‘Raised By Wolves’ Episode 3 Recap And Review: ‘Virtual Faith’

The third episode of Raised By Wolves follows three story-lines.

In the first, we have Mother, Father and the children—Campion and his new companions abducted from the Ark—as they learn to live together. Things don’t go according to Mother’s hopes and plans as the children, one by one, begin to fall ill. Except for Campion, of course.

In the second, Marcus is taken back to the small group of survivors remaining after Mother’s assault on the Ark. His wife, Sue, is there fortunately. While the leadership aboard the Ark was killed, the ranking cleric, Ambrose (Steve Wall), takes charge. You can tell immediately that he’s no leader. Marcus and Sue are determined to go after the stolen children, but Ambrose refuses. The risk is too great. I suppose he has a point.

In the third, we journey back in time to the 13-year voyage aboard the Mithraic Ark, Heaven, as it makes its journey from Earth to Keppler-22b. Aboard, Marcus and Sue and all the rest of the crew and its passengers are in stasis, but while they sleep their minds interact as if they were all awake. We’ll start here.

Aboard the Ark, everyone is placed into stasis.

Essentially, they’re all asleep—and not aging—for the thirteen-year voyage, but can freely interact, play games, converse and so forth in a highly advanced VR sim. Marcus and Sue are both a little freaked out, suddenly surrounded by religious zealots with a whole new way of speaking and being, but the Mithraic seem like pretty nice people for the most part.

The real challenge is suddenly becoming parents. “We should go talk to him,” Marcus says to Sue as they watch Paul play by himself below. So they go down and start to talk with him, joke around a little, and he seems genuinely surprised. “You never talk to me,” he says after a bit, and we learn something of a crushing truth about this quiet boy. His actual parents never parented him, at least not with any sort of compassion. They were cold and distant. This newfound warmth must be a side effect of the simulation, they all agree.

Fake mom and dad turn out to be much better parents to Paul than the real ones ever were. Thankfully, they have no desire to treat the boy the way his real parents did. They encourage him to go play with the other kids, but he’s nervous because the other kids always accuse him of being weird. So Marcus and Sue take Paul down to where the others are playing a game of Duck Duck Goose.

The three form their own circle, but Marcus quickly has the entire room laughing as he turns the game into a spectacle, flapping his wings and grining his sly grin. Soon he has Paul on his back running and laughing down the halls of the Ark—directly into a room filled with Mithraic worshippers, including a woman who appears to be some kind of high priestess. This is Justina (Susan Danford), and far from being disturbed by this intrusion, she tells Marcus that she’s happy to see that he’s happy—able to set aside the trauma of his years as a soldier and let loose a little.

They back awkwardly out of the room, that same sly grin on Marcus’s face. (It’s hard not to think of him as space Ragnar with a mullet, quite frankly, but that’s fine with me).

It’s all very heart-warming. That these two imposters—and murderers—far from ruining Paul’s life actually bring joy into it is such a happy accident. Joy and love and acceptance that he must never have felt before. Imagine having cold and distant parents and then one day they just toss all that aside and really love you fully. What a relief, what true joy that must be for Paul.

Ethically, morally it’s all obviously incredibly dubious at best, but the practical outcome is that Paul is given parents who he thinks are his, and who appear to genuinely care for him for the first time in his life.

Back in the present timeline, Paul’s fake parents may as well be the real thing. They’re determined, more than any others in the remaining Mithraic host, to track down and save Paul and the others. Thirteen years spent with the boy, even in a virtual reality sim, has left them devoted to their adopted son.

We also get a flashback to Marcus’s childhood. He was a child soldier fighting on the atheists’ side—a side that seems every bit as awful as the religious zealots they’re fighting against, perhaps worse. There’s not many things more terrible than conscripting child soldiers.

Marcus and another girl fight in a circle. Their commander has them put on “turbo-charge” devices that allow them to leap higher, fight harder and generally transforms young kids into super-soldiers. The only downside? If your unit takes a bullet or malfunctions it can mess you up pretty badly, which is what happens to Marcus’s companion.

It’s not a fond memory.

The Mithraic are gathering supplies and trying to salvage what they can—including a fountain of milk.

