A trippy Doctor Who travels up its own timestream
The Doctor stalls for time in an episode that starts stronger than it finishes
TV Reviews Doctor Who
After the overstuffed premiere of the Doctor Who: Flux miniseries, I assumed we’d be in for smoother sailing. Surely introducing all the season’s main players in one go would reduce the need for week-to-week exposition and set-up, right? Apparently not! After last week’s relatively straightforward Sontaran romp, “Once, Upon Time” ramps up the mysterious plotting to warp speed. The first half of this episode toes the line between being enjoyably manic and just plain overstuffed. And while, in the end, “Once, Upon Time” is actually a little more straightforward than it initially seems like it’s going to be, it also turns out to be less substantial than I wanted as well.
After a brief prologue that introduces us to Thaddea Graham’s delightfully optimistic survivor Bel (more on her later), the episode picks up right where last week’s cliffhanger left off. With Yaz and Vinder about to be fried by the full force of time, the Doctor makes a desperate plea to stall for time. She leaps onto the broken Mouri platform with Dan, sonics the hell out of it, and transports the team to a swirling ether she refers to as the “heart of the timestorm.” They’re only there for a few moments before they’re zapped off to parts unknown. And while it eventually becomes clear that Yaz, Dan, Vinder, and the Doctor are pulled into various moments from their own timestreams (past, present, and future), one of the things “Once, Upon Time” does best is evoke a dream-like sense of confusion.
We have to figure things out along with the Doctor and her companions as they find themselves in worlds that are both familiar and deeply confusing. The Doctor is leading a siege on Atropos alongside a hardened team of Yaz, Dan, and Vinder. Dan is on a trippy date with Diane. Vinder is applying for a prestigious military position with a space captain version of Yaz. And Yaz finds herself on a police shift with the Doctor—or is it her old co-worker? “Once, Upon Time” effectively captures the jumbled way that dreams come together with a mixture of confusion and recognition. (The whole thing has big “And then you forgot” energy from “Forest Of The Dead.”) And, best of all, it does so while doling out some meaningful character backstory too.
Well, kind of. Poor Yaz doesn’t really get anything to do this week, other than setting up next week’s big Weeping Angels episode. But Dan and Vinder fair better. We get to see more of Dan and Diane’s sweet will-they-won’t-they friendship, and learn that Dan was engaged 15 years ago only to be left heartbroken when his fiancée ended things two days before their wedding. (The way John Bishop quietly delivers the line “God I loved her” is pretty devastating.) Vinder, meanwhile, has a love story of his own—one that helps him emerge as the tragic heart of this episode.
The basic gist is that he was a moral military man who earned a prestigious promotion only to discover murderous corruption at the highest ranks of government. And it was Vinder’s decision to blow the whistle that led to him being banished to the remote Outpost Rose where we met him in the season premiere. In a fitting nod to that outpost’s name, it turns out spunky, sparky Flux survivor Bel is ready to take down whole battalions of Cybermen to get back to the man she loves (and whose baby she’s carrying). Like Jacob Anderson, Thaddea Graham is an immediately winning presence who you’re ready to root for before you even really know her. The duo provide a welcome bit of human emotionality to an episode that sometimes gets bogged down in clunky exposition and slapdash CGI.
Indeed, the visual lowpoint are the scenes of the Doctor talking to giant Mouri in a swirling purple “timestorm” that reeks of cheap green screen work. But, hey, Jo Martin is back and that’s fun! Like Dan and Vinder (and I guess Yaz?), the Doctor is thrust back into a fragmented, modulated experience from her past. Only hers is one she doesn’t remember because it took place when she was in her Jo Martin “Doctor Ruth” form, working for the Division. The soldier represented by Dan is actually Karvanista, who apparently fought alongside her. And the Doctor gets to live out the moment she captured Swarm and Azure (a.k.a “the Ravagers”) after their first attack on the Planet Time.
Yet while the Doctor’s throughline starts strong, it unfortunately devolves into some frustratingly confusing Chris Chibnall-era overexposition. The subplot works best when it has a clear emotional center, like when Swarm calls out the hypocrisy of the fact that the Division seeks to end killing by executing those who kill. But the more abstract it gets, the harder it is to connect to. As far as I can tell, Flux is gearing up to be a story that pits space against time because that’s apparently the “founding conflict” of the universe. Swarm hints that the Division created the Planet Time in order to control an uncontrollable force and end the “Dark Times.” And since the planet takes up physical space, that makes the Division the pro-space camp to the pro-time camp of Swarm and Azure? Maybe?
