the way Fimmel trains his clear and wild eyes directly on a child who now finds himself deathly afraid of his own father. Again, it takes an actor who knows how to use his instrument to be able to play these notes so effectively.
In the end, Marcus gets the sign he wants. After he prays to Sol for a sign he’s not going crazy, Campion—who’s part of a scattershot jailbreak from the compound that also involves Marcus’s wife Sue, their child Paul, and the children Holly and Vita—sets fire to the group’s makeshift church. While the rest of the Mithraic scamper to see if they can put the fire out, Marcus stands there delighted. What surer sign of Sol’s favor could there be than fire?
There’s more to the episode that doesn’t directly involve Mother and Marcus. The android formerly known as Father, for example, is revealed to have been tapping out “Sol is the light” in morse code with his twitching trigger finger; “For a minute there, I thought you were still in there, Pops,” says Hunter, the true-believer among the children, when he susses out the code. And indeed, Father chases and nearly kills Campion during the boy’s escape. Campion himself, meanwhile, has begun to accept the ghostly presence of his dead sister Tally as a given, simply telling her to shut up instead of denying her presence altogether. I mean, she’s right there in front of him. What would you do?
Raised by Wolves could be seen at this point as a puzzle-box show, an exercise in genre-based mystery-making along the lines of Lost or Westworld or even elements of Battlestar Galactica; it can be argued that it borrows plot points from all three. But banging your head against the wall of those mysteries until either they or you crack is a mug’s game, as it always is. Better to allow yourself to be transported by the expert acting, the impeccable creature and environment design, the push-and-pull of belonging and individuality, biological family versus chosen family, nature versus culture. Those are mysteries worth solving.
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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