Raised By Wolves Season 1, Episode 3 recap: Virtual Faith

Raised By Wolves Season 1, Episode 3 begins with Mother telling the children an eerie rendition of the classic “Three Little Pigs” folktale. Her goal is to calm them down. They’re extra scared now after the creatures attacked. I also noticed Mother now has her eyes safely secured around her neck.

The chilling way Mother narrates only seems to terrify the children more, especially as she verbally snaps at Campion for being disrespectful when he tells her he always hated the story.

After the credits roll, we get a text screen telling us we’re seeing a flashback to ten years earlier, when the Ark of Heaven was still traveling to Kepler-22b. Despite being in stasis, passengers could communicate with one another through their minds as if they were awake.

Raised By Wolves Season 1, Episode 3 recap: The children get increasingly sick.

Speaking of the children, all of them are becoming increasingly sick by the second — except Campion. He wonders if Mother is making them all ill. Father says she wouldn’t do that. As for why Campion isn’t sick, we still don’t know. He’s just “special” for now.

Even Mother is starting to think she’s inadvertently making the children sick. She tells Father he will have to help her destroy herself if that is true.

In another flashback, Marcus, Sue, and Paul hang out in the simulator while he builds his golden city. Paul wonders if he would have made a good soldier in the world. Marcus says he would have, but their side didn’t draft children.

“Only atheists did that.”

Then in a flashback-within-a-flashback, a young Caleb — who is now Marcus — remembers being trained as a soldier at a young age. Forced to fight his friends and wield guns against Mithraic soldiers, it’s hard to see the atheists as anything but barbaric.

In the present, Marcus meets Lucius, who asks if he remembers fighting alongside his father during the Battle of Boston. Marcus calls him a good man, which seems to be a misstep as Lucius asks if that means he has forgiven him.

“Is that not what Sol teaches us?” He responds, which satisfies Lucius.

Raised By Wolves Season 1, Episode 3 recap: Mother retrieves medicine.

The two men then go investigate the new cracks that have formed in the terrain post-crash. I think the theory about the skeletal creatures coming from them is accurate since Marcus comments that something is definitely living down there.

Luckily, the remaining Mithraic don’t run into anything unsavory when they’re forced to take refuge in the cracks moments later, as Mother soars over, shrieking, to look for survivors and medicine for the children. The Eminence sacrifices one of his androids to lead her away from the wreckage.

Mother easily kills and dismantles her before removing one of her eyes — or so it seems. Despite ripping out her heart, the android gets up again and runs, although she doesn’t get very far before tumbling into the pit.

Meanwhile, the Mithraic children and Campion launch their escape plan. Pretending to look for Paul’s mouse, Campion cleverly finds a way to lock Father inside the carbos storage unit. The children escape into the woods.

A few are worried they’ll run into the creatures. Campion reassures them that they aren’t will, that Mother can make them see things when she wants to. We’ll find out if he’s right soon enough, I suppose.

At the wreckage site, the other android sings a hymn for the soulless for her fallen comrade. Marcus is disturbed by her singing and tells her to stop. We learn the Mithraic often sing it when they delight in atheist executions, which is probably why it made him uncomfortable. Everyone looks at him skeptically, so Marcus pretends he only worried her song would make the necromancer return.

Raised By Wolves Season 1, Episode 3 recap: The truth about the sickness.

In the woods, Paul gets separated from the rest of the children when he spots his mouse roaming around. His pet mouse is named Mouse, fittingly enough, as we discover through a flashback. Marcus gave it to him first in the simulator as a pet.

When Mother returns to the homestead, she gets some good news from Father, who has discovered the source of the children’s’ sickness. The carbos has a radioactive element they were unaware of before, and the newly-retrieved omnibiotics should aid the Mithraic children.

Father is sent to retrieve the group of kids while Mother gets Paul, who we know has been separated from the rest. The kids are rescued just in time, too, since a creature can be heard closing in.

When they get back, Father tells Campion what they found out about the carbos. He verifies that Mother was telling the truth using the lander’s bio scanner. But the moment he steps outside, another creature is waiting to pounce. Again, Father saves him. They lock the beast inside the storage unit that Father was trapped in earlier, so Mother can take care of it when she returns.

Father is deeply hurt by Campion’s earlier betrayal. He needs to feel that he is of use to the family, or he has no purpose.

Raised By Wolves Season 1, Episode 3 recap: Paul sees something odd in the woods.

Elsewhere, Mother closes in on Paul’s location. She calls out for him in the woods; unfortunately, he doesn’t hear her as he wanders farther away. Paul notices a strange hooded being ahead of him, someone who appears to be using Tally’s voice and song before her early death in the pit.

I’m confident now that there is more to these pits than first appeared. Especially as Paul tries to follow the figure and inadvertently triggers a trap. The forest floor opens beneath him and sends him tumbling down into one of the massive holes.

Luckily, he lands on an extended branch that stretches across the middle. Still, things aren’t looking good for him as he looks up and pleads for someone to find him.

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Odds & Ends from Raised By Wolves Season 1, Episode 3

Paul also found a stick doll that looked a bit like Tally. Could the pits be wormholes of some kind? Did Tally fall through to another dimension? Is she the hooded figure, but perhaps older? Or a different version of her child self? After all, she is the only child to have “died” from the pit, the only one without a body to bury.
As the lore depends and the world grows, it’s easy to see why TV Guide thinks Raised By Wolves could “put HBO Max on the map.”

What did you think of Raised By Wolves Episode 3? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

New episodes of Raised By Wolves debut on Thursdays on HBO Max.

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