Raised By Wolves lets Ridley Scott expand one of his strangest sci-fi ideas
Image: Photo: Coco Van Oppens (HBO Max) TV Features For Our Consideration
The first time you notice it is about 20 minutes into the first episode. Two androids, unambiguously named Mother and Father, have alighted upon a blue-tinted tundra planet, raising a crop of humanoid children with faltering success. Only one is left. Mother and Father are fighting—ostensibly about reprimanding their child, but the argument has also dilated, become existential, as arguments do. “I thought we were in sync, Father,” Mother seethes, “and we would remain in sync until we cease to operate.” When she barks at him to shut up, shortly after, spittle flecks her lips, and something seems off—tinted, like everything else in the show, perhaps. But beads of the fluid then appear on the back of her neck, also off. It is not until she impales Father on the tooth of some ancient monster that you confirm that these androids you have been watching are full of milk.
For a not-insignificant portion of Raised By Wolves’ viewership, this fact—androids, full of milk—will be enough intrigue to catapult them through the ensuing 10-episode season. The show’s main hook is not its plot but its pedigree: It’s the television directing debut of Ridley Scott, whose early-career one-two punch of Alien and Blade Runner still reverberates in sci-fi some four decades later. Those films were as much triumphs of production design as anything else, and one of the singular innovations of Alien, among a dozen or so, was that Ash, the secret-agent android interloper aboard the Nostromo, would reveal himself through beads of milk appearing on his brow, and that, once disassembled, he would appear not full of circuits or steam like pop culture androids previous but as part of a pearly, viscous slop full of noodles and orb lights and squid. Organic, but not. Milk instead of blood.
It’s as good an idea as, say, infiltration via face hugger, and perfectly in sync with the rest of Alien’s psychosexual horrors: the xenomorph’s phallic design; the threat of violent impregnation; the way Ash, sweating milk, attacks Ripley by shoving a rolled-up porno mag into her mouth. There’s probably a YouTube explainer’s worth of themes packed into the choice of milk as Ash’s bodily fluid, but part of the enduring appeal of Alien is the way it never belabors the point. Its legacy is its economy. As the series changed hands in ensuing films, it became a showcase for different directors, each extracting different elements from Scott’s ur-text: James Cameron expanded the theme of motherhood into an intergalactic cage match; David Fincher weaponized the industrial-chic aesthetic of deep space; Jean-Pierre Jeunet brought a sense of whimsy to the series’ potential for uncanny-valley body horror.
The series and its milky androids went dormant for 15 years thereafter, until Scott revived them for a pair of prequels. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are not remembered particularly warmly, but I liked them both well enough in theaters, and liked them even more on a recent rewatch, in light of Raised By Wolves. They feel less like prequels to Alien and more like sequels as Scott would’ve made them, expanding on the latent themes from the 1979 film that he found most rich: the relationship between humans and the gods who made them; the relationship between androids and the humans who made them; and the tension between technology and religion. That the prequels turned the aquiline and mysterious Alien into something talky and mythic, more akin to Star Trek than The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, miffed many long-time fans, and I sympathize. But Alien arrived fully evolved; it could only be expanded. And, still, both prequels make room for relentlessly present-tense set pieces that emerge organically from Scott’s big themes, like Prometheus’ deranged self-abortion scene or Covenant’s mid-film transformation into an android-on-android erotic thriller. Here I will remind you of the flute scene.
All of which brings us back to Raised By Wolves, which I spent at least one hour feverishly speculating was a covert installment in the Alien series, based solely on the splatter of milk that emerges from Father’s torso in the pilot. It isn’t, for what it’s worth—the timelines don’t match up, the technology isn’t quite right, and they celebrate Christmas on Prometheus, not whatever the strange meta-religion in Wolves would dictate. And yet it feels of a piece, undeniably threaded to Scott’s early sci-fi and his more recent successors. We are still being pointedly asked what androids dream of. (Mother claims she does not need to dream, and yet she keeps retiring to a simulation in which she can access her subconscious.) We are still contrasting an android’s faith in their human creator with a human’s faith in their unknowable god, in a way that challenges both. (Mother and Father, avowed atheists both, notice that their remaining human child is drawn more and more to religion as his siblings die.) And we are still struggling, relentlessly, with parenthood, which seems increasingly like the preoccupation animating all of Scott’s science fiction, from prodigal sons like Roy Batty and David to the sheltered seed-children of Covenant and Raised By Wolves. Scott launched his sci-fi career, after all, with a birthing scene unlike any other.
