Monsters From The Boroughs Anatomy Explained

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:05]After finishing up the burrows in one sitting, all I can think about is how we humans make a monster out of everything our minds can't comprehend or we don't understand. This show certainly tries its best to change your idea of what makes a monster. As it turns out, the real monsters are the humans that choose to exploit everything divine in order to benefit their agenda. Unlike the creatures with crazy superhuman abilities, the one in the burrows seems to have completely different kinds of powers, which is why there's no better time than the present to discuss who Mother is and understand how her powers really work. So, without wasting another moment, let's get right into it. Who is Mother? If you've already binged the entire show, and this is a quick spoiler alert for those who haven't, you know that the Burrows wasted no time to introduce us to a pack of spindly spider-like creatures with multiple legs and glowing eyes, sucking on the cerebro spinal fluid of the elderly residents inside the postretirement community by climbing in through the tunnels leading to their oven at the dead of the night and then creeping above the victim's bed by opening their mouth and sticking in their stinger-like thing deep inside the victim in order to suck in their brain fluid. Lovely, huh? This all happened while their victim slept. And because the process was very slow, nobody ever realized what was happening to them until it was too late. Each time they sucked the brain fluid out of a person's body, it took years out of their life in one go and eventually led to diseases like dementia or Parkinson's. Now, after one of these feeding sessions turned deadly for Jack Willard, his neighbors Sam Cooper, Renee, Judy Daniels, Art, Wall-E, and security guard Paz methodically tracked down the creatures and discovered how there was so much more to the story than meets the eye. As it turns out, these so-called monsters that feed on people living in the burrows in the dead of night are actually the children of an ancient humanoid called Mother. And as harmful as it is for them to be siphoning off old people's fluids, they weren't doing so for fun. Instead, they've been imprisoned by the community's ageless CEO, Blaine Shaw, and his wife, Annaise.

[00:02:15]In fact, these spider-like children are trained to do this ritual at night to feed mother, whose blood has fantastic healing properties that keep its drinkers alive, young, and healthy indefinitely. When Sam, Judy, and Wall-E were trying to catch one of these children, they had to set up traps using the blaring light coming from multiple televisions to phase the entity. Given that Edward used Owl as a reference to describe the monster to Sam, as they were both nocturnal creatures with glowing eyes, it only made sense that the immense energy of light would work as a booby trap for them. Now, even if the power cut off too fast and television shut down, Judy shot at the creature and did manage to injure it only to find out that it bled blue. Not just that, when exposed to light, their blue pigment in their blood immediately burst into something that was rather otherworldly. But we soon learned that these children were being kept in cages underneath the basement of the manor, which was connected to the tunnels leading to every house within the burrows. And as beautiful as her children are keeping her alive, mother is merely a prisoner of the Shaws and is doomed to spend eternity as their immortal blood bank. Even if her blood has been described as the fountain of youth and the cure for death, the irony is that mother is not immortal. She is apparently dying and the Shaw are ready to do literally anything to keep her alive so their fountain of youth can never run dry. That's why they forced Wall-E to work for them and help restore mother's health in exchange for access to her blood, which was an offer he could hardly refuse as he suffered from terminal prostate cancer. After running multiple tests, Wall-E said the only way to save mother was to regenerate her dying cells at a faster rate by giving her a transfusion of her children's blood. Blaine wanted to run the entire elderly community of the burrows dry to fatten up the children so they could feed mother and strengthen her for the transfusion. But that was also very risky as the entity was in a very vulnerable condition. So an entire transfusion done all at once could actually end up killing her. So yeah, mother is the literal mother of the spider-like monsters who suck the brain juice from the residents of the manor and the burrows. Apparently before he was Blaine, the current CEO of the burrows, he was a minor named Marcus Shaw who had found a strange egg in 1949 which hatched and birthed mother.

[00:04:34]Somehow they started drinking mother's blood and realized how they did not age.

[00:04:39]Not just that, the blood cured their various illnesses and made them immortal. Unfortunately, to keep mother alive, they needed brain fluid. So they started having her children feast on the brain fluid of others. That's why they started the burrows as a front to give mother and her children an endless supply of cerebrros spinal fluid. The Shaws kept Mother locked inside the manor at all times. And from time to time, her kids came to inject the brain fluid into a tube that travels into mother, thus keeping her alive. What does mother look like? While her children had a spider-like body with multiple legs and a freakishly large antlike skull with glowing beady eyes, Mother actually looks a lot more humanlike. It can be assumed that she used to be an alien type creature who developed human traits after spending decades surviving on human brain fluid.

