Environmental disaster dramas, especially ones from the past couple of decades, usually revolve around how nature is basically responding to the damage humans have done to it. A new German co-produced series on The CW is along those lines, this time with the inhabitants of our oceans attacking humans all over the planet.
Opening Shot: A man with a fishing net and basket walks towards the beach in Huanchaco, Peru.
The Gist: He goes out on his thatched kayak and casts his net. When it detaches from his kayak and sinks to the sea floor, he dives down to free it. In the process, a massive school of fish surround him and attack. The man never resurfaces.
Leon Anawak (Joshua Odjick), who works for the Vancouver Island Marine Institute, gets called to a beach where a dead orca has washed ashore. It looks like it was attacked by weapons instead of dying a national death. When he and colleague Jack Greywolf O’Bannon (Dutch Johnson) go to some fishermen Leon knows and question what happened, the fisherman shows them another boat with extensive hull damage. Apparently, the orca actually attacked the boat, and had to be killed to fend it off.
In Skaw, on the Shetland Islands, a marine biologist named Charlie Wagner (Leonie Benesch) has to dive to retrieve a measuring buoy; when she surfaces, she finds that her boat has floated about a quarter mile away.
Back in Vancouver, Leon is tracking whale migration patterns, and he notices that they orcas are arriving late. Oceanographer Alicia Delaware (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers) notes that this is the latest the whales have arrived. It’s gotten so bad that Leon’s friend Lizzie (Elizabeth Kinnear), who operates a whale watching business on a boat they co-own, may have to close up shop.
Charlie feels that she’s on “the rock” because she’s being punished for mistakes she’s made with the instruments and other behavior that shows her rebellious streak. She goes into town for a drink and meets Douglas MacKinnon (Jack Greenlees), a fisherman. Despite being on the opposite sides of the ecological divide, they sleep together. He goes with her the next day to redeploy the measuring bouy, and they find hundreds of chunks of “fire ice” floating in the water. When she reports this anomaly to her boss, all her boss is concerned about is the liability of someone not on staff being on the water with her.
Back in Canada, Leon notices the whales have finally arrived, and Lizzie tells him she wants to be the first boat out. But when he goes to see where the migration is going, he sees a troubling pattern from the orcas and tries to warn Lizzie, whose boat is full of tourists. But he’s too late, as one of the orcas jumps out of the water and lands on the deck of Lizzie’s boat, splitting it in half. It’s as if the whale did that on purpose.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Based on a novel of the same name, The Swarm brings to mind environmental dramas like The Day After Tomorrow or 2012.
Our Take: The first episode of The Swarm, and the only one provided to critics, doesn’t do a whole lot to actually explain the situation at hand. In fact, it spends its first 42 minutes like any disaster movie would in its first 20: It introduces some characters and gives them some desultory backstory that may or may not be germane to the story at hand.
We usually are all for character development on a show, but in a show like this, the main characters are the marine creatures who are somehow banding together to get revenge on the human race for all of the damage its caused to the oceans over the centuries. What’s controlling these creatures is still a mystery. But we only get hints of just what’s possible until the last five minutes of the episode, when the whale watching ship gets attacked by the migrating orcas.
The character beats will help this extended science fiction movie sustain itself over eight episodes, though it seems that we’re nowhere near being introduced to all of this show’s major characters, but what we didn’t like was that the first episode was almost all character and very little about just why these sea creatures are turning on the human race.
One of the things we wonder about is if these attacks are going to get repetitive over the span of the first season. We’re not sure where creators Frank Doelger, Eric Welbers, Marc Huffam and Ute Leonhardt are going with this story, but we hope it at some point becomes a balance of character beats, animal attacks, and people actually coming up with a solution, maybe one that actually involves the human race being less destructive than it is now.
Sex and Skin: None, even when Charlie and that fisherman sleep together. We only see him wake up in her bed the next morning.
Parting Shot: As Leon tries to pull Lizzie into his boat, she gets pulled under by one of the orcas.
Sleeper Star: Rosabell Laurenti Sellers as Alicia Delaware, just for the absurd line that “I’d like to think the state was named after me.”
Most Pilot-y Line: When Leon tells Lizzie that he can lend her money out of his savings, she responds, “That’s why they’re called savings. You save them.”
Our Call: SKIP IT. The first episode of The Swarm suggests that there will be a lot of throat clearing and not a whole heck of a lot of actual thrills.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.