After Scott’s pair of big-budget and bigger-idea debut episodes, Raised By Wolves downshifts into something more familiarly TV-like in its pacing and plotting; there is much arguing over logistics between various parties, many blue-lit sets growing overly familiar, a prophecy of some sort. But the show remains alive in the relationship between Mother and Father, precisely because of the way they are framed: as parents. They may be full of milk, but they’re dealing with the same shit all parents deal with: infidelity, insecurity, fear of the future. Scott unveils all the fun production design himself—Mother’s transformation from ’93 Bowie to floating banshee crucifix is a pulp sci-fi fever dream—but his pet themes, once handed to other directors (including his son, Luke) prove strikingly relevant in 2020. There isn’t a parent alive who won’t wince as Mother relays how the religious Mithraic army on Earth thought it a sin to let androids raise children, particularly as, outside the show, we experience the ongoing collapse of the social support networks (like public school and extended family) that once made the burden of raising children in late capitalism manageable. Even the staunchest screen-time holdouts are panic-purchasing tablets in 2020.
Indeed, it’s this very conflict, at least in part, that precipitated the Terminator-like apocalypse on Wolves’ Earth, and that sent humans into space searching for a new home in the first place. Both the androids and the Mithraic army land on this barren planet in search of a future for humanity, but as the season continues, it becomes clear that both parties view human children as a proxy battle for their own belief systems. This turns into less whiz-bang people-popping and more cerebral variations on the show’s signature themes, including, most intriguingly, a lightly handled subplot about vegetarianism. (As Mr. Rogers once said, “I don’t want to eat anything that has a mother.”) If that seems didactic, fret not; Raised By Wolves seems to revel in complications and counterbalances, as good sci-fi tends to. And so of course it is not just the androids who are full of milk. Halfway through the third episode, a Mithraic soldier cranks open a pipe full of milk and howls a full-throated “milk” alert to all nearby soldiers, who then jog over with mugs outstretched. They drink the milk, offer the milk to each other, and carry on with their business, full of milk. It is not mentioned again. It is the strangest moment in the series, and also one of the best, an evolutionary abnormality borne of the anxieties Scott has been itching for decades.
70 Comments
I’m not sure why you are immediately convinced that Wolves cannot be in Alien Extended Universe™. It could just be far in the future. We’ve already seen with David (and Ash to some extent), that androids can be “a little twitchy” (as Bishop from Aliens says), unpredictably self-aware, and downright aggressive towards humans. Perhaps it just took some time for them to come to the point of creating that “terminator” apocalypse on Earth.
After a little Googling, it can happen. Prometheus was ~2090, Alien was 2122, Aliens was 2179. By 2145 the war was on Earth, the Mithraic created necromancers. I’m going to keep believing this is a stealth Alien series.
Yeah this all feels like one of MattPatt’s Game Theories. Outside of them both having androids that bleed milk there is very little in common with Raised by Wolves to the Alien franchise.Besides, Disney owns the Alien Franchise so there’s no way in hell AT&T would want to make any direct connection to Alien.
If it’s so far in the future, the robots should be running on cheese by now…
Hey I’m down with that future.
raising a crop of humanoid childrenThey are actual human children, not humanoid. Unless this is a vague spoiler for upcoming episodes.
Technically yes, but a lot of SF seems to think that “humanoid” is a fancy word for human — like in the old Berzerk video game “Stop the intruder. The humanoid must not escape!”
The show refers to them as humans, just the writer here making the needless distinction (unless, of course like the OP notes, he knows something we don’t).
