 What's up guys and welcome to One Take, I'm Gil and today we're talking about Raised by Wolves, episodes 4 and 5. This video will of course be full of spoilers through episode 5 and we're dealing with some pretty big questions this week. Is there intelligent life on Kepler-22B? Is Marcus now a mythraic prophet? And who is under that hood? Also who is under that other hood? We'll get into all that and more in today's breakdown, but first some overall thoughts. I really liked both of these episodes, I thought the storyline focused on the mythraic group, really ramped up and got more interesting. I also loved the growing mystery of the planet, the conflict between mother and father and the origin of mother was really interesting and really well done with a lot more emotional impact than I expected. There were a few storytelling choices that didn't quite work for me which I'll mention, but overall I had some worries after episode 3 and I'd say that those have pretty much been taken care of. I was a little worried about how interesting the storytelling would be for the mythraic characters, like I said they ramped that up, so at this point I'm fully on board for this show and can't wait to see where it goes next. Before we jump into the details, just a quick reminder, if you're enjoying these videos, to please go ahead and hit the like button, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon so you get notified the next time we do a video and you can keep up with our coverage for the rest of the season. And every time I see that subscriber count go up even by one, it makes my day and gets me excited to do the next video, so if you click that subscribe button you are an amazing human being. With that, let's get into the episodes. Let's start by talking about the mythraic and everything they go through in these couple of episodes. They find a strange structure in the middle of the desert which seems to imply some sort of intelligent life residing on this planet. They view the structure through a religious lens, Marcus hears voices from it which help him kill Ambrose and take over the group and they all think that it might be part of the mythraic prophecy promising that they will find the answers to the mythraic mysteries or unlock the secrets of the mythraic. And I wonder if maybe they're not wrong. If there is a consciousness on this planet, perhaps that consciousness had something to do with the birth of their religion, maybe that consciousness had something to do with the birth of humanity itself. The reason I'm thinking that is because there seems to be a twisted garden of Eden analogy taking place on this planet. Mother and father are sort of a stand-in for Adam and Eve. Then in the biblical story, you had the serpent which guided Adam and Eve to eat the fruit that of course had some pretty horrible consequences. Similarly on this planet, you have those giant serpents that bear not fruit but carbose. And again, eating those carbose had some pretty awful consequences. They turned out to be poisonous. Now it's definitely a twisted version of Garden of Eden because not everything is provided for them and they need to fight for their survival. But I think there's something there. And maybe it's no coincidence that Kepler-22b is the planet they chose for their new civilization. It was the only choice. It was the one planet they could find that could sustain human life. But perhaps more than that, this consciousness is calling them back to their origins. If that's the case, I'm very curious to see why exactly. Anyway, this is one of the aspects of the show I'm really enjoying. I love the melding of sci-fi and religion. I also think they're doing a great job of pacing the questions with revelations. We get these big questions about potentially some intelligence on this planet, but that's counterbalanced by where only a few episodes in and we get to see a lot of mother's origins. So this is all great stuff and exactly the kind of things I love to see in sci-fi. Now, I mentioned that the structure helps Marcus take out the mythraic leader, Ambrose. Basically, Ambrose has still been hesitant to go rescue the children. He discovers that Marcus and Sue are imposters and attempts to kill Marcus with the help of an android. But the structure helps Marcus burn Ambrose alive. At least that's what it seemed like. Ambrose is confronting Marcus. Marcus hears some voices that seem to come from that structure. It heats up, Marcus pushes Ambrose, and he burns alive. Now, I was initially put off by how quickly they resolved the situation, because I thought there was a lot of dramatic tension in Marcus and Sue potentially getting discovered as imposters. But as soon as that happened, the situation was resolved immediately. At first, I was put off by that, but now I'm actually kind of happy about it. Because I think Marcus rising up as a religious leader and Marcus potentially starting to become a believer is an even more interesting situation. For example, if Marcus leans into his belief and Sue doesn't follow, that could lead to an interesting conflict between the two of them. Sue may end up being one of the only atheists left in humanity. So what will that do to Sue and her allegiances? Though I'm uncertain how important to Sue her atheism actually is. We know she's a non-believer and we know to some extent she looks down on the religious group. She disparagingly refers to them as a church choir at one point. But interested to see where that goes. Also, I just need to shout out how much I love Travis Fimmel in this role. Especially this one habit he has of just shaking his head constantly. He always looks like he's going along doing something he really doesn't want to do. The best example of it might be when they find the structure and Ambrose tells Marcus and his men to put him down. Then Marcus does one of these. I never get sick of seeing it. Now we've already seen one mysterious hooded figure. The one that appeared a couple of times seemingly as Tally. But here we see the introduction of what I think is a second mysterious hooded figure. Basically mother removes the children's trackers then drops them into a pit. This athletic hooded figure