| “ | You and I, dancing across Space and Time, locked in combat. And now, after so long apart, we get to do it once more... I remember every battle... which gives me the advantage. Our final fight has begun. | „ |
| ~ Swarm to the Doctor, The Halloween Apocalypse. |
Swarm is the main antagonist of Series 13 of Doctor Who, which is subtitled Flux. He is a dangerously powerful being who was an old enemy of the Doctor in their forgotten lives. Having been imprisoned by the Time Lord agency, the Division, Swarm escaped and with his sister Azure, began his mysterious plans.
Swarm is mainly portrayed by Sam Spruell, when his original form portrayed by Matthew Needham, who also playing Larys Strong in A Song of Ice and Fire.
Biography[]
The Founding Conflict[]
During the Dark Times, Swarm and his sister Azure worshipped Time as an entity. Azure would later indicate that the Ravagers existed to "correct" the concept of life prevailing. The Ravagers fought The Divison and the Fugitive Doctor in the Founding Conflict, a fight between the forces aligned with Time, such as Swarm and Azure, and those with Space, who would put time under their control.
Siege of Atropos[]
Towards the end of the conflict, Swarm and Azure took control of the Temple of Atropos where Time was imprisoned. They expelled the beings known as the Mouri who guarded the Temple and allowed Time to run wild, taking millions of hostages within Passenger forms in an attempt to deter the Time Lords from interfering.
A team of Division agents who included the Fugitive Doctor and Karvanista were deployed to Atropos to capture Swarm and Azure. When confronted, the Ravagers began disintegrating multiple Passengers of hostages until the Doctor revealed that one of them contained the Mouri, which emerged and retook their positions to imprison Time once more and return things to normal. Swarm and Azure were taken prisoner by Division, who imprisoned Swarm in a containment pod on an uninhabited asteroid. Division agents visited every thousand years to make sure he was still imprisoned.
Flux[]
Freedom[]
After millennia of imprisonment, in The Halloween Apocalypse, due to the technology keeping him imprisoned being deactivated by Division's leader Tecteun, Swarm was able to relink himself with the Doctor, as part of a long con. Swarm managed to drain the life force of his wardens, becoming rejuvenated, and taking on a new, healthier form. Swarm then found Azure living under the persona of a human called Anna, and killed her partner Jón, stripping the human guise from her. Swarm confronted the Thirteenth Doctor, finding that the Division had wiped her mind of all but thirteen of her other lives, and gleefully mocked her.
Return to Atropos[]
Swarm and Azure travelled back to Atropos, where they found Yasmin Khan and Inston-Vee Vinder in the sanctum of the Mouri. Swarm used them to reveal the Mouri, who had been quantum-locked against the Ravagers after the founding conflict, finding that two of them had been burned out by the ongoing Flux event caused by Division. Swarm destroyed the other two just before the arrival of the Doctor and Dan Lewis, who he taunted by revealing how he'd forced the others into the Mouri's place to withstand the full force of the time vortex, which they would not survive.
The Doctor pre-empted Swarm and Azure by taking the place of one of the Mouri herself and taking on the force of the time storm. After this allowed her to re-experience the siege of Atropos, she was inspired to use the same solution again and used a Passenger form to summon more Mouri. The Mouri were able to restore the temple once more, but by this point Swarm and Azure had already harnessed enough time force to continue their goals. They left after Swarm revealed that they were holding Dan's friend Diane hostage within Passenger form.
Growing the Timeforce[]
In order to strengthen their time force, the Ravagers gathered survivors of the Flux event to the world of Puzano and lured them into the Passenger's transportation field, trapping them in Passenger form. Swarm and Azure sacrificed hundreds of prisoners to the time force in order to harvest their spatial energy. This in conjunction with the time force rejuvenated Swarm's pre-existing psychic connection with the Doctor into a psycho-temporal bridge which allowed them to locate her current location at Division Headquarters. Upon arriving, Swarm came across Tecteun and disintegrated her with his touch after revealing that he knew she had released him before telling the Doctor that she was next.
Final gambit[]
The Doctor unsuccessfully attempted to escape from the Ravagers, but Swarm's interference with her conversion plate caused her to splinter into three duplicates, one of whom remained on the Division spacecraft. Swarm mocked the Doctor by showing her the fob watch containing her memories from Division and destroying it repeatedly, causing her great pain. Swarm and Azure then used Division's technology to generate a second Flux event in order to destroy the universe. Their ultimate goal was to destroy Atropos using the Flux, releasing Time from its imprisonment, before using Time to replay the destruction of the universe on an eternal loop and force the Doctor to feel every dying particle as revenge for their earlier imprisonment.
The Doctor at Division Control managed to distract Swarm and Azure long enough for an Ood working at Division Control to access Division's technology and reduce the power of the Flux as much as possible. Remnants of the Flux still remained, but another of the Doctor's splinters remembered the Passenger form's infinite containment and was able to absorb the Flux remnants within the Passenger, where it later dissipated. Unaware of this, Swarm and Azure brought the Doctor's splinter from Division to Time as a sacrifice upon its release. However, Time informed them that the Flux was extinguished and as such, they had failed it. It then killed both Swarm and Azure, which Azure deemed "ascension".
Trivia[]
- Swarm was first teased by showrunner Chris Chibnall in the San Diego Comic Con panel for Doctor Who series 13, naming him as one of the words to sum up the series.
- Swarm is not his real name, merely a "serviceable" translation.
- Swarm's obsessive rivalry with the Doctor parallels that with the Doctor and The Master.
