WARNING: Spoilers for Raised by Wolves season 1.
In Raised by Wolves, Mother (Amanda Collin) seemingly destroys perceived threats with a primal scream, however, the android doesn't actually have the ability to spontaneously use her powers. Instead, Mother needs her original eyes to weaponize. Because of this technicality, the HBO Max series humanizes the robot when she's without her original tech.
Raised by Wolves leans heavily on the premise that futuristic robots can have natural parental instincts and human-like emotions. Mother's creation stems from a war on Earth between atheists and a religious community known as the Mithraics, as someone named Campion programmed Mother and Father (Abubakar Salim) to oversee human life on the planet Kepler-22B. In a narrative twist, a group of humans who survive the Battle of Boston board a space-bound ark named Heaven for a 13-year journey to Kepler-22B, and ultimately come face-to-face with Mother, who has already been there 12 years.
The Raised by Wolves season 1 premiere establishes Mother's backstory on Kepler-22B, and shows her ability to kill via deafening screams. When the Mithraic commander Marcus Drusus (Travis Fimmel) arrives at Mother's settlement and threatens to take her last surviving child, Campion (Winta McGrath)—who is believed to be a future leader that's referenced in the "Pentagonal Prophecy"—the android naturally defends her territory. She melts the faces off several men by staring and screaming, and later kills more people aboard Heaven. At this point, the specifics of Mother's powers remain unclear in the HBO Max series. She can ascend into the sky, and removes her eyes before arriving back home. It's later revealed that Marcus is actually an atheist human named Caleb.
Mother's actual killing methods are clarified in Raised by Wolves episode 2, "Pentagram". When speaking with Father, Mother reveals that she had to swap out her original eyes "for the sake of the children", the result of her kidnapping five Mithraic youths and hoping to start over with her original plan to lead a new human society. Mother implies that she doesn't fully trust her own powers, and later informs Father that her real eyes are needed to "weaponize". By hiding her activating devices, Mother can properly begin anew by knowing that she won't harm anyone; a thought that thematically links to Campion's growing fears that Mother may have killed his Gen-1 human siblings.
Moving forward in Raised by Wolves season 1 on HBO Max, Mother's need to weaponize will undoubtedly be used against her. The irony is that she wants to appear loving and supportive, and even chastises Father for his "strange mimicry of human love". The specifics of Mother's powers will undoubtedly be addressed later on, and the storyline will seemingly be about Mother's attempts to live a healthy life through a human-like perspective, with her victims' eyes functioning as a unique metaphor.
Mother's killing methods oddly connect to a "fight or flight" mentality, only the concept is reversed. Mother is powerful when she literally flies and identifies danger, but her journey is seemingly about finding the strength from within to do what's right. In Raised by Wolves episode 3, Mother learns that radioactive poisoning actually killed her Gen-1 children, which suggests that she may end up wearing her original eyes once again at the settlement, probably to protect herself and others from imminent danger. This will likely lead to more conflict with her Gen-1 son, Campion, who continues to becomes more religious with each episode.