Raised By Wolves ending explained: What did Mother give birth to?

Here it is, the Raised By Wolves ending explained! We still have tons of questions, but I did my best to breakdown the finale!

Let’s dig into this highly-awaited finale hour! The finale raised tons of questions and gave very few answers, but I tried to break it down and present the Raised By Wolves ending explained.

The episode begins with Marcus, who is still very much alive, but none of us really thought he was dead, did we? The necromancer eyeball has imbibed him with some freaky super strength, similar to what Otho exhibited after transfusing Mother’s blood. Marcus looks crazy. He’s intent on finding Paul, especially with his newfound hardiness which he believes is a gift from Sol.

“Your king is coming.”

Mother, Father, Sue and the children search for a place to settle down so Mother can give birth. I don’t know what is growing inside her, but it sure is happening at an accelerated rate.

Raised By Wolves ending explained: Father grows increasingly angry with Mother.

At the camp, Mother and Father get into a heated argument when she finally tells him the whole story about banging their creator in the sim pod and getting pregnant. She also divulges what the creator said about the baby being their true mission. Father reaches his breaking point with Mother, who he feels doesn’t care about him or his wellbeing at all. He storms off into the woods as Campion desperately calls out for him.

The entire scene is framed like two parents fighting over one’s admitted infidelity, and poor Campion is caught in the crosshairs. Mother is still struggling to understand Father’s burgeoning emotions, as she calls it, he is increasingly becoming more likely to give into “human melodrama.”

Elsewhere, Marcus continues traipsing through the landscape until he finds a distorted version of Hunter with a snake for an arm. Marcus’s delusion of Hunter tells him he’s being punished, that only Marcus is the one true servant of Sol. Then the snake strikes him as Marcus grins.

In the woods, Father ponders what to do about his current situation. He cannot take care of the children unless he’s near Mother, but being near Mother makes him too angry to function. He says there is only one solution. Kill Mother? Before he can make further plans, something runs past him and he follows.

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Raised By Wolves ending explained: Sue tells Paul that Sol isn’t real.

Paul has plans of his own concerning Mother’s baby. He gives Mouse to Campion to watch over. Campion concludes that Mouse is not evil, despite spending time in the pit — does that mean the ghost Tally and others might not be either?

Seeing Mouse with Campion immediately puts Sue on high alert and she goes looking for her son, finding him skulking around near the lander. He stashed an integral piece of it in his bag with plans to dispose of it. Paul tells Sue they can’t go to the tropical zone. They have to stay on this side of the planet.

Pressed for details, he finally reveals that he has heard Sol in his head and Sue assumes he picked it up from Marcus. She tells him Sol isn’t real and his dad just went insane. Paul lets her hug him, but there’s a foreboding expression on his face that says he doesn’t buy her story one bit.

Raised By Wolves ending explained: Kepler-22b’s secret history.

Walking near the pit, Mother is ambushed by the same cloaked being Father saw in the woods. Mother’s reflexes are quick enough to defend herself — even without her fancy robo-eyes. Father arrives moments later and they examine the figure. It looks human-ish, with pale, mottled skin. It carried a Neanderthal skull. Father deduces that the skull was not brought from Earth as a Mithraic relic, as Mother suggests.

They conclude that Kepler-22b has a dark and mysterious history they’re unaware of, and Father thinks it could be their undoing. The Neanderthal skull and strange appearance of the cloaked being suggest that humans did once have a presence on this planet — but they devolved. Are those skeletal creatures running around part of the devolution?

While digging a hole for the body, Father informs Mother of his big plan. It’s not as sinister as trying to kill her, thankfully, he just wants Hunter to wipe his memory files. Father believes if he can start anew with Mother with his current behavioral model, they can coexist. He says the version of her she is now, so different from who he met 12 years ago, would not inspire him to “mimic human love,” for her. Burn.

Honestly though, love Father, but he’s being a little petty and childish about all of this, isn’t he? From a human perspective, he sounds like a selfish dad willing to sacrifice his relationship with his kid just because he’s pissed at his spouse (who, in this case, isn’t even his spouse). But then, that’s also very human of him.

Raised By Wolves ending explained: Paul turns on Sue.

Honestly though, love Father, but he’s being a little petty and childish about all of this, isn’t he? From a human perspective, he sounds like a deadbeat dad willing to sacrifice his relationship with his kid just because he’s pissed at his spouse (who, in this case, isn’t even his spouse).

Things get complicated at the campsite. Sol has cranked up the volume in Paul’s head and he’s gone on a full-on power trip. Sol told Paul Sue’s real identity, and now he believes she’s some atheist demon. He holds her at gunpoint and forces her to admit it to the group. Paul also accuses Sue/Mary of wanting to harm Mother’s baby. Then he asks Sol to guide his hand and he shoots her. As she falls to the ground, Sue tells the kids to find Mother and tell her she has to give birth now or the baby will die.

