Raised by Wolves Season 2: See the cast, date, episodes, plus watch the trailer

In Season 1 of HBO Max series Raised by Wolves – which has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was in the top 10 of Showmax’s most-watched series of 2021 – we were introduced to Mother and Father, androids sent to create a new colony on the planet Kepler-22b, a rather inhospitable place. The locations are breathtaking; the series was filmed in the Western Cape, specifically Somerset West, Stellenbosch and Cape Town, South Africa. There’s just something about our region that locals instantly recognise, even within the fantasy sci-fi context, and its portrayal is suitably otherworldly.

Mother and Father escape a war-torn Earth with their cargo of human embryos that they are to nurture to birth and beyond. Sadly only one of the six survives past young childhood, and the parents do their best to raise Campion as a good atheist; the war on Earth is between those who believe in Sol, and those who do not. While Father is a service android programmed to protect and support the mini colony, Mother – also named Lamia – is a powerful machine known as a necromancer, who only fully discovers her abilities when she sets out to destroy a Mithraic ship and bring back five assorted children to bring their total back up to six.

Not everyone on board the ship – The Ark – is killed, and the survivors are intent on retrieving their children. Among them is an atheist couple, Marcus and Sue, who had their faces surgically altered to escape Earth and in the process inadvertently acquired a son, Paul, who, of course, is one of the group now under the care of Mother and Father. Things grow more complicated when Marcus begins to believe he has been chosen by Sol as a prophet and not to put too fine a point on it, begins losing his mind.

Through a simulation process, Mother gets to meet her creator again and see things he had erased from her memory. Next thing we know, she is pregnant – properly so, in her own belly, it’s complicated, go with it – but the child she births is not what anyone expected. 

In the season finale, Mother and Father decide to go on a suicide mission to destroy the potentially dangerous child and thereby ensure the safety of the children they leave behind. They fly their craft into one of the huge holes peppered all over the place, which emit great heat. Well, what do you know? These holes go through the molten core of the planet so all three passengers are ejected – alive – on the other side … finally, in the tropical zone that we’ve heard so much about.

And this is where we find them at the beginning of Season 2. The children have all somehow been rescued and brought to an atheist colony controlled by a robot where they are reunited with Mother and Father; Mother and Father have been repaired, and Mother’s murderous traits have been removed; Paul is reverting to his religious beliefs; Marcus is wandering in the wilderness alongside an acid sea where he encounters a young woman and her android “daughter” and is entertaining a vision of converting the atheists one non-believer at a time; and Lamia’s offspring is hungry…

Raised by Wolves: Who’s who in the main cast

The characters in Raised by Wolves can be loosely divided along these lines: atheists and androids, and human worshippers of Sol, the Mithraic. In group A, we have Mother and Father, androids played by Amanda Collin and Abubakar Salim respectively. Their surviving son Campion is played by Australian actor Winta McGrath. He is named after Mother’s creator Campion Sturges (Cosmo Jarvis), a former Mithraic scientist who changed his faith. He and Mother have, shall we say, an interesting relationship. 

Technically, or at least to begin with, Marcus (previously Caleb) is an atheist. He’s played by the piercingly blue-eyed Travis Fimmel (Vikings) who was nominated by Critics’ Choice Super Awards for Best Actor Science Fiction/Fantasy Series for his role here. The series received two additional nominations, for Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Series, and Best Actress: Sci-Fi for Collin. Marcus’s wife, Sue, is played by Niamh Algar, and she’s still very much an atheist. She and Mother circle each other territorially around Paul.

The children brought from the Ark, and indoctrinated with the religion of Sol, are Paul (Felix Jamieson), who barely ages a minute between Season 1 and Season 2, while his friend Campion is hurtling into adolescence and that awkwardness of young male actors when times passes in the real world; Hunter, an older boy played by Ethan Hazzard; Holly (Aasiya Shah); little Vita (Ivy Wong); and Tempest (Jordan Loughran), who has every reason to hate the Mithraic. She embraces Mother and Father and sheds her former beliefs.

Group B is comprised of a lot of soldiers who get killed, but Marcus overlaps into it with his delusions of grandeur. For now, with the first two episodes of Season 2 aired, we can assume Decima is in this group. She’s played by South African star Kim Engelbrecht (Reyka).

