Raised By Wolves, Westworld, Robots, and Time
Raised By Wolves, the new TV show produced by Ridley Scott out now on HBO Max, is not a show that coddles its viewers. It begins with a spaceship crash-landing on an alien planet. Two people on the ship awaken, and the viewer is aware right away that these two are not exactly human, not quite. From their mentions of ‘programming’, it becomes obvious these two are androids. Though they are also clearly a bit different than the usual androids you see in most science fiction television. They refer to themselves (quite bluntly and in a blank tone of voice, to be fair) as caring a great deal for the other’s well-being.
(Side Note: In this article I will most likely refer to what are technically ‘androids’ as ‘robots’ or ‘cyborgs’ or ‘synthetics’ or ‘hosts’. I am positive I will be in the wrong more than once on that count. I apologize in advance to all pissed-off nerds.)
The androids are named Mother and Father (played by Amanda Collin and Abubakar Salim respectively) and they have journeyed to Kepler 22b (a real extra-solar planet that resides in the habitable zone of its own star system) with a clutch of human embryos and a plan to re-ignite human society on this new planet after Earth has apparently fallen to disaster by raising their children to self-sufficiency. The plan gets complicated, of course. Humans are unpredictable, especially to robot parents. The planet may be more dangerous and have a darker history than they suspected. A different (mostly human) group arrives from Earth on the planet and has different ideas as to restarting humanity.
The show is beautifully shot, both the enigmatic intro song and the score itself are haunting and gorgeous, and the acting all around (especially from Amanda Collin and Abubakar Salim as Mother and Father) is terrific. If you have a taste for strange science fiction to half the degree that I do, you will come away from the first episode (of which I have only briefly described maybe the first half) just fascinated. All caps INTRIGUED by where the show might be going and what the show might be saying.
The last time a sci-fi TV show’s pilot episode made me feel that way, inspiring that same depth of obsession for an insightful concept and hunger for more, was the first episode of Westworld. The pilot of that show is rightly (and famously) praised as a fantastic introduction to a series and its world, in addition to just being an enthralling piece of television. There’s the quick bait-and-switch with Teddy right in the beginning. The beautiful (and yet oddly foreboding) shots that introduce us to the impossibly large futuristic theme park. The dual layers of reality the show seems to create with the dusty organic park occupied mostly by robots (or ‘Hosts’ in the series lexicon) on one level; and the sterile metal, plastic, and concrete corporate environment occupied mostly by humans running the park on the other. After Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) repeats a particularly violent Shakespeare quote her malfunctioning robot father repeated, then slaps (quite portentously) at a fly on her neck, I remember feeling like I’d just seen the future of science fiction on TV, I remember being desperate for the next episode.
Viewers of Westworld Seasons 2 and 3 (this is where I shamefully admit I have yet to watch season 3 after trudging through season 2) will most likely conclude I may have been a little too optimistic. I agree with you. That is why this article, when speaking about Westworld, focuses exclusively on season 1. Though I believe that quite a few of the issues with the second season of the show were somewhat visible in the first, as we will discuss shortly.
Raised By Wolves and Westworld have a decent amount in common besides gorgeous and intriguing pilot episodes. Science fiction is a genre of ideas, and I believe it is by ideas and questions and concepts that sci-fi shows and books should be classified or grouped. These two shows have quite a few of the same questions on their minds. The most important (and most obvious) of which concerns androids and humanity. What does it mean to be truly human? Can a soul or a consciousness as we understand it exist in something that doesn’t technically live? At what point does an android or robot become something more than just a tool? What do humans owe to the machines they’ve created?
Both shows give their viewers answers (or at least scenes to ponder that are related) to these questions. The entire theme park in Westworld essentially functions as a giant Turing Test, when you think about it, one they both pass and don’t. The goal of each ‘host’ is to fool their guests just enough as to their ‘humanity’ to make whatever dark desires the guests put the hosts through truly satisfying, yet they can never be so human as to cause sympathy.
Yet there is another character in the first season of the show (Jeffrey Wright), whose travails with a particular door are well known, who passes the Turing Test with flying colors for almost the whole season. All of which leads viewers (or at least myself) to wonder how it so believably worked out that way. Why does it make an uncanny-valley sort of sense that the robots that are essentially made to be abused must be almost human but not quite? Why are we so surprised by the door reveal? Is it because humanity is easier to fake than we think? Would we only notice a machine pretending at humanity if we knew to look for it? These are fascinating questions and ideas for a TV show give to viewers to chew on, this is what I believe science fiction is for.