Raised By Wolves ending explained: Mother gives birth to a serpent.

Okay, so in the final minutes of the finale, everything goes completely bonkers. Mother stumbles upon the area from her vision. She finds the dodecahedron cage mechanism along with the terrifying alien-looking helmet that was spewing white blood.

Beneath the helmet is a skull that looked like an android’s skull. Was the creature inside the skull a Necromancer? We know they were made from dark photons and given to the Mithraic through scriptures created by Sol.

It seems like what Mother saw in her dream when she scanned the metal card was a bunch of these cloaked, devolved humans worshipping a Necromancer. That would explain why they kept it imprisoned in a cage and helmet — they obviously didn’t want it to use its eyes, supersonic screech, or fly away.

After that horrific discovery, Mother does give birth Alien-style. A creepy flying (yes Campion, it definitely flies!) lamprey-snake baby crawls out of her mouth and then starts suckling from her stomach. When Father finds her, Mother is preparing to get into the lander and crash it inside one of the pits. She fears the baby will want blood once it finishes with her milk. She also realizes she might have made a mistake in thinking the baby is their creator’s — something else put it inside her. Maybe while she was stuck in the sim pods?

Raised By Wolves ending explained: Mother and Father try to sacrifice themselves to kill the creature.

In the distance, Mother and Father hear Campion calling out for Mother. He arrives just in time to see them descend into the pit, the same place where their story began in the premiere episode when their lander crashed landed in one.

At the core, Kepler-22b looks similar to Earth. Mother and Father comfort each other as they face the molten abyss. They think Campion will become the new leader and keep the other children safe and they recall their fond memories of spending time with the kids. Awe.

But once the lander bursts through the core (fertilization symbolism, anyone?) it comes out the other side and blasts through to what appears to be the other side of the planet — and the tropical zone. Luckily for us viewers who weren’t ready to say goodbye to these androids, they both appear to come back to life once they’re out of the pit — just in time to come face-to-face with Mother’s baby which has already grown three times its size.

Father and Mother jump out of the lander before it crashes and then the snake baby, no longer a baby, but a giant flying dragon-like serpent, busts through the lander and takes off into the trees. I guess we know what those giant serpent skulls left all over the planet were from now.

As the finale comes to a close, Mother and Father are now stuck in a verdant, green world with a snake flying around — how very Adam and Eve of them.

Campion and the children are left alone with Sue, who appears to be recovering from her gunshot wound. I’m not sure what happened to Paul.

Raised By Wolves ending explained: An atheist ark arrives on the planet.

Then there’s Marcus, who happens to discover some roaming atheists and kills almost all of them except for one lone survivor. He steals his earpiece and tells his commander that he is the “one true king of this world,” and the guy on the other end of the line is like, “uh, we know your ark crashed so whatever.”

Overheard, a giant, atheist ark flies by. So it would seem they didn’t all perish on Earth like we were led to believe. We spent a lot of time with the Mithraic in Season 1. It looks like we’ll be meeting several new atheists in Season 2.

Abubakar Salim and Amanda Collin in Raised by Wolves Season 1, Episode 1 – Photograph by Coco Van Oppens/HBO Max /

Raised By Wolves ending explained: What’s next for the show? What does it all mean?

On top of all these developments, we also now know that some of those cloaked figures running around are humans in the throes of devolution. So what happened to all of those people and why did they start to devolve? Does this planet have its own evolutionary chain? Where do the skeletal creatures and serpents fit into the big picture? In some ways, it seems like Kepler-22b is a parallel of Earth, perhaps with a reverse chronology of our overarching timeline.

Considering the crux of this show is religion versus atheism, it would make sense for evolution to become a core plot point. Science and religion continue to come to blows over evolution even in 2020. It’s interesting when Mother says that her “creator” didn’t get her pregnant, something else did. It reminded me of that argument — did God create the Earth or did science, etc.

It’ll be interesting to see where the series goes from here and I’m sure fans are going to come up with some genius theories between now and the time Season 2 premieres! Put on your thinking caps and let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

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Raised By Wolves ending explained: Odds & Ends

Romulus’s tooth turns up again in this episode, it managed to survive all the pandemonium from the last episode. I know a lot of theories believe the Romulus and Remus myth is directly related to Campion and Paul.
It seems like the pits we’ve seen on the planet are created by the giant snakes, right? They can easily tunnel from one side of Kepler-22b to the other. My question is, why is the first one we’ve seen alive? Did something kill them off before? Can they reproduce asexually?

The entire first season of Raised By Wolves is now streaming on HBO Max.

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Raised By Wolves Season 1 ending explained: What the heck did Mother give birth to?

By Mads Lennon | Oct 1, 2020