Mother In 'The Boroughs' Explained: What Are The Creature’s Powers?

Netflix’s sci-fi thriller show, The Boroughs, centers around an ominous creature, later dubbed as Mother, whose blood can cure all incurable diseases, heal lethal wounds, and stop aging in human beings. But sadly, the effects of her magical blood wear off in 24 hours, which means anyone looking for immortality has to keep drinking Mother’s blood every day, forever. The only problem here is: the creature doesn’t have eternal life herself. The first season of The Boroughs didn’t reveal much about Mother, especially where she came from, what her original form was, how she bore so many children, and what the extent of her powers was. However, over the course of eight episodes, The Boroughs gave us some information, based on which I think I can theorize the creature’s origin and its powers.

Spoiler Alert

In 1868, the location where the Boroughs was established used to be a coal mine, which started flourishing overnight after the miners found copper in 1910. However, the best years of the town didn’t last for long, and the community started to disperse as soon as the copper dried up. In 1949, the mining  company sold the land to its new owners, Marcus Shaw, a local miner, and his wife, Anneliese, who found a strange egg buried deep beneath the ground, inside the cave, possibly somewhere near the magic tree that Art Daniels came across in the present timeline. That egg hatched a strange creature, which Marcus and Anneliese named “Mother,” likely because the creature cured Anneliese’s polio and gave her a new life. But as mentioned earlier, the effect of Mother’s healing abilities only lasted for 24 hours, so it’s possible that once the effect wore off, Marcus and Anneliese started exploiting the creature to remain forever young and healthy.

Slowly, Marcus and Anneliese learned about the creature’s strange eating habits, as she needed a steady stream of human brain fluid to sustain herself, and this was why Marcus (changing his name to Blaine Shaw) laid the foundation of the Boroughs, marketed as a retirement home. Before inviting customers from across America, Blaine hired an architect to build underground hidden tunnels connecting every house in the newly-built community, so Mother could easily absorb the brain fluids of the elderly residents, without killing them. As the days went by, Mother, an oviparous creature, laid eggs that hatched into her children, which grew up into giant spider-like entities with numerous legs. This, I think, had been Mother’s original form as well, however, after being constantly fed with human brain fluid, Mother’s anatomy changed completely, making her look more like a human. And as Mother grew old, Blaine and his team fixed her with machines, forcing her children to use the same tunnels, to suck the needed cerebrospinal fluid out of the residents’ body to feed Mother so that they could keep her alive forever. One detail that the show never explained was that if Mother gave birth to all her children, then they must have shared the same blood, that is, they all had right-handed chirality, which means their blood should have the same healing effect as Mother’s. So my question is: did Blaine and his doctors ever try drinking the children’s blood? Maybe they did, and figured that only Mother’s blood had special properties, which was why they were so bent on keeping her alive by any means possible.

In the seventh episode, Sam Cooper’s brief interaction with an elderly patient, the Duchess, made it clear that Mother could communicate with humans and animals through telepathy. So after Blaine and Anneliese locked Mother up and put on her life support to keep her alive, Mother started using her telepathic abilities to communicate with elderly people who have been through traumatic experiences that have left their minds lost in time. In simple words, these people couldn’t overcome their personal tragedies and were still dwelling in the past (in a way). Through her powers, Mother had been able to access the memories of these traumatized individuals, and appeared to them in the form of someone they knew, a person they had lost in the past. For example, in Sam’s case, Mother appeared in his visions as his deceased wife, Lilly, while in Edward’s case, she took the form of her son, whom he had lost at a very young age. Furthermore, the murder of crows that Art Daniels witnessed out in the desert could also hear Mother’s cry for help, but the mental noise was too much for them, which was why the crows ended up killing themselves by hitting the ground. However, there’s one thing I am still not able to overlook, that is, if Mother could communicate with and manipulate creatures using her mind, and she eagerly wanted to escape Blaine’s captivity so she could die in peace, why didn’t she convince her own children to stop feeding her with cerebrospinal fluid, in order to starve her to death? Also these children of Mother’s looked pretty powerful to me, meaning they could have easily taken down Blaine and his minions, so why didn’t Mother ask them to rescue her? I think we’ll have to wait for the second season to get these answers (if the show gets renewed by the streaming platform).

Apart from telepathy and healing abilities, it seemed like Mother also had the power to walk through time. In episode 7, the Duchess mentioned that Mother “doesn’t experience time in a straight line.” This was further pointed out by Blaine, who after his wife’s death, told Sam that Mother could still bring her back, and whatever he (Sam) and his friends had accomplished could be undone. In the show, we never witnessed Mother pulling off such a miracle, but it’s possible that Blaine and Anneliese had previously seen Mother fiddling with time, which was why he said those words to Sam so confidently. I think the second season of The Boroughs will shed more light on Mother’s mysterious power in regards to time travel.

And here comes the most tricky part of the discussion, because the show didn’t give us any information on this. The easiest answer can be that the egg that hatched Mother arrived on Earth on a meteorite which crashed into the desert, maybe centuries ago, where it remained hidden until the company started their mining operations. Or maybe it was a spider’s egg that was affected by radiation, as the deserts of New Mexico had been extensively used as a nuclear testing ground during the Second World War. So the radiation from the blasts may have altered the DNA of the insects, therefore creating a mutant like Mother, with special powers. However, I strongly believe that it wasn’t Mother that was special, but the tree inside the cave from which Mother received her powers. This could also explain why only Mother’s powers healed humans and stopped them from aging, but her children’s blood didn’t have the same powers, because they weren’t blessed by the tree. Remember, it was the peach from the tree that made Art Daniels younger, however, much like Mother’s powers, the effect wore off in a day. Later, Anneliese told Art that when she found the tree in 1949, it was blooming, but in the present timeline, it had withered, just like Mother. So my theory is: both Mother and the tree are connected in some capacity, and this was further highlighted by Mother’s odd request from Sam, as she wanted to die under the tree, and not anywhere else. Maybe by exploding herself near the tree, Mother returned the powers she had once received from it, and likely after her death, the tree would bloom once again, and bear peaches that would make people younger for a day. Whatever the case might be, I think the second season of the show, if it ever comes, will explore the origins of the tree, and finally give us the answers we are looking for. With that said, these are my thoughts on the mysterious creature in The Boroughs, but if you have anything else to share, please feel free to comment below.