finds the trackers, brings them to his hideout underneath the serpent skeleton. Which leads the Mithraic there. When the Mithraic arrive they have to work their way through a couple of booby traps. One of them seemingly loses an eye. Then they find a makeshift map made of rocks, stones, things like that. And on the map a pile of cards. One of the Mithraic starts looking at the cards. They seem to have religious symbols on them. Then that hooded figure shows up, snags the cards and runs away. So who is this guy? The other hooded figure, the one appearing as Tally, feels like maybe it's part of the planet's consciousness. A sort of manifestation where the consciousness is communicating with the various androids and beings on this planet. But we'll come back to that. This person feels a little bit more human. They seem to have a hideout. They seem to be fighting for their survival. So one of the Mithraic posits that it could be a human that arrived on the planet previously. And right now that's the theory which feels most possible to me. Like I said the cards that they find look like they have religious symbols on them. So that makes me wonder if this human is not really a warrior or a fighter but more of a scientist. Maybe somebody that discovered the intelligence or consciousness located on this planet. They came to study it. Maybe they think it could explain the origins of the Mithraic or other religions on Earth. And that would explain the cards we see. So they've been hanging out on this planet and studying it. Now we see that this being or this person has some pretty great moves. It's able to jump higher than you would think a human could jump. But that could be explained if it has one of those atheist power packs. The one that we saw Marcus wearing as a child before he became Marcus. Which allowed the atheist soldiers to jump and just hit harder. Another question I have about the hooded figure is what is it doing with the trackers? At first I thought it was trying to purposefully lure the Mithraic into its hideout. But that doesn't really make sense to me because if he wanted to lure them in why would he booby trap the place? And then why would he just show up grab the cards and then run? So now I'm thinking we know that the hooded figure has been watching mother. We can tell that from the map. It knows where her settlement is. So maybe he was watching her, saw that she dropped those trackers into the pit. He doesn't really know what she dropped in there. He grabbed the trackers to investigate them, not realizing that they were trackers and not realizing that it would lure the Mithraic to its hideout. Now let's talk about Marcus's hallucination. First I want to compliment the cinematography here. When he and Sue go to make love, the camera cuts to an overhead shot of that serpent skeleton and then sort of swoops in down to the two of them and that's when the hallucination kicks in. And I just have to say, first off that looked great. And every time we see those overhead shots of the serpent bones, it looks incredible and just adds to the bizarre nature of what we're seeing on this planet. So in his hallucination, he sees Sue dying. Then he sees a reflection of himself wearing the same helmet as the prisoner. So he sees himself as a prisoner. As he watches Sue die, he notices that he's holding a scalpel. And it looks like the exact same scalpel that Mother created, the same one that Tempest used to kill the creature that turned out to be pregnant. So what exactly is going on here? I don't think it's just a hallucination, especially since it happened after Marcus heard the whispers that seemed to help him kill Ambrose. So I suspect that this hallucination is some sort of intelligence, again, communicating with Marcus. But what exactly is it saying? The fact that we see the same scalpel here that we saw Tempest used to kill the creature makes me wonder if maybe this intelligence know the creature was killed and it's sort of communicating its displeasure to Marcus, saying one of my creatures were killed. So now I'm going to show you your wife dying and show you the scalpel, the weapon that was used to kill one of the creatures that's part of my ecosystem. Maybe in a godlike manner, the intelligence created those creatures and that's why it's upset that one of them was killed. Though I do think we're also seeing some of Marcus's own concerns reflected in this hallucination, when he sees himself as the prisoner, I read that as his own fear manifesting, his fear that he might end up like that prisoner. That prisoner also heard the voice of soul and it ended up driving him to do some pretty horrible things. So Marcus might be worried that the same fate awaits him. With the help of the map they find in this hooded figure's hideout, the Mithraic are finally able to locate the settlement and find the children. This is going to be pretty interesting because Paul is now friends with Campion. Some of the children are now starting to see mother and father as protectors. So Marcus and his followers are expecting to find captives, children who will willingly leave the androids and come with them. But I don't think that's what they're going to find. I'm sure Hunter is going to want to leave with them, but I don't know about the rest of the kids and it should make for a pretty fascinating conflict. So that's about everything we see from the Mithraic and these couple of episodes. Like I said before, I was a little bit worried about how invested I would be in the Mithraic portion of these episodes. But I got to say I'm pretty turned around on that and I'm very happy to say that. Now let's talk about the mother, father and company parts of these episodes. Father wants the kids to kill the creature he captured for food and Campion is very against that. Mother points out, you know as well as I, that his sense of empathy is highly pronounced. Then we get a sense of where that came from. Mother wants to repair the damaged artificial wombs so she heads to the Ark to find some spare parts. But while she's there, she looks at one of the capsules that people hibernated in and plugs into it so she can experience the sim. Once Mother's in the sim, she essentially