Spoiler alert: Don‘t read on if you want to watch this series. I will be discussing the three endings of the book and series.
A while back, I wrote the first part of my review about the first 6 episodes of The Swarm, on Netflix. It’s taken me almost a month and a half to figure out what I liked about the last two episodes and WHY I liked it. I‘ve also been talking to folks about whether they liked it, and why or why not. It‘s been a lot to parse.
First off, the series changed the novel‘s ending. In the book, Schätzing has the team of scientists heave overboard the body of a dead colleague, who has been „injected“ with a message for the Yrr, that we are all one. A message of togetherness and recognition. (Something like that, it’s been more than 15 years since I read it)… all well and good.
It wasn’t til I saw the new ending (let’s call it Ending 2), that I realized what bugged me about that solution: why would the Swarm care about a dead human enough to ‚read‘ the message? Why would that have been enough to save the world?
So the series ending, Ending 2 has Charlie, slipping into a submersible and in effect going underwater to meet the Yrr. She sacrifices herself to save the crew and the rest of the world. She goes and makes an intense connection with this new lifeform/collective consciousness in the knowledge that she’s giving up her life to do so.
As she slips out of the submersible, we see her sinking into the Yrr, her arms out like Jesus Christ on the cross. I did roll my eyes, because so many movies underline self sacrifice with this type of visual.
Everything fades to black, for a good while, then we see Ending 3: Charlie washes up on shore in Antartica, and her eyes glow blue. So she‘s a bit more than when she went into the ocean. Hmmm… it’s not merely the scriptwriters/showrunners jockeying for another season, as many reviewers have written. It’s an absolute twist, where although kitschy it‘s absolutely common within the horror and sci-fi genres.
It wasn’t until I started listening to Brian Godawa‘s book „Hollywood Worldview“ for the second time, that it clicked for me. This series had Charlie as the secret hero in the team of scientists. In fact, Charlie is an incredibly lonely main character. She’s lost her parents, her best friend and her lover. The truth about her comes out gradually – she‘s so hungry for connection, that she becomes a scientist like her deceased parents.
We get to realize that being a scientist is her secondary identity, because she’s constantly knocking heads with her supervisor and she goes a lot off her intuition and hunches. This didn’t click for me at first, because scientists also often use intuition within their research.
It’s no surprise then, that she’s the only member of the science team who we see looking with awe at the Yrr doing CGI tricks in the water inside the boat. It follows on, that she’s the one who wants to make physical intentional first contact.
On the one hand, it made me think of various materialist arguments, that we are just one of many consciousnesses (i.e. so humankind isn’t so special) on the planet, and that we‘re the problem. Which (while it is uncomfortable to think of ourselves as the villains) isn’t very helpful in the movies or in real life. Charlie‘s willingness to sacrifice, to go beyond, is much more interesting and pragmatic than wallowing helplessly in our guilt.
It‘s the idea of reconnecting with nature, rediscovering the awe and beauty of it all that may be naive but the root of the solution. She knew she would die, but did it anyway. That may have been what fascinated the Yrr so.
I‘ve also spent some time pondering on whether whatever they find in her mind was enough to give humankind a second chance. What was in there? A bit of Goethe? Shakespeare? Memories of a few Bach or Mozart concerts? Art? Architecture? Or maybe the ability to hold values from both science and religion…
The knitpurl dispatch 