Praise Sol.

For those of us who, like me, never accepted the cancellation of Raised by Wolves, four years later we finally have confirmation that makes the whole thing even more infuriating: a third season was not some distant possibility. They were ready to make it.

David W. Zucker, executive producer of the series and Chief Creative Officer at Scott Free Productions, revealed that the team was “ready to do” the new episodes when the WarnerMedia-Discovery merger changed everything. With David Zaslav taking over the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery, Zucker said, the third season was simply set aside by HBO Max.

And that confirms, in the clearest possible terms, what fans had suspected since 2022. Raised by Wolves did not end because Aaron Guzikowski had run out of story, because the production did not know how to move forward, or because that universe had reached any kind of natural conclusion. The series was caught in a corporate decision during a massive Warner restructuring.

In December 2025, when I wrote about Raised by Wolves, I argued that it represented the kind of risk HBO was once willing to take, and that we now miss. It was expensive, strange, philosophical, uncomfortable, and completely uninterested in making life easier for the viewer. It did not feel as though it had been conceived by an algorithm, a focus group, or the possibility of going viral. It felt as though it had been made because someone still believed television could also be this. Now we know the story almost continued.

Aaron Guzikowski always made it clear that he envisioned Raised by Wolves as a story told over approximately five seasons. So when the second season ended in 2022, we were not approaching a conclusion. We were probably not even halfway through the story. And what a place to stop.

Mother (Amanda Collin) had been subdued by Grandmother, whose plan to ensure humanity’s survival was becoming increasingly terrifying. Father (Abubakar Salim) continued to discover that the boundaries between technology, memory, and life on Kepler-22b were far less clear than anyone imagined. Marcus (Travis Fimmel) ended the season literally suspended in midair, transformed into something that seemed to bring Sol closer than ever to the mysterious entity manipulating both humans and androids.

There was still Sue, the tree, the serpent, the humanoid creatures, the temples, the Mithraic cards and, above all, the question running through the entire series: what was Sol?

Religion? Technology? An ancient intelligence? Something genuinely divine? Raised by Wolves was never in a hurry to answer because its strength lay precisely in dismantling, episode by episode, any certainty that faith and reason were truly opposites. The secrets of Kepler-22b challenged religious and scientific explanations at the same time, and many of them remained unresolved when the series was abruptly cut short.

Mother remains, to me, one of the great recent creations in science fiction. An android designed as a weapon of mass destruction who learns to become a mother; a machine programmed to kill that develops affection, guilt, fear, jealousy, and an almost ferocious need to protect her children while humans continue destroying one another in the name of their own certainties. Who is more human?

It is a question deeply connected to Ridley Scott’s universe, from Blade Runner to Alien and Prometheus, but Raised by Wolves added another fascinating provocation: what if faith can also be programming? What if what we interpret as divine is simply technology too advanced for us to understand? Or, more unsettling still, what if it is not? Perhaps that is why the series was so difficult to explain. And so easy to love once you entered its logic.

The developments of the past few weeks raised hopes slightly because Raised by Wolves reappeared on the Apple TV Store in some markets and began showing up in sales rankings. Some headlines made it sound as though Apple had “brought the series back to life,” but it is important not to confuse the two things: Apple TV has not rescued Raised by Wolves, has not ordered a third season, and there is currently no announced negotiation to revive it.

What is interesting is the coincidence. Four years after its cancellation, the series is circulating again just as Zucker reveals that Scott Free never fully forgot about it either. He not only explained that the third season had been ready to move forward before the merger, but also said that he personally still wants to bring Raised by Wolves back. He even recalled that there was a time when he could never have imagined Scott Free making Alien or Blade Runner series and that, because of that, he continues to hope Raised by Wolves might also “have another day.”

It is a lovely hope. A realistic one? Far less so.

Four years have passed. The children who made up the generation being raised by Mother and Father have grown up, and several of the young actors are now adults. A time jump would obviously be the simplest narrative solution, and it would not be difficult to justify within a series so obsessed with evolution, cycles, and transformation. The bigger problem would be reassembling a cast that has moved on.

Amanda Collin and Abubakar Salim, our Mother and Father, are now both part of House of the Dragon. Collin plays Lady Jeyne Arryn, Lady of the Eyrie and head of House Arryn. Salim is Alyn of Hull, the sailor who saved Corlys Velaryon and whose importance to the Velaryon story has grown dramatically.

Travis Fimmel, meanwhile, continues to orbit another major HBO franchise. In Dune: Prophecy, he plays Desmond Hart, a central character in the story, and he returns for Season 2, expected later this year. If the series survives the latest corporate upheaval surrounding Warner, there is obvious room for it to continue for more seasons.

The irony is both delicious and cruel: Mother, Father, and Marcus are still tied to the very same ecosystem that allowed Raised by Wolves to die.

And that ecosystem is changing again. So reviving an expensive, visually ambitious series that has been off the air for four years would involve much more than simply restarting the third season that was ready in 2022. Schedules would need to be reorganized, the production rebuilt, rights sorted out, and the story itself would probably need to accommodate the inevitable passage of time.

It is not impossible. But it would be a resurrection, not a simple continuation. That is why Zucker’s statement should be understood for exactly what it is: hope, not a plan.

Still, there is something we did not have until now. We know that Raised by Wolves has not been forgotten by the people who made it. We know that the third season almost happened. And we know that its cancellation was not the natural consequence of a story that had reached its end.

Maybe one day it will be a new season. Maybe a miniseries. A film. At this point, even a graphic novel finally revealing Guzikowski’s plan would be better than spending eternity watching Marcus float in the air without knowing what Sol was trying to say.

Aaron Guzikowski planned five seasons. We got two. They still owe us three.

Praise Sol.