S01.E01: Raised by Wolves

[paulvdb]

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After Earth is rendered uninhabitable, Androids Mother and Father start a new settlement and family with human embryos on the planet Kepler-22b. Twelve years later, only one child, Campion, remains, and the arrival of an Ark of surviving humans called the Mithraic presents a threat that Mother has no choice but to confront.

 

[AnimeMania]

Not what I was expecting, what a way to clean house. Not much left of my expectations storywise, I will have to reassess what I thought the story would be like. How do I watch a story without good guys, I don't even like Campion that much. Father will make a return, I did like him, but I don't think he will be the hero of the story. Maybe the girl that feel down the hole is still alive, raised in an alien community and ready to kick some butt, I could get behind that. Mother is a huge disappointment, the ship was a great resource and humans are an endangered species, treat us as such.

[Joimiaroxeu]

Visually it's stunning.

Father got jokes. I hope Marcus figures out way to revive him so maybe he can help the humans.

Interesting that they made a point of having Mother and Father produce children of multiple ethnicities and yet they all spoke English. Wonder if there will be a Tower of Babel in this world and different languages will arise?

Mother is hardcore. She killed Father with no hesitation. "Consider that a divorce."

Eh, I don't think I'm going to be a fan of Mother. Her badassery makes no sense to me. Seems like she's just plain psycho with a laser focus. Her operating system is completely overrun with malware. ☠

How is it that the humans have no way to defeat things like Mother? Their puny weapons were no match for her literal death stare, hah, hah. You'd think they would've been better prepared despite their doubting androids had the abilty to outrun them to another planet.

Okay, Ridley, I'm in. Don't let me down.

[xfuse]

What I have a hard time with is that Mother doesn't want the children to be religious. There is a simple way to do that. Don't mention religion or prayer and just mention science, If they have no concept of it then they won't be it. 

[PotterOtherP]

Mother appears to be a re-programmed superweapon. Even she was not initially aware of the powers she had, so maybe it's not surprising that the humans weren't prepared for her.

The androids in the Alien series also bleed white fluid. "Mother" was also the name of the ship's computer in the first Alien movie. The show's music and visuals reminded me a lot of the Metroid Prime games, which were themselves partly inspired by Alien.

Can't think of anyone better than Ragnar to take with me to an unknown planet.

Edited September 4, 2020 by PotterOtherP

[Tachi Rocinante]

A bit disappointing, but I'm still in.  Intersting how most of the trailers were comprised of clips from the first episode.  I kind of like that, it tells me that there should (hopefully) be some cool stuff to come.  We'll see.

 

[Joimiaroxeu]

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Can't think of anyone better than Ragnar to take with me to an unknown planet.

I didn't watch Vikings and was not familiar with this actor at all. While watching RBW's first episode I was actually thinking it was Charlie Hunnam. But either way, yes, Travis Fimmel as Marcus will be a delicious treat for the eyes. 😋

[marinw]

On 9/3/2020 at 5:27 AM, AnimeMania said:

Father will make a return, I did like him

Same. Father is the most sympathetic and likeable character on this show. 

I am intrigued by a religious society using science and technology while maintaining their faith. One does not necessary preclude the other, so long as your religious practice does not become too fundamentalist.  I am reminded of the Mormans in The Expanse

The Crusades uniforms are a little unsettling. 

I like this show in that the society and technology of the Future is truly different than our present rather than an extrapolation.

Why only bring a dozen embryos? They don’t take up much room, and six kids is not enough genetic diversity to ensure healthy offspring, assuming they reproduce normally.

Edited September 5, 2020 by marinw

[paigow]

9 hours ago, marinw said:

I am intrigued by a religious society using science and technology while maintaining their faith. 

Picard would tell them that their androids are sentient and cannot be treated as property.....

[marinw]

47 minutes ago, paigow said:

Picard would tell them that their androids are sentient and cannot be treated as property.....

Good luck with that! 

[Joimiaroxeu]

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Why only bring a dozen embryos? They don’t take up much room, and six kids is not enough genetic diversity to ensure healthy offspring, assuming they reproduce normally.

I wondered about that too but I guess Mother didn't want to be perpetually pregnant. She and Father were going to have their hands full raising six kids and who knows how long more embryos would've been viable? Not to be sacrilegious but a small initial sample size worked out for humanity according to Genesis. {The Bible book, not the band. 😏) And it seems to work okay with rabbits, hah, hah.

[marinw]

So what happened to the other six emboeys? Was that explained?