Then Mother shows up, screaming as she approaches. The Mithraic scatter, heading underground to hide. Ambrose tells Marcus to go and distract the Necromancer—the type of robot Mother turns out to be, a weapon of mass destruction—but he wants nothing of it. Why not send one of the androids? They’d be happy to make the sacrifice.

Though why send anyone at all escapes me. They’re hidden. For all Mother knows, nobody survived the crash. There’s no immediate danger once she’s gone into the crashed Ark—why alert her to their presence? Ambrose, you see, is not very bright.

But he does what Marcus suggests and sends one of two twin androids. She runs out and Mother follows and the android ends up dead. Fortunately for the rest of them, Mother wasn’t there to kill and soon she’s gone.

Now that they’re in a smaller group, it’s more difficult for Marcus and Sue to hide their true identities—and lack of Mithraic upbringing. Marcus is taken off guard by another soldier, Lucius, whose father knew Marcus. “Oh yes, a good man,” Marcus says. “Then you’ve forgiven him?” Lucius says, surprised. “Is that not what Sol teaches us?” Marcus replies, quick on his feet. Sue, meanwhile, is a medic and has decided to say she spent the 13 year voyage studying medicine to explain her skills.

After Mother leaves the twin of the lost android strats singing. Marcus rushes up to her and tells her to stop. He seems distraught. The song, it turns out, is one that the Mithraic would sing at atheist executions. It’s obvious why the song would bother him, but not obvious to the others who find it a calming little hymn. He pretends that he’s concerned because it might bring back the Necromancer. But you can see a little doubt on some of the faces of the Mithraic.

Meanwhile, back at the settlement the children are settling in. Mother tells them the story of the Big Bad Wolf, and when she blows the house down all we can picture is her deadly screaming, her icy breath.

The children begin to fall ill, one by one. That’s why Mother heads to the Ark—to find medicine. When she leaves, Campion and the others attempt to make their escape.

Campion has become convinced that Mother is poisoning the other children and he and the others trick Father, locking him in one of the out-buildings. They set off to find safety. They do not find it.

Campion was also not convinced that the strange alien creatures were actually real. Mother has powers of illusion and could have created the strange creatures.

This also turns out to be false. The creatures are real, and they very nearly get eaten by some while on running away. Father finds them just in time, but not before Paul get separated from the group. Mother sets off to find Paul.

Back at the settlement, Campion is nearly killed by another of the creatures but Father saves him, capturing it and locking it away. Campion apologizes to Father for tricking him, but Father seems truly wounded. If he can’t protect the family, he is of no use to them, he tells Campion.

Alone and frightened, cold and coughing, Paul calls out for help. He sees someone in the forest. A young girl, singing a creepy sing-a-long song. He follows her through the dark, and the ground opens up beneath him. He drops into a well-concealed pit, landing on a large branch twenty or thirty meters down. The credits roll.

Perhaps the biggest revelation in tonight’s episode was the source of the sickness—the food itself. Why Campion is immune to the radiation in the tubers they’ve been growing remains a mystery, but nobody else is. This is what killed all the other children save Tally (who fell into the pit, though we never actually saw her die). It’s what is making the other kids sick.

Mother and Father had no way of testing the plants out until they acquired the Mithraic ship, though I wonder wouldn’t they have suspected as much? Would retrieving the ship from the pit have been an impossible undertaking for them?

Oh well. That’s neither here nor there. At this point, they’ve solved that mystery and now must solve another: What to feed the children?

Overall, this was another great episode of Raised By Wolves. We discover more about the relationship between Paul and his fake parents, and their role in the surviving Mithraic dynasty, which look like it may grow more strained. And we discover that, despite her own doubts, Mother has not been poisoning the children. She has been, as Father tells her, a good mother. Mostly.

What will happen next? How will Marcus navigate the strange politics he’s confronted with and the petty leadership style of Ambrose? How will the androids feed the children, and what will happen to poor Paul and his mouse?

Episode 4 drops this Thursday. Stay tuned to this blog for my recap/review. And let me know what you thought about this episode—and the show so far—on Twitter or Facebook.