In Nancy Drew, he was fresh off of coming out and being himself, and you see the Drew Crew help him seal the final part of his coming-out journey. The new show also sets up a powerful, shadowy organization called the Road Back that acts as the main antagonist for Swift’s tech-driven journey. The discovery of the meteorite kicks off the plot of the new standalone Tom Swift series, in which Tom has used the space-borne debris to create a fuel source that can take his father to Saturn. The introduction is fittingly bold for the first Black queer male lead on network television.įans of the CW’s Nancy Drew first saw Tian Richards as Tom Swift in the season four episode, “The Celestial Visitor,” in which Tom recruits Nancy to help him find a long-hidden meteorite. In this moment, which wouldn’t look out of place in a Lil Nas X video, we understand everything we need to know about Tom, a twentysomething billionaire inventor who is unapologetically himself.
And when we first see Tom Swift, the character whose eponymous show premieres May 31 on the CW, he is shirtless, glistening in sweat, behind a shower of welding sparks as he constructs a spaceship. Every hero deserves a memorable entrance.
