Main cast: Rosario Dawson (Dr Galina Mirny) and Jason Winston George (Dr Simon Afriel)
Director: Tim Miller
Swarm is what Three Robots: Exit Strategies could have been: a semi-interesting look at free will and socialism without hitting the audience in the head and yelling, “See? See? You bad! You suck! You bad people, unlike us!”
Dr Simon Afriel is a Shaper, an expert in utilizing genetic engineering to elevate the human form into something more sublime. His recent venture leads him to a planet-sized hive of insect-like creatures.
These creatures are born with only just enough brainpower to do their designated role in their lifetime, which makes them more like machines than living creatures with free will. Despite this, these creatures are dedicated and tireless, which in Afriel’s mind makes for a perfect race to be humanity’s shock troops and work force.
He liaises with another shaper, Dr Galina Mirny, who has already established a research post there beforehand. She reluctantly agrees to help him use some synthetic pheromones he has smuggled in with him to alter the behavioral pattern of some members of the swarm. Naturally, this leads to some… shall we say, dramatic consequences.
This is a visually gorgeous episode, but even with its long-for-this-show runtime, it is forced to strip down a lot of the more interesting details present in Bruce Sterling’s original short story. As a result, this one ends up like a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing.
Like the source material, it raises an interesting question: is free will, or intelligence as it is called here, inherently destructive to a civilization? The swarm has existed for untold millennia, having seen races come and go, and this is due to the fact that the race operates like a well-oiled factory. There is no dissent, no need for individual possessions or needs, and hence, everything works in unison and there is no want or lack so long as everyone is content to play the role they are born into.
This sounds a lot like the ideal commu… er, socialist dream that no one has ever replicated to date, but is it because human beings, due to having free will, are inherently selfish and incapable of living for the greater good of all, especially if doing so means having to make some personal sacrifices, such as the reduction of one’s personal living standards?
While all this may seem like gobbledygook or amateur political hour to an outsider, sci-fi has always been an inherently political genre that leans heavily toward socialism and communism. I’m not sure if this was due to the whole concept of robots and programming attracting people that find the concept of hive-mind existence appealing or vice versa, but it has led to some diverse and interesting, even thought-provoking works in that genre.
Well, this episode captures most of the essence of the source material, but at the same time, it also feels somewhat hollow compared to the latter. It’s very lovely to look at, I can’t deny that, but, somewhat like the swarm itself, it feels tad mechanical at the end of the day.
