Raised by Wolves settles a next-century new world

▶︎ Raised by Wolves (11 episodes) is on Sky Atlantic and Now TV.

Raised by Wolves is an original ten-part sci-fi drama set in the 22nd century. After a self-destructive world war has rendered Earth a grimly redundant brownsite, the human race seems to have pinned its future on settling the unexplored virgin planet Kepler-22b (a real planet, discovered by Nasa’s Kepler space telescope in 2011). This new Earth’s creation story is set in train by a perfectly formed surrogate Adam and Eve – lithe androids, played by the strikingly gymnastic Abubakar Salim and Amanda Collin, programmed to oversee the seeding of a new civilisation. Having survived a crash-landing in a sleek two-person craft resembling a kazoo, they disembark and activate the equivalent of a self-assembly marquee, around which a modest agrarian settlement will take shape. 

Beatifically referring to each other as ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’, the couple commence their mission to populate this unwelcoming next rock from the sun. Under slate skies with roiling clouds, the scene is set for sci-fi’s latest post-apocalyptic warning from the future. Wolves was created for HBO Max by Aaron Guzikowski, who wrote Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners (2013), SundanceTV’s The Red Road (2014-15) and the 2017 Papillon remake, and is exec-produced by sci-fi guv’nor Ridley Scott, who rolls up his sleeves and gamely directs the first and second episodes. (In an echo of  the saga’s family dynamic, Ridley’s son Luke directs Episodes 3 and 4 and the Season 1 finale.)

The show’s title refers to the legend of Romulus and Remus, twin founders of Rome, earmarked at birth for death and abandoned on the riverbank, but rescued and raised by a she-wolf in a cave. This is just one historical reference in a veritable layer-cake of allusions. In less sure hands, it might have collapsed like a sunken meringue, but the Scott family’s proficiency and storytelling experience prevent that.

Once Mother and Father are precariously bedded in on their new homeworld, we witness the 22nd-century equivalent of a human litter, delivered not from Mother’s womb (she appears not to require one), but from six identical tubs of pulsing goo. When one of the half-dozen tots appears to be stillborn, Father emotionlessly responds, “Feed it to the others.” Instead, Mother revives him with the android version of maternal love, christening him Campion. (As an inquisitive, questioning teen, played by a tousle-haired Winta McGrath, he seems destined for greater things.)

The early, establishing episodes will remind Star Wars fans of the flat desert planet Tatooine: agriculture proves arduous; crops fail; tickly coughs foreshadow death. Our unrufflable parentbots play house, a game that soon includes burying the weaker of their first offspring. Unsurprisingly, Mother and Father’s roles are far removed from the messy details of human reproduction – Collin and Salim’s spray-on rubber fetish-wear confirms the lithe duo’s lack of nipples and other fleshy details.

Genre aficionados will recognise the fictional terrain – unsurprisingly so, given Scott’s confident command of stories set in other orbits and other epochs, in particular Alien (a franchise predicated around life-cycles, incubation and failure to ignore distress signals), Blade Runner (robots indistinguishable from humans) and, perhaps even more pertinently, The Martian (2015), in which Matt Damon’s marooned botanist imposes potato farming on the Red Planet. (Scott’s location scouts are adept at finding terrestrial equivalents: they took him to Jordan for The Martian, while Kepler-22b finds an effective surrogate in Cape Town.)

Having started out with a standard Crusoe-in-space yarn – shelter, food, hardship, disease, bad luck – Guzikowski steadily reveals greater narrative ambitions. Subsequent, larger arks arrive, carrying a less able second wave of humans, driven, it seems, by an ancient theistic faith. (Mother and Father have been hardwired to raise atheists, immune to the airy-fairy tenets of religious doctrine.)

While Father is a kind of Olympian Alan Titchmarsh, cheerily tending his hardscrabble allotment, Mother has a secret: she has been pre-programmed to shape-shift when threatened. Originally designed and built as a warlike ‘necromancer’ robot, she has the ability to levitate in metallic form between planets. She can also emit a squeal that causes fragile human bodies in range to explode into scarlet action-paintings, a terrifying example of machinery’s power over mere humans.  

Guzikowski seems confident in what is almost literally a world-building exercise. Threat and conflict are carefully rationed while Mother and Father toil tirelessly to propagate crops in the recalcitrant soil. What look intriguingly like dinosaur bones throw up further questions for the past and future. 

Wolves presents a brave new world with an arresting attention to detail – in the sound design, with its signals of upheaval or threat, and the score by composers Marc Streitenfeld (Scott’s Prometheus, 2012) and Ben Frost (Sky Atlantic’s Arctic thriller Fortitude, 2015-18), which contrasts celestial ambience with grave, gut-churning thudding beats. Damon’s stranded Crusoe in The Martian promised lightheartedly to “science the shit” out of his predicament: having already been recommissioned for a second season by HBO, Ridley Scott looks set to science-fiction the shit out of this pack of Wolves.