And that’s not even getting into all the stuff about Passengers keeping hundreds of thousands of prisoners inside of them or the deadly “particles of the timeforce” mites or that extremely mysterious scene where a Time Lord-y woman billed as Awsok (Barbara Flynn) casually informs the Doctor that it’s time for this universe to end. Awsok also reveals that the Ravagers have a crucial role to play in all of this, and the Flux was apparently made and placed because of the Doctor. “I’m sorry, I’m normally very good at keeping up with things, but you lost me quite early on,” the Doctor notes. I know exactly how she feels.
For an episode that starts with such mysteriously intriguing promise, the climax of “Once, Upon Time” is frustratingly muddled—both in the past and the present. Thankfully, it’s just about saved by a cliffhanger that sees a Weeping Angel break onto the TARDIS and start piloting it somewhere. Now that’s the kind of concrete yet intriguing storytelling beat that I can follow. “Once, Upon Time” is an episode that toes the line between being entertaining and confusing, and just about stays on the right side of it. Hopefully next week will get the balance even better.
Stray observations
- It’s some fun worldbuilding that after the Flux hit, the Daleks, Cybermen, and Sontarans immediately started a turf war over who would get to rule the end of the universe.
- Yet another mysterious sequence in this episode: The scene where Dan finds himself with a laser-gun-totting Mr. Williamson in one of his tunnels. Since Dan is theoretically stuck in his own timestream at that point, is that a hint towards a future adventure he’s yet to have?
- The Division Doctor tells Swarm and Azure that their punishments will be either “isolation prison terms for the infinite duration of the universe” or “erasure of identity,” which I think is supposed to explain how Azure wound up living as a human in the Arctic Circle.
- Why did Swarm’s face look different in this episode? Was it supposed to indicate that he was younger?
- Vinder knowing what a TARDIS is but thinking they weren’t real is a nice riff on the classic “It’s bigger on the inside” scene.
- Jodie Whittaker has so much fun with that brief scene where she gets to play Yaz’s satsuma-neutral partner! More of that please!
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I have a feeling I might appreciate these episodes more on a rewatch once everything airs, because after the fairly nice episode last week, I’m dangerously close to “I don’t give a shit” territory. Vinder and Bel were great, though, and seeing a Weeping Angel in the TARDIS is a good cliffhanger. Everything else? Eh. Dan hasn’t even become an official companion yet, has he?
I’m dangerously close to “I don’t give a shit” territory.
Welcome to the Chibnall era. Whittaker deserved better.
*Chibnall scrawls 10 minute monologue for Whittaker to give to the camera offering a rebuttal that “show, don’t tell” is cliche and cliches are for hacks so Whittaker is the luckiest actress in the world.
It’s not an ironclad rule, to be fair. I always think of the ‘it’s like a soap bubble, no it’s not!’ from The Doctor’s Wife as a classic example of exposition done right.
This really was just a pile of incoherent nonsense, wasn’t it? Yeah, yeah, not exactly new for Doctor Who, but the meaningless sound and fury was ramped up to 11 this time.
I like my Doctor Who frenetic and right on the verge of incoherence. This went past the verge a few times but was still way more entertaining than most (maybe all) of Chinball’s run, not going to appease the professional Whovians but a lot of fun nonsense, which I think is what Doctor Who is at its best
You have a point, I just feel like even the most convoluted nonsense should have something of substance in Doctor Who. This isn’t Legends of Tomorrow. Even The Last of the Time Lords has some compelling ideas and character work beneath all the schmaltz.
“Welcome to the Chibnall era. Whittaker deserved better.”
What about us, the potential audience?
I’ve been saying since the first episode that this seems like it would be better binged than watched weekly and I haven’t changed my mind now that we are half way through.
The problem with the binge approach in this case is that it means sitting through approx. 6 hours straight of Chibnall.
Weekly doses is about all I can take.
Yeah it’s so completely serialized that individual episodes don’t really cohere on their own
Calling it: The Weeping Angels are going to turn out to be the “good guys” this season. Sontarans, Daleks, Cybermen are all nihilistically short-sighted: sort ofStep 1: “Kill Them All!”Step 2: “???”Conversely, the Angels have a lot to lose if time gets shattered. Of all the monsters in play, they’re the only ones who are Creatures OF Time.They are reaching out to the Doctor for help, and trying to get her somewhere safe to parlay by hijacking the TARDIS.——————————————————SIDE NOTE: If my guess is proven right next week, can I please be ungrayed?