[00:05:27]She honestly looked like a rapidly aged and overly wrinkled human with long white hair and a deformed body. She is very pale. The skin is sagging on all sides and her glowing eyes are each of a different otherworldly color. While one of her hands looked very human, the other was longer in size, brown in color and fully deformed. Mother was curious about her surroundings when Wall-E broke her out of the manor, which is probably because she spent her entire life locked inside. She was also hunched over due to a large tumor-like mass on her back, which seemingly has two golden rod-like things embedded inside. The weight of the large mass on her back makes it difficult for her to walk. And that's why the best she can do is hobble as opposed to her children who were in fact very fast runners. Mother can only communicate via telepathy. As you know, the powers that mother has are not just physical. She also has a form of telepathy and can reach those who are lost in some way. In most cases, the people she connects with cannot seem to help her as they're usually too weak or afflicted by mental disabilities to do anything about it. Which means Sam was never her first choice. People before him were all lost in time and not strong enough to do what needed to be done. But with Sam, it was different because the overwhelming grief from the loss of his wife, Lily, had literally split his mind. That's how much he loved her. He had half of him stuck in the present and the other half on the day Lily died, similar to how he's been living the day of Lily's passing inside his head over and over again. Mother Too doesn't experience time in a straight line, and that helped them connect. Apparently, the ghost of Lily that Sam had seen ever since he came to the burrows was not a sign of PTSD, but it was actually Mother reaching out to him telepathically.

[00:07:12]According to the Duchess, a mostly catatonic resident who can be awakened with cigarettes, Sam learns that mother appears different to everyone who sees her and always takes the form of someone from their past. To Sam, she appeared as Lily and kept telling him how she was in a lot of pain and wanted him to save her. But due to his extreme stubbornness, Sam had kept himself so isolated that he refused to listen to her calling out to him. Basically, the ghost of Lily that kept haunting Sam was actually mother asking for help. As the Duchess said, even though the birds could hear her cry, Sam ignored her. I think that's why Art saw an entire murder of crows just fall to their death, as it was probably them growing erratic after hearing mother's call.

[00:07:53]When Sam understands that mother just wants to be free, his perspective of her shifts and he finally listens to her, reaching out to him telepathically. Not just that, after the group breaks her out, she communicates with Sam telepathically to let him know that mother wished to die under the tree she was born in. This was the same tree that was surrounded with quartz crystals stolen from the town and bore a magical peach fruit that Art found. Apparently, her children had been preparing it for her death. So all Sam had to do was get her under that tree and free her children so they could finally rest.

[00:08:24]After a lot of hurdles, Sam did end up taking mother to the cave and let her rest under the same tree she was born in. When Blaine tried to stop Mother from exploding herself after her children joined her, Sam stopped her and asked her to let go. We then see mother exploding in a sea of light while surrounded by her children. In doing so, she ensured that nobody would exploit her race ever again. And with her children dead, everyone who was consuming her blood were doomed to wither away. Mother is a true healer. On more than one occasion, we've seen how miraculous mother's healing abilities truly are. Starting with the peach tree, it seemed like the fruit had the same regenerative powers as mother's blood.

[00:09:04]Because after Art plucked that peach, the whole tree withered and died. I think in some manner, mother's egg had enriched the soil to birth that tree.

[00:09:13]And over the last seven decades, it grew and gave birth to that fruit. Like art believed, it truly was some sort of an inexplicable divine intervention. Or how else would you explain the existence of a glowing tree deep inside a mining shaft? It takes just one bite from that peach to rejuvenate art as he instantly starts looking and acting younger, even fighting off a mugger at a gas station.

[00:09:36]But nothing lasts forever as we see the effect of the fruit wearing off when Art's hair turns gray again and he collapses on the floor. Similarly, after Annaise ate the seed of the peach out of desperation to get a miraculous shot at the fountain of youth, she just ended up puking her guts out. While she believed Art had found a new way to achieve the same effect that Mother's Blood had, the tree was unfortunately dead by the time they reached it. Instead, the seed turned her into a zombie-like being, and she ran after Art, blaming him. Given she was powered by mother's potent blood for decades, Anelise could still walk after Judy shot her in the chest. She only recovered from her injuries after Blaine helped his wife into a tub full of mother's blood, asking her to heal by soaking up every bit. And honestly, it does fix up her zombie-like appearance along with all her injuries except for the bullet wound, which sort of proves that maybe with age the potency of healing in mother's blood was decreasing. We know that the Shaw's entire posi were surviving on Mother's Blood. So, it was essential for them to make sure Mother stayed alive. We also know that after Judy was brutally stabbed by Anelise in order to get Art to give up Mother's location, she almost died at the end. But then, Mother stepped out of her wheelchair and hobbled towards her. All she had to do was place a hand on Judy's wound to fix her. And after one flash of a glowing orange light, Mother cured her fatal injury. Basically, this otherworldly entity could fix any and all human afflictions. But even though her blood was an elixir of youth, she couldn't slow down her aging. Maybe draining her throughout her entire life caused that.

