In the Flesh: Raised by Wolves (Patreon)

Raised by Wolves is deeply strange by the visual and thematic standards of American science fiction. It feels much more akin to something like The Prisoner, spare and arresting, its human drama both direct and primordial, or like the wildly inventive symbolist comics of Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius. Bronze-skinned androids soar unassisted through the air, their mere gazes reducing men to bubbling ash. Battered soldiers in conical helms wander the wasteland of a world racked by religious war. Embryos grow like hydroponic crops in little fish tanks full of amniotic soup. In short, Ridley Scott’s startling return to form — aided by the formidable imagination of series creator and writer Aaron Guzikowski — after decades of indifferently sloppy historical epics looks nothing like anything else on TV now or in the past decade, and that’s before you even touch the sculpturally arresting faces of Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim). 

Where so much art about androids and robots (I’m looking at you, Westworld) relegates itself to the tedious territory of “what does it mean to be human?”, Raised by Wolves doesn’t so much as glance at anything so faux-deep. Instead it wends its way through the quiet tragedy of a pair of androids sent out among the stars to seed a new world with an atheist civilization, raising human children on their own according to the beliefs of their creator, Campion, the namesake of their sixth child. Nearly thirteen years pass as we watch the children grow, more and more of them falling away by illness or accident until only Campion remains. It’s deeply mournful material, and Collin and Salim display two very different but equally fascinating kinds of restrained grief as their purpose slowly dies around them.

The series’ swift turn into operatic violence is genuinely harrowing, evoking everything from the famed opening sequence of Elfen Lied to the quiet technicolor wonders of Kubrick’s 2001. Scott’s restrained direction frames each scene cleanly, leaving the show’s action intelligible and its quieter moments arresting. In spite of the show’s spare aesthetic every shot is rich with detail. The modular homestead inflating itself in silence. Mother’s empty eye sockets gaping like the vast hole in the surface of Kepler 22b where rags of shed serpent skin blow in sulfurous updrafts. Raised by Wolves is that rarest of things in the age of sequels, reboots, and remakes: an original idea executed with talent, craft, and wonder.