“Dan hasn’t even become an official companion yet, has he?”So far, Dan is a nice enough character for a one-off guest star. In a regular series of DW, I imagine him assisting the Doc & companion during one episode, maybe showing up in a later episode, but not being a continuing character. At the end of ep. 2, I was wondering why the Doctor left Mary Seacole behind while asking Dan to accompany her. In one episode, the Doctor spent more time and worked more closely with Miss Seacole than she has with Dan in all three episodes so far.In this episode, I was left wondering why Vinder and Bel aren’t the Doctor’s companions. In the space of this episode alone, they come across as far more interesting, relatable characters than either Dan OR Yaz even.
I liked this more than last week because I like seeing more of the shape of what’s happening, especially how the likes of the Cybermen and the Angels are pursuing their own agendas amidst the chaos. Everyone wants to rule in Hell it seems.
Why did Swarm’s face look different in this episode? Was it supposed to indicate that he was younger?
The credits actually had a listing for ‘Old Swarm’, so it’s presumably a deliberate plot point.
It was the version of Swarm we met in the first episode before he… regenerated? He doesn’t just look different, it’s a different actor
We see that Swarm “regenerates” in episode one when they are freed from their cell and dissolves the Division Agent, and since this is in the Doctor’s past, the previous incarnation of Swarm is the one that was involved in these events.
In the first episode Swarm regenerates from ‘Old’ to ‘New’ (slightly more camp-y )Swarm right after his release from imprisonment which suggests something Time-Lord-wimey
Overall I’m enjoying it but definitely think this will work better on a rewatch with all the pieces together – if they come close to sticking the landing.
I like how to honour the death of Dean Stockwell they decided to do Doctor Who Does Quantum Leap.
Swarm’s face looked different because it was. This was the earlier Swarm we saw imprisoned in ep1, before he essentially regenerated into his current form.
This series rely is just awful at this point. Confusing nonsensical babble just to appear clever writing (and it’s not great writing if it only makes sense on repeat, it’s a cop out) and as an excuse for 50 minutes of filler in an only six episode limited series is just the worst.Given how bad the decisions by Chibnall and the BBC have been the last few years (and I say they not minding the Timeless Child stuff) I’m glad RTD is not only back but is getting full creative control.
Agreed. Davies definitely had a vision for who and what Doctor Who should be and pretty much nailed it out of the gate. It respected canon but wasn’t so married to it that it couldn’t be entertaining. It’s been a slow and steady decline since he left—kind of like the old boiling frog parable. That decline is pretty obvious now that we’re on our third showrunner. The big problem is the writing. Great actors have managed to mask a lot of that over the years, but it’s gotten to the point that the only way for even great actors to compensate for the writing is to increasingly ham it up. The best characters of the Chibnall Era have been portrayed by full-on scenery chewers like Sacha Dhawan’s Master and Sam Spruell’s Swarm.
The Bel character was good, but honestly, why? There is so much going on that introducing another new character and their story just feels like over-reaching. I want this to end well and wrap things up for 13’s story arc, but at this point I don’t see how.
Chibnall has a bad tendency to think putting a character out there is enough all by itself, and then not thinking through what that character does for the actual story, or how to build relationships with other characters.It was the undoing of his three companions scheme in the earlier seasons. There never seemed to be any particular reason why there were three instead of two or just one, he just sort of thought up three characters and let them rattle around.The plotting of the first two episodes this season was much tighter than he’s ever done, so I’m not completely sold that Bel will be wasted. But I am definitely concerned that her character doesn’t end up with any significant role except just being there.
She may do some more things, but will any of them matter except as things Bel does on screen because Bel needs things to do on screen? Ryan, Graham and Yaz seemed to do so much busywork previously because Chibnall had decided to have three companions and then needed *something* for them to do to justify their existence, not because he knew how to use them.
I was thinking along the same lines, but I appreciate the fact that a character who could have been “my girl who is waiting for me at home” is given some agency. And it allows further exploration of the impact of the Flux outside of what the Doctor and her companions can observe.The shootout with the Cybermen was a bit much, but I can roll with this. We’re at the halfway point now.