Not only is Raised by Wolves the biggest budget production to be filmed in South Africa, the cast features several local actors. They include Clayton Evertson (Arendsvlei), Susan Danford (Still Breathing), Litha Bam (Intersexions), Garth Breytenbach (8, Troy: Fall of a City), Tristan de Beer (The Girl From St Agnes, Rage), Tanya van Graan (Die Spook van Uniondale, Zulu), Tarryn Wyngaard (DAM, The Watch, Dwaalster), Jenna Upton (Cape Town) and Anlia van Rensburg (Getroud Met Rugby), as well as Loulou Taylor and Daniel Lasker. 

Raised by Wolves Season 2 release date

Season 1 told a sprawling tale, and on more than one occasion it looked like a lead character might perish, so full marks for suspense and drama. Before you dip into Season 2, you might need a refresher of Season 1 if you watched it way back when it premiered nearly 18 months ago. Warning, here be spoilers.

The first two episodes of Season 2 aired on HBOMax in the US on 3 February 2022, and on Showmax on 4 February. New episodes will follow weekly every Friday on Showmax. There are eight episodes in Season 2, with the season finale on 18 March.

Raised by Wolves Season 2 trailer

The subtitles in the Season 2 trailer begin with “unnerving music” which is pretty much the mood of the soundtrack to the entire series (the main score is composed by Ben Frost). It’s followed by Father’s optimistic observation that this side of the planet seems less intent on killing their children.

The haunting song playing in the background’s lyrics are “something wicked this way comes” so unfortunately Father’s hopes are more than likely going to be dashed. Especially when you see the end of the trailer “ALL SCREAMING” – in capital letters for emphasis, in case you weren’t quite convinced of the terror that is being foretold. Trailers by their nature shouldn’t reveal too many details, and are often edited out of sequence but for maximum effect.

However, it would appear the divide between religion and atheism is going to be a driving factor in Season 2. 

Raised by Wolves Season 2: List of episodes

At the time of writing, the first two episodes of eight had aired, with new episodes following weekly. These are the titles of the first four episodes to be released.

Episode 1: The Collective

Episode 2: Seven

Episode 3: Good Creatures

Episode 4: Control

What we’ve seen so far in Season 2 is in the much anticipated tropical zone, food is abundant and looks a whole lot more palatable than what the characters ate in their previous settlement. Accommodations are better too, with all the modern technology a settler on a new planet could want. Although Father does have a moment when he’s doing a spot of handwashing and mutters darkly about a stain that is difficult to get out. One would think with a collective run by a machine, and all the other fancy technology, they’d have figured out laundry better. All in all, it’s a strange juxtaposition of old versus new.

As former Mithraics, no matter their current theological beliefs or lack thereof, the children are not exactly welcomed with open arms in this colony upon which they all happened, from what we can gather, 3 000 miles from the original settlement. They and their android parents are viewed with suspicion and a bit of fear, and the reactions centuries into the future are the same as they would be here and now. The punishment is somewhat different though.

In episode 2, titled Seven, Lamia’s child makes an appearance. Its name is Seven, being her seventh child. While she feigns ignorance, Lamia takes it upon herself to destroy her baby – who is now pretty darn huge. Naturally, this is a conflict for her. 

Meanwhile, Marcus is holed up in a cave with Decima, going madder by the minute. Her droid became separated from them but is found by Paul and Campion so there’s the perfect set up for the two factions to collide. Vulture has a full recap here.

Where to watch Raised by Wolves Season 2

Showmax is the only place to watch Raised By Wolves. Season 1 has 10 episodes of just under an hour running time, which you can binge now before you begin Season 2.

The first episodes of Season 2 have aired on HBOMax in the US and are available on Showmax, where new episodes will be loaded weekly every Friday. The dates to diarise are 11 February 2022 (episode 3), 18 February 2022 (episode 4), 25 February 2022 (episode 5), 4 March 2022 (episode 6), 11 March 2022 (episode 7), and 18 March 2022 (episode 8).

For sci-fi fans, must-watch series on Showmax include Westworld, in which rich people get to interact and live out their fantasies with AI characters in a futuristic theme park; in Intergalactic, a cop is exiled to a prison colony. On the way there, her fellow convicts stage a mutiny and she has no choice but to join them on the run to a distant galaxy; and His Dark Materials, which is set in a multi-world reality, with the action moving from one to another. For more sci-fi and fantasy titles, click here.