“Raised by Wolves”: how is the first Ridley Scott TV series

Raised by wolves, first television series directed by Ridley Scott, it could have been many things. The sublimation of a monstrous talent. The culmination of an ancient tradition. The alternative, newer and therefore palatable, to the physical and emotional devastation he told about Westworld. Instead, the production, debut on Sky Atlantic on the early evening of Monday 8 January, he lacked courage and inventiveness. And everything that could have been simply wasn’t.

Or at least not as it should have.

Raised by wolves it was based on a known story, a dystopia. “Boston, 2145,” warned an overlay headline, taking the viewer to a faceless city, where a religious war has erased any residue of humanity. The atheists fought against the Mithraics, who grew up within Christianity while adoring a different God, Sol. And the Earth, once the cradle of civilization, has become sterile. All that is left on the planet once called “home” is a scenario of devastation: dust, rubble, torn bodies. A gray-yellowish palette, the filter of which was then found on Kepler 22-b, the Planet appointed to welcome a new humanity.

Raised by wolves, where the alternation of past and present was not enough to explain the reasons for a war designed to warn (the few still not aware of it) of the dangers of fundamentalisms, has tried to give itself the tone of a science fiction genesis. Father and Mother, two human-like androids, were charged with feeding some embryos, “giving birth” and raising them, so as to allow them to give life to a new civilization on Kepler 22-b. But of the twelve children only one survived, Campion. And there, in the growth of the little one, the Adam and Eve of the new millennium have lost all logic and, together, any possibility of giving shape to a wow effect.

Mother and Father, together with little Campion, found themselves living on an increasingly inhospitable Planet, facing the invasion of the Mithraics, whose ark (spaceship format) is docked on Kepler 22-b. Other children have landed on the planet. Mother kidnapped them, to raise them with an affectivity that has nothing to do with the mathematical perfection of Artificial Intelligence. A war ensued, between humans, androids and monsters of dubious origin. But the horrifying future that, on paper, should have induced the viewer to serious and urgent reflections on the present did not bring with it the questions it should have. Only a series of questions related to a story in which it proved impossible to identify a common thread.

Raised by wolves, war within war, has stripped the anroids of their coldness. Mother, perhaps the most contradictory character of the entire series, he was endowed with the same emotionality of a human being: a robotic creature with the same powers as a Marvel superhero, she found herself a hen. And the machine-animal dichotomy is thus gone. Ridley Scott has shaped a futuristic world, putting current issues into it: rape, prevarication, fundamentalism and motherhood, religion and opportunism. Too much, however, did not allow him to dedicate the depth it deserved to each topic. The result is an enjoyable series, studded, however, with its own incompleteness. The episodes flow and Mother’s battle for the protection of human children manages to give the series a good pace. However, there is a but. And this, however, never manages to leave Kepler 22-b, a distant land where humanity has the opportunity to be reborn better.