We still have three specials with Jodi next year to wrap her story up, for better or worse
This episode definitely suffers from ‘exact midpoint of a many-parter’ syndrome; not so early that it’s still introducing interesting pieces, but not so late it’s started to resolve anything. It doesn’t even get to tie itself up in a self-contained story like the episodes before and (presumably) after it, it’s pretty much entirely mid-story progression.That said, it’s at least good mid-story progression, I like everything put forward, it’s a great shot of backstory for Vinder, and yeah, the parting shot of the Weeping Angel in the TARDIS is a fun one.Also… was it just me, or did this particular Angel look broken? I couldn’t tell if it was just shadows or something, but it looked like it had a big crack in its face.And… yeah, I’m pretty sure Swarm looked different this episode because we’re seeing him much younger (or at least much earlier in his timestream, I’m not sure Swarm ages). He was apparently conscious for his entire imprisonment.
I’m pretty sure it was cracked, yes.
Over the last day someone found some promotional material when I was talking about this, and it does confirm: Yes, that specific angel does indeed have a crack across the face!Which is interesting, in its way; while the starved Angels in The Time of Angels were depicted as eroded statues, this is the first time we’ve seen one actually injured.
It would be kind of neat and different if it actually came to them for HELP.
A crack, you say?
I liked the first two episodes of this season a lot, but this on was a big letdown for me. I kept waiting for the fractured timeline and shifting to settle down and it never really did.It was awfully gimmicky and felt like the worst tendencies of Chibnall came out — heavy emphasis on poorly thought out characterization, and laggy, inefficient storytelling that overrelies on gestures rather than communication and action.Chibnall tends to think witholding information from audiences is the same thing as engaging them in a complicated story, but it’s really just a weak shortcut trying, unsuccessfully, to create the same effect.
I truly don’t understand most of what happened here but I’m pretty certain I love Vinder. he immediately feels like more of a layered and intriguing companion than, well, any Chibnall era companion has in three seasons. really hope he has a big part to play in the finale because he’s absolutely fantastic as for everything else… fuck knows at this point, but a Weeping Angel episode certainly has potential to right the ship. oh, and Swarm is great I suppose: this backstory is unnecessarily convoluted and confusing but the actor playing him is at least having a great time. the line delivery on “to reign in Hell” was absolutely delicious
Is it wrong that I associate Vinder with that other dreadlocked space hero Lister.
That was the same vibe I got from him in the first episode.
Just wait until he sticks a cigarette in his ear.
Well, I suppose that’s one way of delivering character backstory (‘I’m hiding in my own timestream, but for some reason in a slightly more linear fashion than the other characters!’), but can we talk about the wierdly nothing-y way in which the supposed ‘cliffhanger’ of the previous episode was resolved?
Like, it’s just the Doctor asking the robe people (who I thought were too broken to do their jobs) to sort it all out, and then eventually they say ‘oh go on then’, and rather abruptly everyone’s OK. Except that they’re in a room with the bad guys who last week were all ‘we’ll burn you if you try anything’ but that’s also OK because they just sort of let them run off for some reason.
Yes, I wasn’t convinced by Swarm’s nonchalant “ah, we totally meant for you to do that, you’ve done exactly what we needed for our evil scheme, so thanks… and now we shall be going” routine at the end there.
This isn’t very good Doctor Who but it is at least *pretty good* Doctor Who, which is more fun than 90% of anything else on TV. Chibnall’s decision to go all-in on crazy plotting and goofy characters and to let Whittaker’s Doctor act bonkers and also kind of mean and aggressive is great, especially since Chibnall has an unfortunate tendency to nerf The Doctor, which is often irritating but in the face of a Universe Ending catastrophe actually works fine, because it seems like the situation is just very challenging. The new companions are also much less boring than the old ones, and Yaz has morphed into somebody I like watching instead of an afterthought. Very pleased to have this show back to at least baseline competence.
I don’t know. Even the craziest Doctor Who plots only work if they have some sort of solid emotional core. Which this one was severely lacking.
I know this is what most fan’s think but I’m pretty much fine with the show just being a bunch of fun nonsense, emotional core or not
Fair enough, but I just think that all television requires an emotional hook of some sort, even ridiculous ones like this.
