Raised By Wolves Season 2 Episode 7 Feeding Review- Is This The Beginning Of The End

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder, Raised By Wolves Season 2 Episode 7 blows the roof off.

If you thought a flying serpent and a tree lady were the strangest plot beats, you would see, Raised By Wolves said, “Hold my beer,” and topped a bonkers Season 2 Episode 6. It is easily the bravest, most inventive alien series out there. HBO Max’s series has redefined what extraterrestrials and AI can and should be. Raised By Wolves Season 2 Episode 7 was another wild episode that once again spun everything 180 degrees.

If there were any doubts that Sue became a tree, those were squelched. In an effort to create an army of Sol lovers, Paul and Marcus distribute Sue’s tree fruit for everyone to ingest. Free will and poisoning danger are evidently not a concern for the religious pair, proving that Paul might be the scariest thing on Raised By Wolves. In a series with acid sea creatures, flying snakes, and homicidal faceless robots, that’s saying something. What’s most interesting about the fruit-eating, however, is that Campion puts the fruit down. Although Paul would love to be the chosen one, Campion is the wiser and more intuitive of the pair.

Campion consistently values life in whatever form it takes. Unfortunately, that adherence to peace sometimes gets him in trouble as it did last week with Seven and puts him in danger this week with a wildly erratic Vrille. Winta McGrath(Campion) has embued the boy with layers of complexity. He isn’t just a naive child or a potential prophet. He is both and more. Wise beyond his years and braver than he should be, Campion is everything Paul is not, and the two boys are headed for a crisis. If this is the Garden of Eden, Paul and Campion are Cain and Abel.

One of two big storylines dominated Raised By Wolves Season 2 Episode 7. The first is a visually impressive bonkers bit of character evolution. Mother’s biological child Seven has been a problem for a while now. Mother and Father have been lying about its origination, and it seems to have a nasty streak of sibling jealousy. After eating first all the tree fruit, it then ingested all of Sue from the top down. Sue had been trying to tell Marcus she was mistaken and burn her before Seven could get there, but it was too late. Eating the tree advanced Seven’s evolution rapidly, and it emerged a larger, squid-like hydra with fully powered weapons similar to Mother’s.

Mother’s maternal programming prohibited her from unleashing her full strength on Seven. Her half-hearted attack was unsuccessful and gave Seven a chance to show what it could really do. It unleashed a sonic scream throwing Mother several feet through the air and injuring her. Marcus, who has realized that he backed the wrong pony, collects her and takes her back to the Tarantula to correct her programming. Until that is done, Seven can continue its reign of terror as it tracks down Campion, presumably to kill its rival. Seven is dangerous and emotional having gotten traits from Mother. This is a major problem as it makes it unpredictable. Hopefully, Mother’s collaboration with Grandmother isn’t another step towards annihilation. Mother will wear Grandmother’s veil to dampen her maternal instincts so she can kill Seven.

Although Grandmother is also surprised to learn the serpent has emotions, she hopes Mother can defeat it by wearing the sensory dampener. Grandmother and other androids like her were created as shepherds for the ancient humans. Unfortunately, they could not protect them from the entity that is sending the signal and playing games with everyone’s lives. No one knows what it wants beyond the death of all human life.

One question everyone should be asking before Mother puts on the veil, though, is whether or not Grandmother might be infected by the signal already. What if she is yet another ploy to trick the group. If Mother is turned against humans, there is little anyone can do to save the colony. I also have grave concerns that removing the veil from Grandmother could be just as dangerous as Mother wearing it. Without her filter, will Grandmother become overcome with potentially detrimental emotions?

The second plot turn deals with Tempest and the search for her baby. The young woman has been through it in the past few days. Her body is recovering from a brutal self-birth, and her mind is struggling with the loss of her baby and postpartum hormones. She vacillates wildly between icy determination that sees her slicing pieces of sea creature’s skin off to use as an acid shield for the drone Hunter made to cold detachment as she walks away from her rescued baby. Hunter is understandably devastated and confused that Tempest doesn’t want her baby back, but no one can understand what she has been through and how she feels.

She was raped on the trip here and has seen nothing but violence and dispair since arriving on the planet. Her reaction is understandable if heartbreaking. When faced with what appears to be a loving sea creature feeding her baby, she thinks giving up her child might be for the best. Hunter shot the creature to retrieve the baby, but the nurturing demeanor of the creature and the already dead sea infant in the cave lend credence to the theory that these creatures and humans share more than a little DNA. These very well could be what became of the ancient humans on Kepler-22b.

This same storyline also gives us the return of Vrille. If her exposed robot wiring wasn’t scary enough, the mask she applied is even more frightening. It’s no wonder that the others are suspicious of her. She did go on a bloody, although somewhat justified, rampage. Vrille calls her killing spree delayed self-defense in a rare moment of humor. The line was funny because she earnestly meant it. It was all the more amusing because it was so unexpected. Raised By Wolves is not often humorous. It is a stone serious story that sometimes feels as weighty as an elephant.

As quickly as the levity comes, though, it is replaced with more critical questions about who the real villains are. The AI already on the planet has proven deceitful and cunning, but so has Marcus and The Trust. It seems hardly anyone is trustworthy. Grandmother, Mother, and Father are beholden to their programming, but systems break down, and we know very little about Grandmother. Vrille was designed as a replacement for Decima’s child, but she also had problems. Vrille is now officially dead, but she wrote several lines of code onto a tree trunk before she died. She said she was writing down the “important parts”. We will have to wait and see whether this code can be used to rebuild her and whether the missing bits will matter.

Father continues to echo the difficulty of parenthood. He is willing to sacrifice anything for humans. His programming has created a being that serves and protects without having any worth beyond his charge. Some of the greatest moments come from Father, who struggles with so many typically human feelings. Like most parents, he is consumed with his children’s safety. Mother is his partner, but she has forced him to keep her secret and deal with her dismissal. As much as he would like to be nothing more than a robot, Campion is right. He has valid emotions, and they are being tested constantly. It’s no picnic for Mother either, though. She has to make the difficult choice to go to war against her biological child to save everyone else. It is a Sophie’s choice of epic proportions.

At the end, does it matter if you are raised by sea creatures, androids, human monsters, or wolves? Raised By Wolves Season 2 Episode 7 asks some interesting questions. Vrille sagely declares that everyone must prove themselves eventually. Some crumble under pressure, and others reveal a self-serving heart. There are a few, though, that choose goodness and light. Hopefully, those heroes will prevail. It’s Raised By Wolves, though, so more likely, humans will keep doing dumb things, and serpents will keep flying. Find all our Raised By Wolves coverage here.