Raised By Wolves season 1, episode 7 recap – “Faces”

By Jonathon Wilson
Published: September 17, 2020 (Last updated: last month)
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Raised By Wolves season 1, episode 7 recap - "Faces"
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Summary

“Faces” would be more aptly titled “Voices”, since everyone is hearing them, but the dynamics and conflicts remain highly fascinating in another great episode.

This recap of Raised By Wolves season 1, episode 7, “Faces”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.


Mother is, to put things mildly, in a bad way. Marcus has her eyes. She’s leaking goo all over the place. Campion is distraught and steals a gun from one of the Mithraic, but Mother, ever the caregiver, cautions him against violence again. Mother is strung up and left alone, alive but wounded and disarmed.

It’s a success for the Mithraic, but Sue is fuming with Marcus for using Paul. She wants to flee to the tropical zone in the lander, just the three of them, since she feels that keeping up appearances with the beliefs of the Mithraic any longer than necessary makes them traitors. Marcus plans to reprogram the androids on the basis that they’ll need them to maintain and defend whatever they build in the tropical zone. Nobody, though, least of all the audience, is buying that as his true explanation.

This is basically confirmed when he goes to see Mother. She suggests he takes Paul and leaves the rest of her “family” with her. She also knows who he truly is having detected his facial scarring; he’s an atheist, a child soldier. They have a bit of an argument and come awfully close to kissing.

Father, meanwhile, has been fixed up, but he’s not himself — his only interest is service now, and not the kids. Speaking of the kids, they’re concerned about Campion and wary of the Mithraic. Holly and Tempest tell Vita that Father isn’t himself anymore, simply an android. Since Campion is “impure”, the Mithraic plan to baptize him.

Paul, in the meantime, builds a model of Mithras out of stones, leading the Mithraic to believe he’s the prophecised child; the prophecy speaks of an orphan, though they surmise that might be wrong, obviously not knowing that Paul is in fact an orphan after Marcus and Sue, or Caleb and Mary, killed his real parents. Tempest goes to see Campion and fills him in on everything, as well as taking him some fungus. She advises him to pretend to accept Sol so that the Mithraic let him out. He doesn’t accept Sol, obviously, but neither does she — there’s no reason for anyone else to know that. Campion hears Tally’s voice in “Faces”, advising him to kill himself so they can be together.

When Mother and Marcus speak again, they discuss their respective backgrounds and suitability as parents. She’s programmed to be a caregiver, while all Marcus has ever known is war and deception. He’s a lost boy himself — how can he raise a child? This gets to Marcus, but the voices remind him to let Mother live and he’ll be the kind of this world. When Paul tries to speak with him, Marcus throws the boy to the ground.

Campion’s baptism is to take place in a half-built church, partially assembled from the headstones of his siblings, which he notices midway through the ceremony, halting his recitations. Apparently the headstones thing doesn’t matter since atheists are soulless, which is small consolation for Campion, who attempts to flee but is stopped by Father. Campion stabs him in response, but it achieves nothing, and he’s carted back to the silo.

Marcus is gradually losing it in Raised by Wolves episode 7. When Sue socks him in the face because of what he did to Paul, he reminds her that she’s only alive because of him. Delusions of grandeur are beginning to take hold. He goes and asks for Father’s help with something, which turns out to be transporting Mother somewhere. When Father arrives to prep her she tries to speak with him, but he is “unable to process her requests”.

In the silo, Campion sees Tally, who whispers to him that he’s all along; look outside and see. He does and sees Father dragging Mother away. When Marcus is stopped by a fellow Mithraic, the one whose father we learned he killed in the previous episode, Mother starts snitching on him for being an atheist. Marcus is able to talk his way out of it, though, with classic faith-based manipulation. One gets the sense you could do just about anything so long as ardent believers thought a deity was telling you to. Tempest, meanwhile, follows behind.

Marcus and Father drag Mother out to the middle of nowhere while she tries to make a case for Campion’s value to the colony — again, a caregiver until the end. Marcus starts hearing the voices insisting he let her live, but rebels against them by instructing Father to drop her in a pit anyway. Father does, but catches the rope, allowing her to climb back up to safety while Marcus fights a version of himself, evidently hallucinating. It’s a fight he loses. As Mother thanks Father — it’s still a little unclear the extent to which he’s aware — and tells him she’ll be back for him and the children, Marcus is slashed across the belly, almost disemboweled. Still, the voices tell him to let Mother live as she walks away.

At the settlement, Paul continues to build his model of Mithras out of rocks. Inside it, he resurrects Mouse, rolling the stone away from the door of a little cave in a very biblical way. This only reinforces the idea that he’s some kind of chosen one, but when Sue finds a badly-injured Marcus outside, he has other ideas. She insists they have everything they need to leave, but he says they’re not going anywhere — the prophecy about the orphan boy in the empty land isn’t Paul or Campion, he says, but him.


What did you think of Raised By Wolves season 1, episode 7, “Faces”? Comment below.

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