I think it speaks volumes about the problems with his take on 13’s character that the only way he can manage to make her take an active role in the plot of her own story is to have her ghosting inside the body of the Ruth Doctor.Much like it’s always risky for a band to cover a more popular band and thus remind their audience of who they’d rather be listening to, poor Jodie Whitaker through no fault of her own ended up stuck in a role where after four years the default fan consensus is “we’d rather have had 3 seasons of Jo Martin.”
I liked the bits where the main cast were playing other people. That’s always fun, Yaz as Vinder’s superior was a particular standout, as was Dan as his dog buddy. As for the rest *shrug* hopefully it all makes sense in the end, but that’s placing a lot of faith on Chibnall’s shoulders and well that’s not exactly been earned at this point.
Yaz was fun playing Vinder’s superior and the doctor’s other sidekick in the flashback. But I prefer if she had more to do as herself. The scene playing video games with her sister was fun anyway, always nice to see their dynamic, on the surface antagonistic but trying to be supportive underneath
Give Yaz something to do? That’s just crazy talk.
I think I legitimately lost interest mid-episode because this morning I can barely remember wtf happened.
Vinder being a whistleblower who is retaliated against for reporting the grotesque corruption of an egotistical and abusive powerful politician who was targeting the family members of a political rival for his own gain was pretty on the nose for this show. But, it did make me like him even more
Agreed…and I was today years old when I finally realized that Jacob Anderson played Grey Worm on GoT, despite having seen reference to his being on the other show previously. Not sure if it was the hair or the voice that threw me off, but I’m willing to chalk it up to good acting.
The hair makes a lot of difference.
Mind. Blown.
Poor Yaz doesn’t really get anything to do this weekSo just like every week then?And look: by Chibnall’s standards this was highly entertaining, with moments even verging on “good”, but… how on earth did we once again get an episode that hinges on poor Jodie Whitaker just standing still as more powerful beings explain the plot to her? Is this really what Chibnall thinks people want to see in Doctor Who?
That’s just it. By Chibnall standards. By the overall standards of Doctor Who, this season is still subpar.
Yeah, we’re all operating with lowered expectations here.Six episodes and two years until the second RTD era. The man’s gonna have his work cut out for him.
It might be a short conversation, but this episode for me is definitely in the conversation for best episode of the Chibnall run. It’s worth noting how forcefully Yaz is pushing back against her timeline, even as it’s seemingly the most pleasant, and how forcefully Thirteen is pushing back against letting Yaz in on what’s going on: “Does everything have to be a discussion?”
Even though the doctor always lies & keeps secrets (wasn’t that one of River’s rules about him?) for some reason it is annoying me extra much that she isn’t confiding to Yaz about what is going on with her despite Yaz repeatedly calling her on the evasions. It is just rude, as well as belittling to Yaz
It definitely carries more of a whiff of desperation than Seven or Eleven’s machinations.
It is reminiscent of Seven withholding information from Ace, but at least that ultimately had a point
That’s what I’m saying — Thirteen doesn’t have a plan here; in terms of the story, clearly she’s doubling down as a defense mechanism because she’s been so unmoored by this other identity she knew nothing about. Her desperation to get even this much information from the Atripose gang speaks to it.
It might be a short conversation, but this episode for me is definitely in the conversation for best episode of the Chibnall runBest Chibnall-penned episode, definitely in the running. Best episode of his tenure as showrunner? To each their own but I’d rewatch Demons of the Punjab a dozen times before this.
Agreed. Demons of the Punjab is great, bold television, and I want to travel to the alternate universe where at least half the Chibnall era episodes are that good.
I took it as read that Vinder was from the far future at the start of the season, but this episode brought home just how far it is. The Timelords and their TARDISes have passed from common knowledge, beyond legend and into myth in his time—the stuff of bedtime stories. His first reaction to seeing the inside of The Doctor’s time machine is disbelief that one actually exists, not that it defies the laws of physics. His second is that since one does exist, he can use it to go home. Granted, it wasn’t a great leap to accept the reality of a mythical time machine after bouncing unprotected around time for almost the entire episode. Still, it seems like he was pretty familiar with the concept of time travel before he met The Doctor.Yes, Dan’s backstory certainly created a level of pathos that didn’t exist for the character up to now. He was established as a nice guy early on, but he could have been a throwaway character since we had no other reason to care about him. Taking him from mildly entertaining comic relief to tragic figure makes me care if he survives this or not.Yaz still needs the same kind of character development. The closest Chibnall has come to giving her a real life beyond just being The Doctor’s sidekick was in Demons of the Punjab.
