Doctor Who Flux: 10 Huge Questions After Survivors Of The Flux
1. Who Is Swarm?
The biggest mystery of the series is surely the identity of
the Ravager, Swarm. Together with Azure, he has been abducting the survivors of
the Flux in order to use them as energy sources to reach Tecteun. But what does
he want, and wasn’t Tecteun the one who released him in the first place?
Swarm has a score to settle with the Division for locking him away for centuries after the Fugitive Doctor successfully led the siege of Atropos. Time has been under the control of the Time Lords ever since and his mission is to set it free. What better way to achieve his aims than by taking over the Division? If Tecteun’s leadership was bad enough, then imagine the chaos the Ravagers could bring.
At least Tecteun was trying to preserve
memories from our universe and take them into the next. Swarm’s ambitions would
appear to be even more destructive. He and Azure repeatedly gloat with the
phrase ‘just as we planned’, which might indicate that whole scenario has been
a trap for the Doctor all along, including Tecteun. With a small amount of
timey-wimey plotting, it’s quite possible he created the Division in the first
place.
He wants the Doctor to remember her past, one in which he
claims to have been her sworn enemy. It’s a conflict he wants to reignite. It’s
as if he is somehow weakened by her ignorance. If Swarm has installed his own
Division operatives, such as the time travelling Great Serpent, then his aim
will be to disrupt time and create exactly the kind of chaos that we’ve been
watching play out. His release by Tecteun made the Flux even harder for the Doctor
to contain because it enabled it to pass backwards and forwards in time. Tecteun
is likely to have called upon his services to thwart the Doctor’s linear
attempts to save the universe. It was clearly a fatal error.