“Gimme the news, doc.”“I’m sorry. You’ve got humanoids.”“My God! How long?”“Eighteen years. Somewhat more if they go to a local college.”
reminds me of one of the best corny-ass bumper stickers i saw when i was a kid, “i’ve got an STD: kids”
The main kid definitely has some funky stuff going on with him, but he’s probably not full android.
To be fair, humans are a subset of humanoids.
That’s what I was thinking – a humanoid is anything with a human appearance/anatomy. In, I think it’s most effective when used as an adjective – like “humanoid appearance”.
No, they’re not. Resembling something is not the same as being something.
Is that actually milk in the androids (both here and in Alien)? I always thought it was just white goo. No doubt there is some symbolism there, but I never thought it was actually milk.
Same. Whenever anyone calls it that I hear “milk” in quotes. The description of the soldiers all running over for a mug absolutely threw me for six.
Especially given how Alien was based on H.R. Giger’s highly sexually-charged artwork, I don’t think milk is the white bodily fluid being referenced.
And don’t forget Dan O’Bannon, who wrote the screenplay to Alien. In fact, the premise for the movie was inspired by a subplot involving an alien beach ball from a movie he co-wrote with John Carpenter called Dark Star.
I thought O’Bannon disliked the reveal of Ash being an android.
Alien was also inspired by the 1958 movie It! The Terror From Beyond Space.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It!_The_Terror_from_Beyond_Space#Adaptations
its not milk. For some reason the writer thinks thats a good hook for the article.
Ridley Scott has the appearance of intelligence, much like the androids he keeps making movies about have the appearance of humanity. But underneath the spectacular visuals, he’s kind of a dummy who has reductive, simplistic views on religion and science. Maybe he’s gone senile. Early on-set hasbeenness.
Ideas? Scott doesn’t have a single idea in his hollow little head. He makes stylized popcorn movies. Stale, soulless popcorn movies that ceased to be remotely entertaining decades ago. As for this android shit, for the love of god let it go. You have less to offer on the topic than a really bad Data episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Just go away and feed pigeons in the park or shoot the shit at the doughnut shop with other washed up directors. God this show sounds fucking idiotic. And don’t get me started on parenting. Get over yourselves. Our grandparents and every generation before them did it without all the navel gazing and self-aggrandizing. Jesus. Get a life.
Huh, that bit about parenting is odd. I mean, if nothing else The Odyssey would like a word with you.
I’m picturing you on a park bench, reaching in to a bag as the bird approach and then tossing rocks at them.
“Tricked you again, stupid birds! I’m a winner!”
You seem to be really against a show you have not watched.
To be fair, he was still accurate in his description of it. I watched all 3 twice.It’s even worse the 2nd time through.
If you didn’t like it the first time, why did you watch it again?
I didn’t say I didn’t like it the first time. I thought it was underwhelming the first time. It was after the second time that I realized it was well filmed but boring – which is incredibly disappointing considering the premise.
I agree that Scott is more of a photographer than a story teller. I don’t mind though – sometimes a few hours of looking at pretty stuff is good enough for me.“Our grandparents and every generation before them did it without all the navel gazing and self-aggrandizing.”No doubt they weren’t thinking about androids as much but referring to yourselves as “the greatest generation” is pretty wild. And my grandparents definitely had a few things to say about raising children.
IMO Scott is overrated as an all-around filmmaker—Blade Runner in particular is a stark example of not just style over substance but style as substance—but Alien is a masterpiece of not one, but two genres and would sit comfortably in the top tier of any director’s filmography.
Agreed. Scott misses far more often than he hits. But by god, when he hits, he knocks it out of the fucking park.
Yeah. He’s made a few great films, with the excellent timing to make a couple of them early in his career, and has really rested hard on that reputation for the most part.
Can’t argue with that. I actually really like Prometheus so was quite disappointed by Covenant for failing to deliver on any of the Big Ideas.
I didn’t hate Prometheus by any means, but Covenant was dog shit.
Isn’t this show just a rip-off of the Australian film I Am Mother?