 

[nodorothyparker]

I'm normally not much for this kind of sci-fi, but I am here for Travis Fimmel even with that haircut, so there's that. Visually it's a lot of fun to look at in all its barrenness and lack of color saturation. The costuming makes all of the humans look like they stopped off to do a little colonizing on their way to a ski weekend with a pseudo religious dress code while the two android characters and their ever dwindling surrogate offspring apparently went for the full body condom look. I realize it's a pilot episode where every bit of dialogue has to do the heavy lifting of world building, but all of the religion vs. atheism talk felt especially clunky.

Was Mother always seriously overpowered to the point of being a weapon of mass destruction and didn't happen to mention it to Father or was that something she more or less stumbled upon by accident?  I was initially intrigued to see her have human like emotions over her surrogate children, but since she destroyed an entire ship to get her hands on a couple of replacement ones, I'm now feeling like I'm going to be disappointed if her entire motivation is an android psycho mom Hand That Rocks the Cradle kind of thing. Yes, if you start out with 12 embryos, only get 6 to implant and grow in your tubs of magical goo, and then still only manage to not lose 1, you really probably shouldn't be raising children.

[marinw]

16 hours ago, nodorothyparker said:

The costuming makes all of the humans look like they stopped off to do a little colonizing on their way to a ski weekend with a pseudo religious dress code

A perfect description! The haircuts are...unfortunate. I think they are suppose to echo the whole Crusades look.

So is their religon some form of Christianity? The captian/head cleric mentioned Eden.

Edited September 6, 2020 by marinw

[nodorothyparker]

He did. And Travis Fimmel's character also mentioned Heaven, which seemed to mean the mothership more than an afterlife destination.

The religious guys obviously weren't across the board anti-science, anti-android since they did have one traveling with them. I hope whenever we get the backstory of their war and what really happened there, it's more complex than a straight black and white religion vs. science thing.

 

[AnimeMania]

I thought it was weird that when the kids were younger, they were wearing the skin tight outfits similar to what the androids were wearing. Then when Campion is older he is wearing thick heavy clunky clothes that the androids made for him, I wonder what changed.

[marinw]

2 hours ago, AnimeMania said:

I thought it was weird that when the kids were younger, they were wearing the skin tight outfits similar to what the androids were wearing. Then when Campion is older he is wearing thick heavy clunky clothes that the androids made for him, I wonder what changed.

Maybe the kids outgrew the body stockings? And they didn't bring bigger ones for some reason. Like lack of planning. 

Those outfits would give 7 of 9 pause. I guess these andriods don't have bladders! Did they have more than one? Or did they never wear out?

Mother does do a lot of weaving. I'm guessing she used plant fibre from all the things they were growing. Mother weaves cloth and Father builds things. Interesting how traditional gender roles are still hapenning.

[AnimeMania]

5 hours ago, marinw said:

Maybe the kids outgrew the body stockings? And they didn't bring bigger ones for some reason. Like lack of planning. 

Those outfits would give 7 of 9 pause. I guess these andriods don't have bladders! Did they have more than one? Or did they never wear out?

Mother does do a lot of weaving. I'm guessing she used plant fibre from all the things they were growing. Mother weaves cloth and Father builds things. Interesting how traditional gender roles are still hapenning.

I hated how the androids clothes looked extremely filthy for a long time and then suddenly looked like they were new again.

Mother, father and traditonal gender roles might be a bias of the people who programmed them or a way to pass on (flawed) knowledge about how society should eventually function in the new civilization.

[Haleth]

On 9/6/2020 at 7:21 AM, marinw said:

So is their religon some form of Christianity? The captian/head cleric mentioned Eden.

It’s strange that the writers chose worship of Mithras as the religion of the people on the ark. I wonder if we’ll get any back story about how that replaced (evolved from?) Christianity and other religions.

I’m just watching for Travis Fimmel. 

[WatchrTina]

I'm really late to this party but there's a pandemic going on and I'm recently retired, so deep dives into SciFi is pretty much my jam these days.

Well, I'm annoyed by this pilot.  The aesthetics alone in the advertisements had led me to expect something better than religion vs. atheism in space.  But since that is where they decided to go, I can't help but poke holes in the plans of the "scientists".  As others have pointed out, 12 children is (probably) not a viable amount of biodiversity to start a new civilization.  Six is certainly not enough.  And once they were down to one sole, surviving child it seems like Mother's programming (like Father's) should have defaulted to saving him by contacting whoever it was that sent them to the planet.  I guess I can hand-wave that away by assuming that Mother is malfunctioning, but I think the point the writers wanted us to take away is that mother animals are the most ruthless in protecting their young and so the "mother" android was programmed with similar ruthlessness.  Furthermore the social dynamics of a wolf pack must have been used as a basis for their programming (hence the howling in grief.)

