‘Swarm’ Season Finale Ending Explained: Did Dre Really Meet Ni’Jah?

While the premise of Prime Video’s Swarm is pretty straightforward – a fan of a pop star goes on a killing spree murdering anyone who criticizes said pop star – the ending is far more complex and actually ends up putting a whole new spin on the story.

In episodes one through five of Swarm, a young woman named Dre (Dominique Fishback) has an obsession with a Beyoncé-like R&B singer named Ni’Jah. Dre’s foster sister, Marissa (Chloe Bailey), shared her obsession when they were younger, but when Ni’Jah drops a surprise album in April 2016, Marissa kills herself on the night it comes out (an event inspired by a real-life viral hoax about a woman named Marissa Jackson who supposedly killed herself after listening to Beyoncé’s Lemonade), and that’s the catalyst for Dre to go on a killing spree, seeking out anyone who dares talk trash about her favorite pop star.

Swarm Season Finale Ending, Explained

In the first five episodes of Swarm, Dre’s story is that of a woman on a downward spiral, working her way toward becoming a prolific serial killer. While Dre initially appeared to be emotionally stunted and irrationally attached to both Ni’Jah and Marissa, her mental stability all but disappeared after Marissa’s death, which is when her killings begin, starting with Marissa’s boyfriend Khalid (Damson Idris), whom she bludgeons to death. The killings continue, but in Episode 6, the sequence of events is interrupted when the episode called “Fallin’ Through The Cracks” depicts a very meta true-crime documentary taking place in our real world and not the fictional Ni’Jah-verse that the last five episodes were in. In the documentary, a Memphis detective named Loretta Greene pieces a together that a group of killings that took place between 2016 and 2018 were all been carried out by a Beyoncé superfan named Andrea Greene, who was once a foster sister to Marissa Jackson, the woman who killed herself while listening to Lemonade. (Again, none of this is actually true, but in the reality of this meta episode it is.) At the end of that episode, series co-creator Donald Glover is interviewed on a red carpet and discusses his excitement for the new show he’s working on starring Dominique Fishback and Chloe Bailey, about the Andrea Greene murders.

In a sense, the show ends in two ways. The first is the surreal twist of episode six, where we learn that Dre’s story is based on a series of “real” murders committed by a deranged Beyoncé fan. Episode seven is the true season finale of Swarm, and that ending is a bit more vague. It’s now June, 2018, Dre’s living in Atlanta, she has cut off her hair and goes by the name Tony. When she meets a gorgeous woman named Rashida (Kiersey Clemons), the pair begin a relationship that actually seems kind of healthy. Tony/Dre doesn’t even kill anyone for a while, that’s how happy she seems! Sure, Rashida knows almost nothing about Tony’s past (save for the fact that she lost her sister), but Rashida falls in love with Tony and the pair eventually move in together, despite the fact that Tony knows Rashida doesn’t like Ni’Jah’s music. But the night of a Ni’Jah concert in Atlanta, Tony surprises Rashida with a pair of expensive tickets that she can’t actually afford, and Rashida flips out. She places the tickets in her pocket, and then insults Ni’Jah’s music and calls Tony stupid for buying her a thoughtless, expensive present. In a rage, Tony strangles Rashida to death and burns her body, but then realizes that the tickets to the Ni’Jah show were in Rashida’s pocket. Tony goes to the venue, kills a scalper in order to get into the show, and once in, she proceeds to make her way to the stage. She climbs up and rushes toward Ni’Jah in an almost trance-like state, but she’s tackled by security who restrain her.

This is where reality starts to blur, because as Tony is being restrained, Ni’Jah calls to security, “Stop! Let her go!” and she walks toward Tony, but Ni’Jah’s face has transformed to Marissa’s face now. “Sing for them,” Marissa/Ni’Jah tells Tony, “Don’t be afraid.” The crowd then cheers for Tony, and the next thing we see if Ni’Jah shuttling out of the venue with her arm wrapped around Tony. They get in Ni’Jah’s waiting car, and Tony rests her head on Marissa/Ni’Jah’s chest, weeping and saying, “Thank you. Thank you so much.” And that’s the last we see of Dre/Tony, living out her happily ever after with a hybrid version of the only two women who ever loved her, Ni’Jah and Marissa.

Did Dre really drive off with Ni’Jah, or was this encounter all in her head?

Co-creator Janine Nabers explained to the Los Angeles Times that the final scene of the show was left intentionally vague.

“When Donald [Glover] pitched the idea to me, the ending was very much something that he saw visually in his head — her getting in the car with this woman and driving off — and we knew that we were going to have Chloe‘s face on her.”

“You look at all of the things she’s done to get to where she is, and it’s a devastating moment because you don’t know the reality of it,” she continued. “You don’t know where she really is in time and space. We wanted to give that very ambiguous ending where people can put their own thought process onto it if they want to.”

Speaking to TVLine, Nabers also said of the ending: “At the end of the day, this is about a woman going through grief in her own way. What she sees in that moment is a manifestation of a lot of the things that she’s been dealing with, especially from the pilot, that set her on this journey to begin with.”

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.