Yes Yas never gets anything to do…it seemed like they were taunting us by pretending they might turn her into a character, or give her romance with Vinder before the reveal that he has a wumman with bebbeh (and it looked like he had been on that outpost for more than six or so weeks when we met him). They did cast Vinder and Bel extremely well.The actor playing main Swarm is super hammy, he’s in Valerian and also a ridiculously bad cop in Small Axe, but it works here. This is getting close to being an unholy mess, but so far it still could hold together. Others have pointed out that so many scenes here are the Doctor standing there listening to more powerful beings explaining things. Now, I didn’t want Whitaker to run around yelling “Girl power!” all the time, but it is kind of ironic that the Doctor has no agency and Yas has no character (while we spend more time on bargain-bin Hugh Grant’s date than on Yas’s entire history)
I’ve not really understood the bargain-bin Hugh Grant comments, so I googled to see if it was “a thing”. Doing so I found a reference to Bishop looking like a hybrid of Hugh Grant, and Bez from the Happy Mondays, which I’ll allow.
it seems like Dan’s thing is not being very bright but being the focus of everything and muddling through to be the white guy who finds the answer all of the time, while Yas is supposed to be extremely competent and instead always just needs to be saved.
I think that remains to be seen on Dan, but I can’t argue that Yas’s character has been short-changed throughout.
so far he keeps bumbling into doing things that are actually useful, Yas does not (she just sits in a squad car and gets terrorized, or plays videogames and gets terrorized, or gets held hostage and gets terrorized)and now in addition to that she is always getting the salty backhand from the Doctor (who seems very close to dropping a “bitch why you always up in my business?!?!?), plus writing the mooney “WWTDD” on her hand…which isn’t as dippy as making the Doctor the PRESIDENT OF EARTH but give me a break…she’s like a battered spouse at this point. It’s just sad that the show has made her M.O. the desire to meaningfully contribute and then at every turn has been like “actually you’re useless”…then it brings in this duffer who’s like “I took a dump down a random hole in the deathstar and it blew up the fleet and saved the world nodoy!!!!!” it’s pretty friggin sad
It could all be building up to a “Yas saves the whole of space and time” moment…
they’ll probably accomplish this by her dying
“All is ending.” Jesus, that whole scene was so frustrating. It was just the worst kind of “we’re being mysteriously quirky and eventually all of this vague hinting will make sense.” The Vinder stuff worked but that was about it. This just feels like they’re piling up stuff in the hope that something will work. Nice to see they’re determined to never give Yaz anything worthwhile to do even if she’s theoretically the Doctor’s closest friend at this point.
Wouldn’t that be the meanest thing you could say to the Doctor? Go fly up your own timestream. Like, the last time they did that, didn’t it “kill” Clara?
I’m hoping next week’s episode manages to be more coherent. While I get that it was kind of the point to be messy and disjointed, I don’t enjoy messy and disjointed. It’s all mystery and no meat, and there’s little opportunity to care about any of the characters.
Wow, I guess I’m in the minority (in the comments section, anyway) because I found this riveting. I’m not sure why people keep complaining about being confused in a serialized story that is still in midstream. We’re not meant to know the answers yet. Time is fragmenting and the Doctor and her companions are confused and disoriented as well. Chibnall-bashing seems to be reflexive at this point. I have been faithfully watching Who for decades but this is first time in many years that I have been itching to get to the next episode.The reason that the flashback Swarm looks different is clearly shown in his introduction. The same actor played him in the containment field then he ‘regenerated’ into the current version when he broke free and absorbed one of his guards.
It could have been worse. I’m sure that someone at the BBC considered having James Corden be The Doctor.
Why did Swarm’s face look different in this episode? Was it supposed to indicate that he was younger?It’s because it was the distant past. It was Jo Martin’s Doctor before she imprisoned him. Jodie Foster was just inhabiting her body at a different point in her own timeline – just like all the other companions in the episode.
“when Swarm calls out the hypocrisy of the fact that the Division seeks to end killing by executing those who kill.”It’s like the Swarm has never read Karl Popper.
This was a really pretty awful setting things up episode that, viewed by itself, did just about nothing.
To add to all the other ‘regeneration’ replies, my take when watching episode 1 was that Swarm took on characteristics of the Division soldier he ‘fused’ with when he escaped. Similar to the Master when he stole Tremas’ body in ‘The Keeper of Traken’.