On December 21, 1988, a bomb hiding in a cassette player went off on Pan Am Flight 103, causing it to crash over Lockerbie, Scotland. A total of 270 people were killed, including 11 on the ground; many of the passengers were students. In a new scripted series co-produced by Peacock and Sky, the father of one of the victims is determined to find the truth about who planted the bomb and what various governments knew about the threat.
Opening Shot: “May, 2002.” We see the back of a man’s head as he enters a prison’s visiting room. A guard asks him, “All that blood on his hands. How can you, of all people, bear to be in the same room as him?”
The Gist: We then go back to December 21, 1988, the night that Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland. Jim Swire (Colin Firth), a well-to-do doctor in England, was the man who we saw in 2002, and he and his wife Jane (Catherine McCormack) are helping their daughter Flora (Rosanna Adams) get in a cab to Heathrow Airport, to take a flight to New York so she can spend the holidays with her boyfriend.
Anyone who was around back then knows what happened next: An explosive device in the cargo hold went off, and the difference in air compression between the outside and inside started tearing the plane apart, with debris and bodies dropping over a multiple-mile radius. The biggest piece crashed in row of houses in Lockerbie, killing 11 people on the ground. All told, 270 people died, marking the largest aviation disaster in UK history to that point.
When reporter Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton) hears radio reports about the crash, he whips his car around and is the first journalist on the scene, seeing things that horrify even the first responders. At a farm that had part of the huge debris field, including one side of the front of the plane, he witnesses a group of what the farm owner was told were “aviation investigators” swarm the scene.
Jim and Jane Swire, along with other victims’ families, go to Lockerbie and almost immediately start looking for answers, especially when their loved ones’ bodies aren’t released to them for a number of days.
Over the ensuing weeks and months, Jim Swire becomes the point person for UK victims’ families. He evolves into that role because he has a college connection with the Minister of Transport, and because Guthrie has been feeding him information uncovered during his reporting.
In essence, British and American officials knew about an anonymous call that said a Pan Am flight originating in Frankfurt and headed to New York, like Flight 103, would be blown up during the holiday season. No warning to the public was issued, yet U.S. Embassy employees seeking to go home over the holiday break were warned to not take Pan Am. The more information Swire gets, the more he prods the minister — and his successor, because Margaret Thatcher sacked him soon after the disaster — for explanations.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Lockerbie: A Search For The Truth has the same mostly-true take on a 1980s disaster that the series Chernobyl did.
Our Take: Lockerbie: A Search For The Truth was created by David Harrower, based on the book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph. The story concentrates on Swire’s research and how he pushed for both American and British investigators to find who was actually responsible for the bombing. The investigation took years to settle on two Libyan nationals, and Muammar Gaddafi didn’t hand them over until 1999.
We’re going to see Swire get close to one of the convicted suspects, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili), convinced that he was wrongly accused. So, even though the series more or less starts with the explosion of Pan Am 103, it’s going to concentrate on Swire’s unyielding effort to get to the truth of what happened, sometimes earning the ire of officials in the UK and the US in the process. It’s the story of a man who wouldn’t take what the various governments told the victims at face value, and it feels like Swire won’t always be presented in a heroic manner.
Because of all that, Colin Firth feels like the perfect person to play Swire. Firth has gone about his award-winning career playing characters who constantly push their real feelings down, perhaps in an old-fashioned British “stiff upper lip” manner. But we also know that when his character finally let that rage go, it’s powerful and a little scary.
That seems to be exactly what Swire was. He kept it together well enough to be the families’ spokesperson and representative, but there are going to be times when his frustration with the various government entities get the better of him. No one we know can play that combo better than Firth can.
There are absolutely good performances around Firth, namely McCormack and Troughton, but Firth is what makes the series more than just a recitation of events. Are there times when Harrower might take some dramatic license? Sure; we don’t think the passengers of Flight 103 were singing “Jingle Bells” when the bomb exploded. But those moments of melodrama are kept to a minimum, as are lingering portraits of the people who perished. It’s not hard to put yourself in Jim Swire’s shoes, even if we don’t get to know Flora Swire all that well before the tragedy, and Harrower was smart to keep that kind of storytelling to a minimum.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Back in 2002, Jim Swire comes face to face with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Sam Troughton as Murray Guthrie. We’re not sure how he’s fostering the sources that are able to give him the restricted documents that he passes on to Swire, but his reporting was critical to getting the Swires and other victims’ families closer to what actually happened and why it wasn’t stopped.
Most Pilot-y Line: Even if Swire did really have a wall where he pinned articles and pictures related to the explosion, that visual has become such a trope over the past 15 or so years that it’s now a cliche. We’re surprised he didn’t string red yarn between the pins.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Lockerbie: A Search For The Truth is carried by Colin Firth, but its concentration on one man’s quest for the truth also keeps the show’s writers and producers from drifting into melodrama around a real-life terrorist act.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
