THE SWARM – Season 1 Episode 1 – limited spoilers
Charlie Wagner (Leonie Benesch)
Three ominous events begin the story. 750 kilometers north of Lima in Huanchaco, Peru, three men take their caballitos de totora (reed boats) into a calm sea. One dives down to free his net which has snagged on some rocks, and is swarmed by a school of mackerel and drowned. 7500 kilometers further north, an orca is found dead on a Vancouver Island beach. Marine biologists Jack Greywolf O’Bannon (Dutch Johnson) and Leon Anawak (Joshua Odjick), from the (fictional) Vancouver Island Marine Institute discover that the whale was killed by fishermen after it attached their boat. And in the Shetland Islands half a world to the west, Charlie Wagner (Leonie Benesch) has some equipment snag on a marker buoy’s anchor line. Tying her boat to the buoy, she dives down to clear the snag, and while she is submerged the buoy stops flashing. When she returns to the surface she finds her boat untied and floating some distance away.
Unnamed Peruvian fisherman about to be attacked.
Both Charlie and the Peruvian are sometimes seen from an undersea perspective, as though they are being watched from below.
Charlie works for the (fictional) Institute for Marine Biology in Kiel, Germany (the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research is located in Kiel). She was exiled to Skaw, the UK’s northernmost settlement, after her failure to follow procedure caused an AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) to run aground. Her boss is Professor Katerina Lehmann (Barbara Sukowa). After finding out that she will be stuck in Skaw for the duration of the summer, Charlie goes into town for a drink and meets a fisherman named Douglas MacKinnon (Jack Greenkees), and, though they are in Scotland, the two of them drink Irish whiskey. From her conversation with Douglas and a bartender named Iona (Kari Corbett) we find out that Charlie is working on her PhD. (She is studying tidal fluctuations and other stressors on the oceanic ecosystem.) We also find out that doesn’t eat fish.
Iona the Bartender
Douglas spends the night with Charlie, and the next day, he insists on helping her launch some equipment because a storm is coming in, and in the process of doing that they discover quite a lot of floating fire ice (methane hydrate). “Dead algae sink and get buried in the sea bed,” Charlie explains. “When they break apart they release methane which then freezes. Sometimes pieces break off and float to the surface.” To find so much fire ice is unusual, and Charlie dutifully reports it to Kiel HQ, and gets chewed out by Professor Lehmann for (among other things) not wearing a lifejacket on the boat.
Jess (Andrea Guo) visits Charlie in The Shetlands on her way to join the arctic research ship Juno at Húsavík, Iceland
We hear nothing more about that Peruvian fisherman, but back in Canada, Jack (the marine biologist mentioned previously) meets Alicia Delaware (Rosabell Laurenti Sellers), who works for the (fictional) World Oceanographic Commission which seems similar to UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. Alicia is from Italy and is in Canada to study the effects of seismic surveys on marine animals. Her father is American and at last report was somewhere in Ohio.
Jack was once in the American navy, but was dishonourably discharged after he freed some dolphins the navy was holding in captivity. (This could be a reference to 83-year-old diver Richard O’Barry, who was once in the American navy and was fined in 1996 after he and another activist released two retired navy dolphins.)
Margot Vanilla Caricati in her TV debut as a young whale-watcher is accompanied by a stuffed orca named Brian and her mother (played by Astrid Maloni) as she boards Lizzie’s ill-fated whale watching boat
Leon meets his friend Lizzie Stringer (Elizabeth Kinnear) who operates a Whale Tour and the two commiserate over coffee about the whales’ late arrival. Leon offers to give a talk on whale song at the marina to generate some revenue for Lizzie until business picks up. Soon after that, Leon electronically detects whale song and phones Lizzie to tell her the whales have returned, then goes out on his boat to listen to the songs more closely. A humpback surfaces near Leon’s boat, eyes him curiously, then swims off to visit Lizzie and her tourists. A pod of orcas follows close behind. Lizzie’s is the first whale-watching boat to encounter the returning whales.
The humpback leaps from the water, splashing the whale-watchers, then leaps again, this time coming down on top of the boat, splitting it in half. Orcas devour several of the tourists afloat in the water. Worried that something strange was going on Leon had followed the orcas, and is there to pick up the survivors. At episode’s end, it remains uncertain which of the boat’s passengers remain alive.
Miscellaneous Info
Sasha Pare Writing for Live Science, said “Reports of aggressive encounters with orcas off the Iberian coast began in May 2020 and are becoming more frequent, according to a study published June 2022 in the journal Marine Mammal Science. Assaults seem to be mainly directed at sailing boats and follow a clear pattern, with orcas approaching from the stern to strike the rudder, then losing interest once they have successfully stopped the boat.”
Natalie Wilson of The Independent reports that on 13 September 2025, a tourist yacht sank after being rammed by a pod of orcas off the coast of Portugal. All five people on board were resucued.