observes a previous memory of hers, something that we hadn't seen. Back when Campion was younger and the Gen 1 children were still alive, Mother still had six unused embryos. And we knew this because Mother mentioned in a previous episode, we came here with 12 embryos and now we have nothing. So we knew that six were used on those first children. We didn't know what happened to the other six. Here we find out. Apparently Gabon and Spiria were messing around and they broke the artificial wombs and destroyed the six remaining embryos. Campion covers for them with Mother and lies to Gabon and Spiria to make them feel better. He tells them that they melted snowballs rather than telling them the truth that they destroyed this potential human life. I thought this was a fantastic sequence. It was incredibly heartbreaking to see Mother's freak out when she yells at Campion, you can't fix them Campion, they're dead. And dead is forever. That was really hard to watch seeing it from Campion's perspective. It also does a good job of setting up a couple aspects of Campion's character. One, we see that he's wise beyond his years. He's smart enough even as a child to know what it would do to Gabon and Spiria to learn the truth of what they actually did and he's smart enough to lie to them and protect them. In addition, it shows us that pronounced empathy that Campion has. Though I will say, I'm not sure why they chose to show us this sequence as part of a simulation flashback rather than as just part of the story back in episode one or two. For me personally, I thought some of the emotional impact was a little bit muddled by presenting it as part of the simulation because then when I'm seeing it, it took a moment for me to realize, oh, what I'm seeing is an actual memory and not some sort of manifestation of the simulation. Also, earlier in the episode, Mother Says to Father, we both know Campion has a pronounced sense of empathy and we as viewers see how hesitant Campion is to kill that creature. Personally, I didn't feel like the first three episodes properly set up Campion as this overly empathetic person but if they had shown this situation with Gabon and Spirio killing the other embryos, I think it would have set that up. Mother yelling at Campion, dead is dead is a big part of planting the seed that turns Campion into this extremely empathetic person. So that's partially why I think the embryo sequence would have worked better if we saw it earlier in the series rather than as a flashback because then I think it would have set up this aspect of Campion's character really well rather than us seeing this part of his character and then sort of getting the set up after the fact. Otherwise, I thought the sequence in and of itself worked really well. It was very emotional. It was more just the placement of it that felt a little odd to me. Let's talk about Mother's second trip into the sim. When we finally get to meet Campion, we meet her creator and we see her origins. Essentially, Campion captured a necromancer from the Mithraic, reoriented her emotions, reprogrammed her to be a mother and sent her to Kepler-22B. I love this whole sequence. I thought it was extremely powerful, a lot more emotional than I would have expected. In particular, I wanna shout out the moment when Campion brings her a baby and as a test asks her to hold it. I felt extremely tense, worrying what she was going to do to the child. Then when he mentions that the baby was taken from atheist parents, I just about jumped out of my seat when she broke its neck. Then it breathed a huge sigh of relief when we saw it was an android and not human. Viscerally, it was just horrible to see her do that to a baby. So it was just shocking. And then you add on top of that, we know that if Campion doesn't get the programming right, it means the end of humanity as we know it potentially. So just a very tense and excellent sequence. This also leads into some pretty interesting spiritual behavior for Mother. We see her talking about her creator, Campion, in almost religious terms. Father calls her out for that. And in another part of the episode, we see Mother sitting in that red igloo structure surrounded by the vessels that once contained the now destroyed embryos. And she's sitting in what looks like an almost meditative state. She's humming. So both of those instances looked like spiritual behavior. And Mother defends it by saying, my creator is a human. I knew him. So it requires no faith. There's nothing religious about it. And I think we're going to get into a theme that looks at religion and questions what happens when you take the supernatural and reign it into the realm of natural physical law. Does that in any way diminish your faith or your spiritual beliefs? Mother's facing that now. And I have a feeling the mythraic may also face that. If they find some intelligence on this planet that can be explained scientifically and that intelligence delivers on the mythraic prophecy, maybe it turns out that intelligence had something to do with the origins of the mythraics. So now their supposed God is grounded in scientific reality. What does that do to your faith? I have a feeling that's a question we'll be exploring and I just have to sit back and be so grateful we have an awesome sci-fi show that's willing to take on some pretty big questions like this one. Also going back to Campion for a second, we hear some of his origins. Mother tells us that Campion was originally born to the mythraic. He switched sides and turned against them. I'm very curious to see what turned him to the atheist side. In general, I'm hoping we get to see more of Campion's past and more of humanity's past in general, especially this war between the atheists and the mythraic. We don't know too much about the war, except that it seems to have destroyed earth as a livable planet. So what could lead to a war of that scope? One that seems to involve the entire planet, but ultimately come down to two main sides, mythraic and atheists. Really hope we get to see more of that. So we talked about the hooded figure that Marcus and his group encountered this week. Let's talk about the mysterious hooded figure that