Although Ridley Scott’s underrated HBO sci-fi show was canceled just as it was getting great, this didn’t stop the series from continuing one of his most intriguing screen obsessions. The news of Hugh Jackman and Ridley Scott’s upcoming Treasure Island movie proves that the veteran director isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Scott’s directorial career dates back to his 1977 feature film debut, The Duellists, but it was 1979’s sci-fi horror Alien that truly put him on the map.
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Scott followed his blockbuster breakout hit with 1982’s Blade Runner, an adaptation of author Philip K. Dick’s seminal sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? While the later Philip K. Dick adaptation Total Recall was a huge hit, Blade Runner was a financial and critical failure upon its original release. The prescient sci-fi movie’s genius wasn’t appreciated until a lot later, much like the charms of Scott’s short-lived sci-fi series Raised by Wolves.
Raised By Wolves Marked Ridley Scott’s Third Great Android Sci-Fi Story
Originally released in 2020, Raised by Wolves was an ambitious sci-fi epic set in the far future after the destruction of Earth during a calamitous war between religious extremists and their atheist enemies. Set on the planet Kepler-22b, the show saw its two lead android protagonists, Amanda Collin’s Mother and Abubakar Salim’s Father, attempt to raise a colony of humans who hopefully wouldn’t succumb to the same tribal divisions that led to humanity’s downfall. Inevitably, this plan ran into some snags.
As religious extremists known as the Mithraic remerge and restart their generational conflict with other human survivors, Mother and Father grow to see that this new population of humans is seemingly doomed to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. Although Raised by Wolves only lasted two seasons, the show’s thoughtful, eerie sci-fi story still had a chance to touch on complex themes of predestination, fate, personal responsibility, belief, faith, and religious freedom.
The revelation that one major character in Alien has been an android all along was not just a great sci-fi twist but also an early hint at Scott’s ambitious view of androids in sci-fi stories. Not content with depicting androids as simplistic robotic wannabe humans, Scott has always viewed these characters as somewhere between organic human consciousnesses and artificial, unfeeling machines, something fleshed out further in Blade Runner.
Ridley Scott’s Android Sci-Fi Stories Utilize A Variety of Perspectives
This approach is what elevates the plot of Raised By Wolves, a dark, patient series that expects viewers to invest just as much emotion in its android characters as they did into its human ones. Like the later sci-fi series Devs, Raised by Wolves engages thoughtfully with questions of humanity in an age of artificial intelligence, neither resorting to scare-mongering nor wide-eyed, naive techno-optimism. Avoiding these extremes resulted in a series that felt genuinely engaged with this imagined technology, rather than focused on its next big twist or action sequence.
Bringing both a healthy dose of anti-corporate cynicism and an open-minded view toward new technologies is what allowed Scott to depict androids as uniquely human and tragic in Blade Runner, only to then later make Michael Fassbender’s David arguably the scariest monster in the entire Alien franchise between Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The same polyphonous approach turned Ridley Scott’s Raised by Wolves from a curio into must-see TV precisely because of his intriguing, nuanced take on androids as a sci-fi staple.
