Swarm

Fishback succeeds in making Dre both terrifying and vulnerable. .... Swarm lacks cohesion, nervously treading a tightrope between pure voyeuristic horror and black comedy.

Swarm feels boldest when it wonders when person-to-person devotion becomes abstract glorification, and what inner mechanics inspire someone to give themselves over to another. ... By separating Dre from one hive and dropping her into the orbit of another queen, Swarm sharpens its conflation of love and family with control and coercion. It’s too bad, then, that the series abandons the commune so quickly to put Dre back on fury road.

It feels as if no one really knew where they wanted to take things. In the balance of the season, the viscous, seductive ambience and dream-logic storytelling mostly fade out, replaced by high-concept, tonally garish episodes that hold your attention but stand alone like neon billboards, adding little to our understanding of Dre beyond the facts of her back story.

As a showcase for Fishback, Swarm is ideal. As cultural criticism, it can be intriguing and occasionally profound. But in its psychological underpinnings, the show conflates identity with pathology in some truly facile, potentially destructive ways. Although this is hardly the only charge that could put Glover in the crosshairs of the BeyHive, it’s the one that makes me doubt Swarm was worth the trouble.

There are fascinating, even thrilling, aspects of Swarm, first and foremost a fantastic lead performance by Dominique Fishback (The Deuce). But the show never quite hangs together, creating a whole that’s substantially less than the individual parts.

Delirious and tense, the seven-part season is strongest in the early outings, when it’s unclear where Dre is headed and the writers more often buck plot conventions. Those episodes also suffer less from the series’ tonal messiness. ... But even her [Fishback's] marvellously versatile performance can’t make up for the wan character development and the tonal wobbliness that sink the series.

It’s the sort of series where you wonder if the ending will unleash a revelation that tells you that you’ve missed the point, but then Swarm ambles over the finishing line, as inert and forbidding as it’s been throughout.