mother, father and Paul got glimpses of. The one that seems to appear as Tali, the girl who fell in the pit in episode one. In both instances when mother and father see the figure, when the figure turns its head, we see Tali as a child. So I don't think this is literally Tali or else she should be a few years older. I mentioned a few times that I think there's some sort of intelligence on this planet that can communicate in different ways. We saw communicate with Marcus through whispers and here I think we see it communicating with mother, father and Paul by manifesting as Tali. So that's what I think we're seeing and I think the intelligence is using this manifestation of Tali to influence their behavior. In this episode it seemed like it wanted mother to plug into the sim because the hooded figure appears which draws mother in. Then she finds a stick doll on the capsule which leads her to lay down and plug back in. So perhaps the intelligence knew it was time for mother to learn her origins. So it told her plug into the sim and go back into your archives to find this memory of Campion. So this is another mystery I can't wait to learn more about though I will say it looks a little bit cheesy every time we see the hooded figure where it appears to be a full grown adult then it turns around and the camera quickly cuts to a close up of this child's face. But overall I'm enjoying the mystery of it and can't wait to see where they go with it. I should also mention that we seem to get a few more glimpses these episodes at more necromancer abilities. One, when Marcus hears that high pitch noise everybody around him starts to yell he's a ticker and then Ambrose goes to kill him. That felt straight out of a zombie movie to me where somebody gets bit so you have to kill them. So that made me wonder maybe back on earth during the war necromancers had the ability to sort of infect people turn them into a ticker and then that person will turn on their own group and start killing others. So that one's a little speculative but we do see a couple of other definitive abilities. We see that mother can put the children to sleep just by saying time to sleep. We did see her say this to Tempest in a previous episode but at the time I wasn't sure if she was literally controlling Tempest's mind or not. Here we seem to get confirmation that she can make people fall asleep. We also see that mother has some sort of healing ability. After she removes the tracker from Tempest's foot she presses her finger to the cut and it's healed. And if mother can physically heal people that could also mean she can physically alter them in other ways which could possibly explain how Campion's able to eat the carbos without succumbing to the radiation poisoning. A few other things I wanted to comment on this episode. I'm really enjoying the conflict between mother and father. Their scenes together by far are my favorite in these episodes and there's so many unexpected developments between them. One, it turns out father is the one that are pushing the children to be more aggressive. He's the one that wants to teach them to hunt but it seems like mother's protective instincts are kicking in more so she's a little bit more protective and wants to shield them from the violence. We also have mother appearing to be a little bit more spiritual. That's gonna create some conflict between her and father which by the way is an interesting foil to the conflict between Marcus and Sue where he seems to be a little bit more of a believer. Then there's Tempest. She poses a very interesting challenge for mother. Mother's great when you need her to just pop some people or crash an arc but here she literally has to convince somebody that it's worth continuing their own existence. She needs to convince Tempest not to take her own life and preserve the life of her baby. I also just have to point out one moment in episode four that made me laugh out loud when mother and father are talking she takes a step towards father and you see him sort of back away in fear. So just seeing father develop the sort of fear of what mother is capable of was humorous but it also shines a light on an interesting dynamic of the relationship. Another moment that made me laugh when Campion discovers these sort of acorns and thinks they might be their salvation. He wants to call them pizza. I thought that was pretty funny. Also later in the episode when Hunter decides he's gonna eat some acorns. He doesn't care if they're poisonous. I'm really waiting to see some evidence of his supposed 205 IQ. Also just wanna mention we got a couple glimpses at the internals of the Androids. Probably the best one is when we see Campion working on mother. I thought the internals looked awesome and it's just a great effect. Also when Marcus digs into the android he killed and pulls out some batteries, those are check-offs batteries. We know those are gonna come into play later. So I'm curious to see when those come in handy. And as always, the score for this show continues to be top notch. One thing I love about it is that every location feels like it has its own character. The sound will change a little bit. One place in particular you can hear it is when they first find that structure in the desert just go back to that scene and listen to it. There are some very interesting sounds that add to the eeriness and the other worldliness of that scene. So to wrap up, overall I am loving this show. It's so great to have top notch sci-fi on TV. And I can't wait to see where we go with the next episodes. With that, if you're enjoying this video please go ahead and hit that like button, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon so you get notified the next time we do a video. You're especially gonna wanna do that because we'll be covering the rest of Raised by Wolves with these detailed breakdowns and we'll be doing some other Raised by Wolves coverage. I'll let you in on a little secret. You know that guy Hunter, the one with the 205 IQ? Smart guy, he's subscribed to the channel. So all the smart people are doing it, that's a bandwagon you're gonna wanna jump on. Anyway, with that, thanks for watching and see you on the next one take.