The story of Pan Am Flight 103 is one that continues to haunt much of Britain. In 1988, a transatlantic flight to America exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members. Parts of the aircraft fell onto the town and killed another 11 people.
A bomb aboard the plane was responsible for the carnage. The search for answers continues to this day, as American authorities are set to hold a federal trial for the latest suspect in the bombing that created the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the UK. The hunt for justice has left deep divisions between the victims’ families, and one advocate in particular, at the center of this Peacock miniseries, came to represent the knotty and obsessive hunt for the truth.
“How can you, of all people, prepare to be in the same room as him,” a particularly forward prison guard asks Dr. Jim Swire (Colin Firth) in the opening scene when he sits down to talk to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili), who served time for the bombing while maintaining his innocence. It was the death of Swire’s daughter Flora in the bombing that led him to become one of the most vocal and oft-controversial figures in the aftermath. Before her murder, Swire was a normal middle-class doctor who loved his family, did house calls, and kept a stiff upper lip.
The destruction across Lockerbie, with debris crushing the town and leaving people’s homes in flames, is shown with brutal impact, as residents stand in shock at the wreckage of what was once their community. It’s a true vision of hell, with ash raining down from the skies and piles of bodies left in the ice rink for lack of more appropriate facilities. Bodies hang from trees. It’s a detailed and technically impressive set-piece that may nonetheless prove too much for those who remember the all-too-recent tragedy. Such is the eternal conundrum when depicting true-life events such as this: how far is too far in the name of combining reality with entertainment? Are scenes of dismembered limbs scored to dramatic strings at risk of turning this pain into something mawkish? The use of news footage from the era to show the accuracy of the production’s recreation only adds to the unease.
In the aftermath, Dr. Swire has no patience for the mandated peace of the mourning period. At a memorial service, he comes close to chewing out a politician whose non-answers infuriate him. While there, he meets Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton), a local journalist with good intentions but iffy tactics, who serves as a handy expository vehicle for Swire. Guthrie eats chips in his car while listening to Deacon Blue, just so you know he’s really Scottish (perhaps a kilt would have been too much.) He becomes Swire’s right-hand man as well as the mouthpiece for the audience to get some of the trickier details of this very complex case. He’s also a fictional character created solely to fulfil this narrative purpose, which makes Troughton’s performance all the more misguided. He’s acting like the outsider journalist in a shady noir, sneaking into people’s homes to use their phones after scurrying through crime scenes and looking corpses in the eye. In a show that seems so earnest in its hunt for authenticity, often to a fault, this character seems like a mistake. Again, we come up against the intrinsic issues of fictionalizing history, one so recent that its details are still fresh in the minds of millions.
The rather hackneyed subtitle to this drama is “A Search for Truth” not “The Search”, because said truth has never been uncovered. The Lockerbie case is one that remains mired in conspiracy and diplomatic strife, and Dr. Swire’s hunt for answers proved to leave more questions than solutions. Firth, who remains the king of the stoic Englishman on screens big and small, does some of his finest work as a nice normal man pushed to fervor by grief and fury. Dr. Swire, like his work in “A Single Man” and “The King’s Speech”, is a figure who has long grown tired of maintaining a sense of so-called decorum, even if the occasion calls for it. The way he barely holds himself together when he sees his daughter’s body for the first time is heart-wrenching. Typical Firth stuff, then, which is handy since the show often struggles to create a full sense of this fascinating and complicated man. There’s so much history to cover, so much pain amid dense details, that it feels as though even our protagonist struggles to find his footing.
And there is a lot to get into, from Dr. Swire taking a flight with a fake bomb to prove the lax security at airports to fears of a cover-up to the convening of victims’ families groups where Dr. Swire becomes a spokesperson. A lot of information is conveyed as quickly as possible, usually through unnatural-sounding dialogue that frequently feels like readings of the Wikipedia page. Dr. Swire’s wife becomes resigned to the role of sad spouse as the endless battle for answers takes its toll on his family. The most fascinating scenes come when Dr. Swire finds himself at odds with other families who believe that the authorities got the right man when they arrested al-Megrahi, a decision that he would publicly condemn.
The series does capture the frustrating cycle of non-answers that continues to plague the case, exacerbated by the shroud of secrecy with tendrils that climb all the way to the top of the power pyramid. In Britain, many critics have compared the show to another recent miniseries about a miscarriage of justice, “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.” That show delved into a scandal involving one of the country’s most beloved institutions and how a computer error led to hundreds of Post Office employees being accused of crimes they didn’t commit. Like Dr. Swire, Mr. Alan Bates was a steadfast soldier for the truth, and his efforts led to major change. Unlike Swire, however, there was an obvious villain for Bates to focus on. Swire and his fellow advocates remain in a Kafka-esque spiral of bureaucracy, redacted documents, and unresolved trauma. It is in this quandary where “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” is able to shine amid the muddle. The pain of not knowing is vastly more agonizing than what closure can bring.
It’s not that “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” is bad. Much of it is strikingly put together and Firth’s performance buoys those moments of emotion with skill and empathy. You can tell that the creative team, including Scottish playwright David Harrower and director Otto Bathurst, care deeply about doing this well. But there’s so much to cover in so little time, and even the deftest workers can be smothered by the tangled realities of making gripping TV out of the deaths of 270 people.
When the show cuts to the devastating news footage of the actual event, one can’t help but wonder if a documentary would have made more sense for telling this still-important story.
“Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” premieres Thursday, Jan. 2, on Peacock.
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