The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search for Truth. This focused on the dogged and agonising search for truth by Jim Swire (played by Colin Firth), whose daughter Flora was killed in the attack, and raised a host of possibilities and theories about who did it and why.
The BBC’s new six-part series takes a different tack. While it explores the investigation into who planted the bomb on the plane and the ensuing trial of two Libyan suspects, one of its prime concerns is to make space to examine the effect the event had on the friends and relatives of the victims, and the way the Lockerbie community rallied round to support the families. The town itself suffered 11 fatalities as blazing sections of the doomed Boeing 747 came plunging out of the sky, the wreckage eventually being scattered over a massive 850 square miles.
This led to the somewhat incongruous spectacle of this catastrophe being investigated by the local Dumfries and Galloway police, the smallest force in the UK, with the assistance of the FBI and the US Department of Justice (the CIA were also lurking secretively in the background). There’s not much light relief in this show, but a little is supplied by scenes in which local DCS John Orr (Peter Mullan, pictured above) gives the FBI bigwigs and anti-terrorist investigators from London an earful about how this nightmare happened on his patch and his force is leading the investigation. It’s Mullan at his stroppiest and most curmudgeonly.
Also in prime roles are Connor Swindells (pictured below with Lauren Lyle) in restrained and empathetic vein as Detective Sergeant Ed McCusker, and Patrick J Adams (a former cast-mate of Meghan Markle in Suits) as the FBI’s point man, Special Agent Dick Marquise. Eddie Marsan plays FBI explosives expert Tom Thurman, wielding a broad Kentucky accent (he does it perfectly well, but it’s a bit startling to hear it coming from Bethnal Green’s finest), while Phyllis Logan plays Moira Shearer, a Lockerbie resident who rallied a group of female friends to sort through survivors’ belongings, clean them up and return them to the victims’ families. She has a transatlantic counterpart in Kathryn Thurman (Merritt Wever), from the FBI’s Victim Services Division, whose tireless support for the families and friends apparently brought about a fundamental change in the way the fallout from such nightmarish events is handled.
Despite all this, and the varied talents on display, the show lacks much sense of narrative light-and-shade, and proceeds at a stately and rather dull pace. As it unfolds, we will see investigators following an evidence trail to Malta, which leads to the identifying of Libyan undercover agent Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi who was eventually found guilty of planting the bomb, but the way his conviction is treated as the indisputable closing of the book on the case feels over-simplified.
As the Sky Atlantic series explained, various theories have been proposed about the possible involvement of Iran or Palestinian terror groups in the attack, and one plausible supposition was that the fate of Pan Am 103 was a revenge attack for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US cruiser in the Persian Gulf. The sense of unseen forces secretly manipulating events has become part of the nightmare of Pan Am 103, as has the suspicion that the true facts may never emerge. Despite its noble intentions, it’s difficult to see what this new series adds to the sum total of knowledge about this horrifying episode.