Raised By Wolves approaches these ideas in a different, but no less interesting fashion. Mother and Father are clearly androids following their (somewhat unconventional) programming at the beginning of the series. But years pass in the first episode alone, as these androids raise real biologically human children. It is inevitable that they will be changed. I can’t explain to you the mix of hilarity, interest, and strange familiarity I felt when I first watched Father make a dad-joke to the children. The wonder and fear you feel as you watch that exact same wonder and fear on Mother’s face as she discovers something new and horrifying about herself in order to protect her surviving children and secure the future she was programmed to believe her kids required. It’s basically a science fiction version of the hysterical strength/mom lifting a car off her child phenomenon. It is thrilling and terrifying to watch for many reasons.
It also forces viewers to ask themselves certain questions about androids and humanity and parenthood. At what point does Mother and Father’s programmed compassion for their children cross over into what we understand as love? Does it actually matter to the children if it never does? Are Mother and Father automatically worse or better than human parents because of their machine origins? How is their machine programming to care for the children really that different from human biological programming to care for children?
It’s questions and concepts like these that make me love science fiction and believe it is a genre whose limits are almost nonexistent. From the very first episodes, both series show the incredible storytelling and conceptual potential of science fiction on TV.
It is in the execution of these concepts and the seasons in their entirety that the shows differ in important ways. This is also where, I believe, Raised By Wolves distinguishes itself as a more confident series with a more solid footing for future seasons than Westworld season 1.
This is where we talk about the final word in my article title: Time. Specifically chronological and structural time. I do genuinely love the first season of Westworld, I think it’s fantastic television and Anthony Hopkins is a goddamn treasure. But the season (and the second season) are also perfect examples of that Rick and Morty quote: I feel like we should, ummm, start our stories where they begin. There were, by my count, between 2 and 4 different timelines in the first season of Westworld, and the show very purposefully makes none of them explicit. The viewer is left to try to piece the whole thing together themselves. While I have nothing but praise for shows that don’t feel a need to hold the viewer’s hand, in this case, it comes across to me as almost a distraction more than a storytelling device. It suggests a lack of confidence in the main story and the ideas being expressed. It seems to demand praise for the complexity of the structure rather than the story itself. There were welcome reveals that came from this structure, but I believe this puzzle-box nature also foreshadowed trouble for the second and third seasons of the show. If the structure matters as much if not more than the story, then continuing the story in a way that interests viewers becomes that much more challenging.
Raised By Wolves, on the other hand, tells a straightforward story (at least in the chronological sense). There are occasional flashbacks for certain characters, and tricks with memory, but the main plot is always in focus and spelled out clearly. While there are of course going to be questions and complaints for the directions the series chose to go in the final episodes of the season (to avoid spoilers I’m only going to say the word: snake-birth), there still exists movement to the story now that the season has ended. It wasn’t a puzzle-box to be solved and set aside like Westworld season 1, instead it feels like the interesting opening chapters in an expanding sci-fi story. The show is confident enough in it’s visuals, it’s ideas, it’s writing (led superbly by Aaron Guzikowski), it’s acting, and it’s story to let those be the focus.
There were other major differences between Westworld and Raised By Wolves of course, in particular the way Westworld clearly chose it’s android’s side while Raised By Wolves seemed much more neutral. Plus Westworld has the whole thing about natural human cruelty while Raised By Wolves has its own obsession with religion. I think the structural time difference between these two shows jumped out at me because the multiple timelines thing is becoming more common in television. I may think this because I recently finished The Witcher on Netflix a month or so ago and found myself annoyed by the pointlessness of it’s three different timelines, despite enjoying the show itself. It seems more and more common for genre shows looking to be taken seriously to start messing with timelines as a sort of proof of good intentions.
This is why Raised by Wolves and it’s simple timeline and deep story was a breath of fresh air to me. It’s worth watching. I’m excited for more. For now, let’s just try not to fall in a pit.
If you enjoyed this article at all, please check out my New Adult Contemporary Fantasy Novel: Magic, Television, & Marijuana. Out now on Amazon.
