WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Raised by Wolves Season 1 finale, "The Beginning," available now on HBO Max.
HBO's Raised by Wolves threw fans for a loop with the bombshell that Mother (Amanda Collin) was pregnant after a digital tryst with her original creator, Campion. Apparently, he built her so that once she unlocked her archives, they could celebrate their love. Through this online "sexperience," genetic information would be coded into Mother's fabric, allowing her to become the vessel for the next breed of human: a machine-organic hybrid.
The Season 1 finale, "The Beginning," finds Mother and her new colony journeying to a site she's had visions of so she can give birth. However, what she makes isn't at all what she imagined -- it's actually a serpent-like monster intent on turning Kepler-22b upside down.
When Mother arrives at the holy site, she finds the giant container she saw an alien trapped in, spewing a milk-like substance. She also spots what appears to be the being's skeleton, but upon inspecting it, she goes into labor. From there, executive producer Ridley Scott gives fans another birth in line with the horror essence of the Alien and Prometheus movies, as Mother's belly deflates and a giant snake forces its way out of her mouth.
Somehow, it can fly through the air, giving the impression of an eel. It's quite aggressive, though, and ends up suckling from Mother's stomach, draining her white blood, which acts as milk. This draws a parallel to Mother's dreams of something forcibly giving up its life essence, so when Father finds her, she admits that an entity corrupted her sex session and messed with the data downloaded into her.
As for who corrupted Mother's birth, it's most likely the malevolent force that's manipulated of Marcus and Paul. They believe it's Sol, the Mithraic sun god, implanting voices in their minds all season long. But given that there are other aliens and humanoids, as well as unknown entities in the Tropical Zone, who could be using tech to infect this dusty section of the planet, it's still a mystery as to who's responsible. Mother used the hibernation pods from the Ark and turned it into memory pods to access her memories so the vessels were exposed after the ship crashed for someone to tamper with. What's for certain is Mother knows her child since she's passed down traits to it and can feel what it's feeling and sense what it's thinking. She understands that it wants death, which ties into the giant snake skeletons littered across the planet. Clearly, whatever poisoned Mother's pregnancy clearly to restart this era and used her to bring a new and more evolved destroyer to life.
She tells Father the creature is growing at an alarming rate, and once it's done draining her, it'll want flesh and blood. Mother has to kill it for the sake of Campion and the other kids, so she plans to go into the lander and crash it to kill her and the snake. Father, still in love with her, doesn't want her to suffer through this alone as he sees the toll the monster is taking on her, so he pilots the ship and they go down into one of the many holes on the planet. They speed through to the molten core and dive into the magma there where they hope to burn it to death, saving the next generation of inhabitants in the process.
Created by Aaron Guzikowski and produced by Ridley Scott, Raised by Wolves stars Amanda Collin, Abubakar Salim, Winta McGrath, Niamh Algar, Jordan Loughran, Matias Varela, Felix Jamieson, Ethan Hazzard, Aasiya Shah, Ivy Wong and Travis Fimmel. Season 2 currently has no release date.