Raised by Wolves Season 2 premieres with two episodes on HBO Max on Feb. 3, 2022.
The return of Raised by Wolves kicks off with a well-curated pairing. Most of the eight episodes in Season 2 will arrive on a weekly schedule, but HBO Max is set to release the first two chapters on Feb. 3. The first is an unexpected reversion to something resembling the show’s previous status quo, despite the seemingly propulsive conclusion to Season 1. The second episode, however, plays like a retroactive justification for this apparent step back. The two-part premiere may not answer any of the show’s lingering questions — many of them don’t feature at all — but it deepens the more intimate mysteries at its hearts, especially those concerning the atheist android couple Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) as they become increasingly human.
When the first season ended, Mother and Father’s plunge into the core of Kepler-22b yielded an unexpected detour. The enormous serpentine child Mother was deceived into bearing — dubbed “Number 7” in these new episodes — took to the air, while the couple’s six human children remained stranded near their desert home, as the undercover atheist warrior Sue (Niamh Algar) bled out from a gunshot wound. Except for Number 7, none of these cliffhangers yield dividends when the new season begins. The show quickly reunites all of its separated characters, who are welcomed into a new atheist colony in the promised Tropical Zone; meanwhile, Sue’s husband, Marcus (Travis Fimmel), remains on the run despite his skirmish with arriving atheist scouts in the previous episode.
However, the establishing of an atheist colony, as a renewed setting for the series, allows familiar character dynamics to evolve in a brand-new context. Where the first season explored Mother and Father’s emotional interiority against a backdrop of nuclear family, the second season — in its second episode especially — brings their haphazard familial unit into conflict with wider society, whose rules and laws the two androids begin to navigate in different ways. Where the Mithraic were governed by faith in the deity Sol, their warmongering atheist rivals appear to take orders from a kaleidoscopic artificial intelligence known as “The Trust,” further blurring the philosophical lines between the two factions.
If there was one element of the show’s premise that felt malformed in Season 1, it was the idea that in 2145 — a mere 12 decades in the future — Mithraism might not only grow into the world’s dominant religion, but might also replace all traces of Christianity while adopting all of its hallmarks. The Season 2 premiere, however, teases a couple of brand-new mysteries regarding not only the religion’s history, but the history of this new planet and its relationship to both humans and A.I. Answering questions with more questions certainly runs the risk of late-era Lost-ification, but Raised by Wolves avoids muddling its mysteries by presenting each one with emotional clarity. We’re no closer to understanding what this planet is, or what ongoing story the colonists have wandered into, but every discovery has a precise and lucid effect on one character or another, which manifests in each performance.
Collin and Salim retain Mother and Father’s decorum and base politeness, but their composure is lost more easily — a reflection, perhaps, of the idea that this return to status quo is much more fragile. However, since the repurposed androids are programmed to analyze their every impulse, not only do Collin and Salim step swiftly in and out of their respective forms of aggression (Mother’s remains explosive, while Father’s is more subdued), but this whiplash is also punctuated by both characters gazing inward, and ruminating on their increasingly frayed demeanor. The actors, therefore, are tasked with not only going to more vulnerable places each time their characters butt heads, but with stewing in a radioactive afterglow, as they try to parse volatile emotions they’ve never felt before.
As for Mother and Father’s children, Campion (Winta McGrath), who Mother brought to term in an external chamber, continues to wrestle with his beliefs in a world of binary extremes, but the returning orphan Paul (Felix Jamieson) is the one to watch this season. As a kid who feels betrayed by both sets of “parents” — the androids who forcefully adopted him, and Mithraic parents Marcus and Sue, who turned out to be atheist turncoats disguised as his actual parents — Jamieson is much looser and more animated this time, and he brings an emotional maturity even to Paul’s juvenile acts of rebellion. As a version of Paul who no longer trusts anyone, his patience wears thin when he’s forced to live among his lifelong enemies as he searches for what he believes to be Mithraic relics and prophecies.
The atheists’ colony introduces a handful of new characters. Peter Christoffersen plays Cleaver, their tattooed, stone-faced leader who has an uneasy relationship with “The Trust,” and who brings an unexpected bite to every conversation. James Harkness joins the cast as Tamerlane, Cleaver’s hard-bitten subordinate, whose unwelcoming attitude towards the colony’s android and Mithraic guests becomes a central source of tension. However, the atheists’ most engrossing facet is their vicious ideology and the way it manifests in their social structure, which the show steadily unearths through the eyes of existing characters. Last season, the exploration of how the atheists harnessed violent impulses was limited to how this affected Marcus, but this time, the show paints a more complete (and more discomfortingly paradoxical) portrait of their brutality.
This bigger picture not only complicates Mother and Father’s new allegiance to the colony, but it also creates a key thematic mirror for Marcus. Last season, the former atheist heard what he believed to be the voice of Sol, and he now becomes a prophetic leader to a small band of Mithraic disciples — among them, a new human character Decima (Kim Engelbrecht) and her android companion Vrille (Morgan Santo), whose dynamic is revealed to be a fascinating inversion of the human-android relationships we’ve seen thus far. Marcus has come a long way from being a militaristic pawn, but the journey that lies ahead of him — concerning whether he can deprogram the violence that was beaten into him, and replace it with a theology he claims is peaceful — could prove to be one of the season’s key dilemmas, especially if the true nature of “Sol’s voice” is revealed.
The most intriguing dramatic elements, however, still come courtesy of Mother, whose residual pregnancy belly is a constant reminder of the monstrous child lurking somewhere in the darkness. Her evolving physiology and emotional complexity continue to mirror Kepler itself; like the planet, Mother is caught in an anatomical and spiritual tug-of-war between destroyer and life-giver, which continues to manifest in ways that speak to the show’s Ridley Scott influence, and the psychosexual body horror that has permeated his work. The Tropical Zone is surrounded by a primordial ocean, but one that is acidic to alien outsiders, while Mother’s life-giving, milk-like blood has begun to exhibit similar corrosive properties. The quandary she faces when the colony is threatened by Number 7 — a terrifying aberration that is still, technically, her biological child — is poised to draw on both her most nurturing and most destructive tendencies.
Scott, who directed the show’s initial episodes, has only nominal involvement this time, and the director of the two-part premiere (TV veteran Ernest Dickerson) doesn’t quite craft the same haunting atmosphere. However, Dickerson and the writers of each entry — showrunner Aaron Guzikowski and Jon Worley respectively — deftly lay the groundwork for a story that feels in line with the musings Scott helped bring to Season 1, about the increasingly blurry boundaries between faith and programming, and the disquieting nature of biological imperative.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/33OK9zr
This could be a real lead forward for personal gaming... Revolutionise gaming
No comments:
Post a Comment