[00:11:09]But because it was never explained, we can only call it a theory. Having said that, I think that mother voluntarily fixed Analise's polio, and once the Shaws learned the true extent of her abilities, they began exploiting her.

[00:11:21]Like Wall-E said, mother's blood was the cure to every terminal illness that ever existed in the world. But that doesn't mean drinking the humanoid entity's blood didn't have any side effects.

[00:11:32]While mother became more human than anyone else as she drank the cerebra spinal fluid, the humans that survived on her blood turned into monsters as they were ready to sacrifice anything and anyone for their well-being. Mother might have saved Sam with her healing abilities. Now, we never really find out if mother is an alien or just some other being because as the duchess explains, even she had no idea what she was or what her name was. Because Blaine and Annalise call her mother, that's what she calls herself. But in reality, she considered herself as a prisoner who could hear everything happening in the burrows, which sort of gives me the idea that maybe mother could mind travel from the confines of her locked room in order to keep an eye out for everything happening in the retired township.

[00:12:17]Having said that, because so much about this entity remains unexplained, that's why the case of Sam's survival sounds too good to be true. As you know, while the explosion of mother's powers charred Blaine to death immediately, Sam seemed to be completely fine, even if he was in the blast radius. In fact, as a show of gratitude for saving her, mother allowed Sam to go back and spend a few seconds with his deceased wife, Lily. Even though we don't know how that could be possible, we know that mother didn't perceive time linearly. So, it's possible that she helped transport both Sam and Lily's consciousness to the time before Lily's death. In doing so, both of them knew what was about to happen, and they got to relive their last memory together on a happier note. Having said that, Sam later wakes up to find skeletal remains of mother and her children, meaning that the explosion only burnt off their flesh. So, maybe it was the entity's powers that exploded.

[00:13:10]By the end of the burrows, we see Sam, Claire, Neil, Judy, Wall-E, Art, Paz, and Renee having dinner together at Sam's house, which has been miraculously renovated. Clare then pointed out that the injury on Sam's head was leaking, and when he went into his bathroom to fix that up, Sam began glitching. He somehow didn't care about it, and he went back to the dinner party right after. The camera then panned over the township as everything seemed a little too fine. So my theory is that Sam could have been imbued with mother's powers during the explosion, which is why he was glitching after being exposed to light. Moreover, we know that Sam's mind split after he felt Lily die, and that altered him. So maybe the firsthand exposure to Mother's powers now allows him to experience time nonlinearly, and that's how he was briefly reunited with Lily. If Sam really did absorb even a portion of Mother's healing abilities, that sort of makes him a human alien hybrid. Well, in case this theory turns out to be true, it would definitely open up a whole new world of possibilities for the second season. How is it possible to stop the healing properties in Mother's Blood? So, we know that Mother and her children are sensitive to glaring light, but everything comes to a halt when Sam and Clare pretty much end up extinguishing Analise and Ernest while briefly incapacitating Blaine.

[00:14:28]After the Shaws and their posi arrived to kill them and take Mother back into their captivity, Sam and Clare hit Blaine and Anelise with the heavy light beams from their upgraded television sets. Even if the show never explains it, I think the blasting energy neutralizes human beings that had mother's blood coursing through their system. Given that Wall-E discussed kirality heavily, we know that those cathode ray tube TV sets were emitting a heavy beam of electrons, which probably helped separate the image created by the transfusion of mother's blood from what they really looked like. As it turns out, everything from our planet has left-handed kirality, but whichever place mother came from clearly had right-handed kirality. That's why mother was transformed after surviving on cerebral spinal fluid since birth. While the humans surviving on her blood were existing as superficial shells of their youth. Which is why when exposed to the light blasted by all the television sets, they disintegrate. As for Blaine, I think he was always in top shape and drank or bathed in mother's blood just to stay young, which is why he endured the lights for a longer period of time.

[00:15:29]And because all the television sets shortcircuited right before he could disintegrate and he managed to survive.

[00:15:35]In fact, I think the remaining amount of mother's blood in his body healed him from the damages he suffered from that incident. And that's how we see Blaine regain his strength and appearance by the time he finds Sam and Mother in the caves. Well, that was my two cents on the extraterrestrial humanoid entities powers and abilities that the burrows left unexplained. Even if the show hasn't been green lit for a second season yet, I think we will soon get an announcement for it. Having said that, I am truly excited to see how the show explains Sam's survival in the future.

[00:16:05]What are your theories about Sam glitching in the mirror? Let us know in the comment box below.