I didn't understand why the men who landed on the planet were so hungry.  They all looked well-fed.  Perhaps the "Ark" has a way of supplying nutrition that is effective but completely unsatisfying, so the men crave the opportunity to eat actual food.  (Oh gosh, I just recollected that Father was ready to feed the last infant to the others.  We may end up with a "Soylent Green is people" scene in this show.)

[Morrigan2575]

Just watched the pilot, that wasn't what I was expecting. Mother is an extremely advanced android. I guess it makes sense to send something very powerful and advanced to protect the future of the human race...well a section of it anyway.

 

However it doesn't make it very interesting to see a few humans fight Superman, there's no chance of winning.

[LeGrandElephant]

Well, it was definitely unpredictable! But that’s not necessarily a good thing if it was hard to predict because it made no sense. The title and the deaths of the other kids and the father led me to believe the story would mostly be about this weird kid raised in the wilderness having to integrate into human society - so I was surprised when the rest of human society also got blown up all of a sudden. But, this episode did not make me want to watch the rest of the show. I had various complaints about ways in which the plot didn’t make a lot of sense. 

Whoever wrote this seems to think that science and atheism are themselves a religion, rather than a rational method for looking at the world. Mother just tells Campion that he has to take her word for it that praying doens’t work - she never explains anything about how you could use the scientific method to test that hypothesis, never explains that humans did studies on it and found that it didn’t work, or anything like that. She then tells the other girl to recite the ways in which the number 5 connects to the world or something, which sounds like they are teaching them by having them memorize rote mystical stuff - not at all how you would want to raise a rational scientist. And if they’re so against praying, how do the kids even know what it is? Presumably they told them the history of the conflict between the religious groups and the atheist group, but failed to explain anything about WHY the atheists didn’t believe in the religion? Makes no sense. 

Also makes no sense that these supposedly rational scientists were apparently planning on starting a new society with 6-12 kids and no resources. And then after most of the kid have died and this ship FULL of amazing RESOURCES and members of an ENDANGERED SPECIES shows up, she just blows it up! It seemed like she could easily have continued walking through killing everyone who got in her way, so why not just kill the leaders, and then appropriate the ship and most of the people as resources for the society she wants to build? Why destroy everything without a second thought? Makes no sense. 

Spoiler for Interstellar:

Spoiler

The way they were trying to raise these embryos on an alien planet reminded me of where Anne Hathaway ended up in Interstellar, and I thought that plan was just as doomed as this one. 

And the Mother android’s powers were just too much - broke the rules of writing a good narrative (you can have magic, but it has to follow rules and have vulnerabilities) and also the rules of science if this is supposed to be science fiction - where was all her power/energy coming from? One minute she seems like she’s about to keel over and die due to lack of energy, the next minute she can fly and kill everyone with no effort and no one else has even the slightest chance against her - boring and gross to watch. And why did she blindfold herself? I didn’t get that. 

(A small thing - did anyone else think the babies at the beginning didn’t look like they had the proportions of normal human babies? I thought they were maybe android babies of some sort, but then later it was made clear they were humans. Am I wrong about them not looking quite like regular babies? It seemed like their heads weren’t big enough - they looked like the babies in old medieval paintings that have the proportions of miniature adults instead of the proportions of newborns.)

By the end of the episode, I had lost interest in watching anymore - but I am mildly curious how it plays out. Can anyone point me to a good recap of the episodes or the whole season? 

 

Edited October 6, 2020 by LeGrandElephant

[LeGrandElephant]

Also, the actress playing Mother is so incredibly thin! I found myself hoping they used some CGI to play it up to make her look not quite human, rather than requiring an actual human actress to stay that thin throughout filming of possibly multiple seasons. Anyone know anything about that? 

[shirazplease]

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I didn't watch Vikings and was not familiar with this actor at all. 

Watch it.  Now.  You're welcome. 🙂

[Broderbits]

On 9/3/2020 at 7:20 PM, xfuse said:

There is a simple way to do that. Don't mention religion or prayer and just mention science, If they have no concept of it then they won't be it. 

Humans have an innate need to create origin stories that often include magic, to explain to themselves why bad things happen, and to think up ways they can avert those bad things. Even if she never mentioned a god, one would inevitably be invented.