WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Raised by Wolves, available now on HBO Max.
Ridley Scott's Raised by Wolves kicks off with a pair of robots, Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim), coming to a mysterious planet, Keppler-22B, to colonize it years after a religious war broke out on Earth. They were sent by the Atheists, who were battling with the Mithraic, followers of a god named Sol.
However, as the first three episodes play out, while the bots do manage to build a mini-society, the first batch of kids they raise, die with the exception of young Campion. But after weaving subtle hints of some misdirection, it turns out the deaths were indeed nature's fault.
Mother, reprogrammed after being a Mithraic war machine, uses her body to turn the embryos into children and raises them in the dusty terrain with Father, carrying the hopes of the Atheists on their backs. With six of the 12 embryos surviving, the robots build barracks, plant provisions called carbos (short for carbohydrates) and educate the kids on science as the means to true progress. They're non-believers and want to fashion a destiny based on their hands, not hoping and praying with an invisible force.
However, the utopia they're trying to establish takes a dark turn as the kids die out. Tally falls into a deep hole, with Walden, Gabby, Mariall and Spiria succumbing to disease. Only Campion is left, but he too shows minor signs of illness, although it may be that he's just frail. Still, it worries his parents as they start to think they're failing in their mission only for everything to change 12 years later when the Ark, Heaven, comes with a new human contingent.
Mother kills Father for wanting to send Campion to mankind, and when Marcus and his knights try to kill her and take her son, she eliminates most of them before attacking the Ark. Mother crashes it but brings five kids back to her home. She wants her pack of six back again with Campion, even bringing Father back to help her fix the mistakes of old. However, once more signs pop up that these kids could be sick or worse, Father's worried the culprit is actually Mother due to her reprogramming failing.
Later, as Mother struggles with the kill-mode in her, the fear she inflicts into Campion when he sees her ruthlessly slaughtering Mithraic soldiers leaves her wondering if she's been subconsciously murdering her children. She asks a reborn Father to kill her if that's the case, as she might be losing herself to her bloodthirsty Lamia identity. But when Campion runs away with the pack and Father tries to load the carbos into a small ship from the Ark, the truth emerges. It turns out the carbos were poisoning the kids as it was laden with radiation. The robots weren't affected but the kids were, leaving everyone wondering if it's the soil, monsters or maybe tech hidden below causing the problem. Regardless of the cause, though, even after Father brings Campion and Co. back home and proves Mother's innocence, it's still unclear how the kids will find a new source of food.
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. New episodes arrive each Thursday on HBO Max.