The Raised By Wolves Colony Report: Sol Reveals His True Intent

When we return to Kepler-22b, Paul is bringing a pallet of fruit picked from the Tree for the colony to eat. They test it and find it safe, then begin digging in. It's a little disgusting watching people eat fruit that looks like human brains, especially when we know it contains some human DNA. Is it cannibalism? Who knows. Campion (Winta McGrath) doesn't eat the fruit after picking it up and inspecting it, and this seems to disappoint Paul, who is watching from a distance. Paul wants something to magically happen to anyone who eats the fruit, but it looks like whatever effects it will have don't happen immediately. Mother takes some of the fruit to her snake-baby, but the creature is apparently starving and eats the entire stack of crates, then escapes and flies away. 

Meanwhile, Hunter (Ethan Hazzard) turned one of the colony's drones into a submersible to look for the fish-creature that took Tempest's baby. They catch one of the creatures, only to realize it is not a pregnant or nursing female, just a well-fed male. They cover the submersible in the male creature's skin in order to protect it from the acid water, then set it on its way. Campion sees someone take it and run, and he goes to catch them. It's Vrille (Morgan Santo), with a Jason Voorhees-meets-Pinhead face-mask that she's created for herself. The others approach and Holly (Aasiya Shah) freaks out because Vrille killed everyone in front of her, but Campion reassures her that Vrille is harmless. Vrille explains that she heard a baby in a cave about 10 miles down-shore, then overheard Campion and the others discussing a missing baby. She took the drone in an attempt to contact the colony, so she could help Tempest find her missing child.

Back at the Tree, Paul is listening to Sue's heartbeat, which is beginning to slow. He asks Marcus what's going on and our intrepid True Believer doesn't sound so faithful anymore: "I wanted Sol to be the answer, a way out of the darkness," he tells Paul. "Maybe Sol is the darkness." The walkie-talkie in Marcus's bag starts getting static, and we can hear Sue's voice, though it's distorted. "Burn me," she starts repeating. Marcus looks up to see the serpent headed straight for the Tree, and he tries to light her on fire. It's too little, too late, though, as the creature swallows the entire tree whole, then begins to transform. It begins sprouting numerous tentacles and grows fins. Mother arrives in her t-posed killer state and attempts to stop the creature, but her scream attack gets caught in her throat. The creature blows her backward to the ground and takes off to find something else to eat. Marcus rescues Mother and asks why she couldn't kill the serpent. She reveals it is her child, and something in her caregiver programming is preventing her from attacking her flesh and blood. They set off in one of the colony's tanks to try and find the serpent, and, using the communications system, watch and listen as the serpent kills another tank nearby. 

The baby search party finds a cave with seaweed everywhere, and Father finds a dead infant fish-creature. They move on because a storm (actually the mutated serpent and its electricity powers) is headed their way. Hunter starts talking about deactivating Vrille and she gets spooked, running off into the wilderness. Campion follows her and Father loses them both. Campion stumbles upon the charred remains of the tank and crawls inside to see Vrille trying to hide among the bloody remains of the crew. The serpent's scream fried some of her systems and she's not doing too well. He tells her about when the serpent got between himself and Mother, acting jealous, and Vrille asks him if she thinks the creature came from Mother. He has a realization that Mother lied to him, and it's sure to come back to bite her. Vrille reveals that the human girl she was based on killed herself when she realized her mother was profiting off of weapons that were killing the earth's atmosphere. 

We return to the baby search party, where Father finally tells Hunter and Tempest that the serpent is Mother's "seventh child." He can't explain much more, however, because he hears a baby crying. They investigate a nearby cave and discover one of the fish creatures nursing Tempest's daughter. Tempest begs them not to kill it, to let the creature raise her child. Hunter tries to force Father to fight Tempest's decision, but she leaves the cave. Hunter kills the creature anyway and takes the baby, then attempts to give it to Tempest, who turns and walks away. This devastates Hunter, who can't understand Tempest's trauma and reasons for not wanting to raise the product of her rape. 

In an attempt to get answers or even a lead on what to do next, Mother questions Grandmother, the ancient android Father revived. Grandmother reveals that she was built by the "technocrats," who fought against "the believers" in a war on Kepler-22b some centuries before. She was a "shepherd" android, basically Mother 1.0 from a mirror civilization of sorts. Grandmother explains that the serpent is part of the "entity," and that it wants to destroy the planet. Mother tells Grandmother about her attempt to stop the serpent and her inability to do so, and Grandmother offers her the veil she wears. Apparently, it will block some of Mother's code, allowing her to face the creature and destroy it.

Campion and Vrille end up in a forest, where Vrille tells him that she's shutting down and starts writing, frantically, in a fallen log. He tries to reassure her and she shuts down, then her warning system activates: "Danger: this product will become radioactive shortly after breakdown." The episode ends with Campion's grief at his friend's permanent death. 

Team Sol is slowly but surely dissipating. Following Vrille's massacre of Marcus' followers, the followers of this faith had dwindled in number to a mere handful of characters. Now the staunchest believer of the bunch, the mad "chosen one" Marcus, has his own crisis of faith. Sue's transformation left him reeling and heartbroken, and his words to Paul about Sol seem like foreshadowing. "Sol is the darkness," he says, and it's interesting that a supposed god of light ("sol" is Latin for "sun") could actually be the darkness. Grandmother's reveal that Sol wants to destroy the entire planet means that Marcus is actually right about something for once, and Sol is in fact the great evil that has made life on Kepler-22b near impossible. Marcus rescuing Mother was even more telling, as the two have been bitter enemies since the series began. If Marcus and Mother are working together, you know things have really gone wrong.