No, they seem to be pretty different in scope and storytelling
You know, I told you to eat a Snickers when you went on a similar rant against Nolan in the Tenet review, but at this point, I think you should probably just piss off with your anger. Your takes aren’t even contrarian; they’re rambling, bitter missives that bring nothing to the table. Stop poisoning the comments with your sad self.
kill yourself
You sound … frustrated. Anyway, I’d agree to some extent. Scott does love to prompt big ideas with an astounding level of incoherence and one does wonder why he bothers. I personally think The Duellists was one of his greatest accomplishments – notably relying on the Joseph Conrad story to relay philosophical themes much more sensibly. Man, I love that movie. What I’m saying is Scott should go back to adapting Conrad or other early modernist writers’ stories with coherent symbolic or thematic structures – it could save him from his worst tendencies.
First of all, it seems as you haven’t even watched this show before making your judgments on it.Secondly, you are spot on.
This feels unreasonably hostile.
I hate to burst your weird little bubble, but Ridley Scott did not write or create this show, and does not run it. These aren’t his ideas. He’s the EP, so he gives notes like “gooey robots” and he directed the first two episodes, so he oversaw the gooeyness. And then he gets back on his yacht and collects the check from this, and the other 30,000 items that he puts his name on.Look I get it, Prometheus disappointed me too. But now I have christlike space necromancers that scream people into red mist, and give them cancer with their eyes. Turns out that’s all I really wanted this whole time. Thank you Raised By Wolves, and thank you Ridley Scott’s yacht.
I don’t disagree, which is why its frustrating that he’s developed this affinity for shepherding the writing of his movies this late in his career. His best movies are just taking a solid script and directing it into a gorgeous movie. But then you get stuff like Robin Hood, Exodus, the Alien prequels, where he has some itch he needs to scratch of realizing some half formed idea and commissions writers to realize it and then commissions rewrite after rewrite until he produces a kind of mushy mess of his vague idea.He can still direct a solid line drive of a film when he takes himself out of the writers room (The Martian); other than directing I don’t think his involvement in this show extends more than exec. producing (a role he’s had on some genuinely excellent series), so I’m not writing this show off on the Ridley Scott factor; but I can’t say I found the first episode as interesting as others have, even in a “oh look how weird this is” kind of way.
Huh. That’s an abnormally strong reaction for a show you don’t have to watch, on a streaming service that’s not even available on two of the most prolific devices on the market.
AHAHAHHAHA. Ok this comment is fucking funny. The show is very good, but the comment is also very good. How can this b….*head explodes, milks sprays you in the face*
Black Hawk Down
lol what is your damage
Don’t pussyfoot around it – tell us how you actually feel!
You weren’t wrong. The show is idiotic. It’s also just hateful toward its audience. The filmmakers view us as slobbering idiots. Everyone forgets, Ridley Scott didn’t write Alien or Blade Runner. He collected and filmed the world the stories occupied. With Alien, he leaned on HR Giger for the creative design, and the script fell in his lap nearly fully-formed. Then the cast were just brilliant. The reason Alien lodged itself into the minds of sci-fi fans is that it captured the perspective of man in chaotic infinity. There is no great creator in Alien. It’s a random encounter in a random universe too old and complex to understand. The only bit that Alien great that is Ridley Scott’s doing, is that he filmed it well.
One thing I really like about Raised by Wolves is that it’s a society that’s very different from the one that we’re used to.Alien and Blade Runner both cemented the 20-minutes-into-the-future look and feel of scifi, so it’s nice to have weird rocketships, bodysuits, and geodesic domes again for a change.
The OP has obvious affection for the Alien universe, which I appreciate. However, I found myself re reading this article after getting lost several times. These sentences run forever. More periods please. I ask this with respect.
I’m guessing the “milk” in this show isn’t actually like animal milk and is some weird concoction that gives nutrients to humans and powers androids as well. I’m really enjoying this show so far, but it’s pretty clear there are some huge plot twists coming that connect everyone a lot more than it seems.
I think you nailed it in part and missed it in part. Less so Alien 3 (and remember how pissed everyone was about Newt) but the Alien series kept being more and more about motherhood. Here the android is the alien mother. As Alien: Resurrection went on (I know not the same writer/director) Ripley started acting a bit more and more like the mother in this show. In any case props for calling out the MILK! moment in a show that is so obsessed with parenthood, the human mithraics are severely flawed but they are the ones with actual milk…who also built the killer robots…who keep the kids who plow the fields who feed the radioactive crops to the ships who live in the house that Jack built
The Mithraics drink the android milk merely to acquire long protein strings. If you can think of a simpler way, I’d like to hear it.
Honestly, I thought the Mithraics were drinking mammalian milk and the “milk” in the androids was something different.
I think it’s some kind of synthesized, all-purpose biotech fluid that fulfills a number of roles, if only because non-human mammals seem to be in short enough supply, even on Earth, that dairy seems like a thing of the past. Unless it’s human milk.
I could also see it being deliberately vague, because the Mithraics have some strange, yet-to-be-revealed source for this milk, which they use both to feed their people and fill/power their androids.
Solid article. A lot of sci-fi writers have themes that they come back to, time and time again, as a method of working out some innate neurosis over a state of being in humanity. I find your case for Ridley Scott having a similar struggle in his depictions of human spirituality and a relationship with a “creator” to be a compelling one.
My only qualm with this article is that it places too much of an emphasis on Ridley Scott as the only creative force behind the creation of those themes. In the case of Raised by Wolves, how does the interplay of Guzikowski’s story mesh with Scott’s desire to depict the relationship between the androids in his trademark stylistic way? In Blade Runner, how does Dick, Peoples, and Fancher’s screenplay coalesce a creative vision that contrasts with Scott’s own – and is there an interplay there that is important to understanding how directors, in general, make their “vision” come to life in accordance with a whole host of other creative minds.
The question of authorship in cinema is an interesting one, if a lot more complicated to unpack. However, it’s articles like these that help us get closer to it!
Would love to see more articles like this here!
Goddam if Ridley Scott isn’t a magnificently overrrated director..Few things are as disappointing as seeing a trailer for a promising sci-fi premise, only to have “Ridley Scott” appear onscreen. These first 3 episodes are DRENCHED in his bullshit.
It’s so weird that everyone involved had to flat out state that even though this totally feels like Alien: The Spinoff Prestige Cable Series, it takes place in its own universe.Which also contains milky androids and an obsession with the religious implications of artificial intelligence and space exploration.I guess there are boring intellectual property reasons they have to say it’s not the Aliens universe, but the series would be so much more interesting if there were some possibility of an Engineer or a Facehugger showing up in a future episode. The Alien series has always been extremely murky about what’s going on back on Earth (I don’t think we ever see more than five minutes that actually takes place on Earth’s surface across six movies), so it would have been cool to explore the dark underbelly of Weyland-Yutani’s colonization and terraforming efforts without Xenomorphs chasing everyone around in every episode.But a Xenomorph will never ever show up in a future episode? What am I really looking forward to? It’s like if the showrunners of Gotham had promised in advance that you’d never see Batman or the Joker, even in the last episode.
Its legacy is its economy.
A legacy nearly every current filmmaker (including Scott) would do well to take note of.
I thought Prometheus was awful the first time I watched it.
But the next time I watched it didn’t happen, because I was right the first time.
Are the milk robots’ feet normal, or do they lactose?
Oh my fucking god…you get a stinkin’ star for that.You should be ashamed of yourself. I’m udderly at a loss at cow you could say that.
“That the prequels turned the aquiline and mysterious Alien into something talky and mythic, more akin to Star Trek than The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, miffed many long-time fans, and I sympathize.”This seems like an odd take, the prequels aren’t talky high brow sci-fi pieces; they’re as much horror movies as the original. What miffed fans is that the original was a smart horror movie, the prequels are dumb horror movies, full of stupid characters, stupid decisions, and stupid dialogue.
where has all the press been for this show? it’s fantastic.
The real question is, does the show ever become interesting? I love a good slow burn but I stopped after three episodes because the show is a giant pile of convoluted and not very interesting plot holes and after three episodes I still didn’t care what happened to any of the characters.
its getting boring. they need to throw some aliens in there. like, ALIEN aliens.