‘Lockerbie’: Colin Firth Tries to Unravel an Infamous Terrorist Conspiracy

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is a Peacock drama about Jim Swire’s decades-long quest to find out who was responsible for the December 21, 1988, bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 from London’s Heathrow to New York City’s JFK airport, which killed 270 people, including his daughter Flora. Yet at heart, it’s really a portrait of grief and the terrible things it begets.

Based on Swire and Peter Biddulph’s book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, this five-part series, premiering Jan. 2, attempts to split the difference between lionizing and critiquing its protagonist. Still, it ultimately does far more of the former—a grave mistake considering that it’s the latter angle which resonates most strongly. Rife with conspiratorial intrigue that fails to convince, and concluding with a dubious anti-Western viewpoint on the entire affair, it’s a venture that works hard to paint its subject as a noble crusader, even though much of its action suggests he was anything but.

In his second gray-haired true-crime role (following 2022’s The Staircase), Colin Firth is Jim Swire, a British physician whose life is forever altered by the loss of his daughter Flora (Rosanne Adams) in the infamous bombing, which additionally claimed the lives of 11 individuals on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is most harrowing during its premiere, when happy last moments with Flora give way to shock and terror as Jim, his wife Jane (Catherine McCormack), and their two other children struggle to confirm that Flora was aboard the plane and then grapple with the realization that they’ll never see her again. Particularly in Jane’s traumatic imagined visions of her daughter plummeting to her death—fueled by the horrific notion that she might have regained consciousness mid-fall—the series captures a real, moving sense of the tragedy’s human dimension.

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth poignantly details the aftermath of this nightmare for Jim and his clan, as when Jim sneaks into the local Scottish ice rink where the dead are being temporarily kept and, upon finding Flora, receives a lock of her hair from a kind official. Once the immediate mourning period is over, however, he becomes consumed with getting to the bottom of the bombing, spurred by his regular dealings with journalist Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton), who starts feeding him gossip that calls into question the identity of the culprits and the British government’s conduct.

From Murray, Jim learns that the American embassy was supposedly warned not to fly Pan Am over Christmas; that a year earlier, German police busted members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command (PFLP-GC) terror group which was hiding explosives hidden in radios designed to circumvent airport security; and that the Palestinians were possibly hired to bomb Flight 103 by the Iranians, who sought revenge against the Americans for a prior air bus bombing.

As founder and leader of U.K. Families Flight 103, Jim puts pressure on authorities to solve the case. When they eventually arrest two Libyans—intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili) and airport station manager Lamin Khalifah Fhimah (Mudar Abbara)—he buys what federal prosecutors are selling.

He changes his tune, though, during the nine-month-long trial, during which key evidence about the bomb’s timer makes him think the accused men are innocent of all charges. Moreover, they’re being railroaded by the U.S. and U.K., who are engaged in a grand scheme to frame Megrahi in order to assuage the public (who covet a just resolution) and to divert attention away from Iran, whose support the West covets during the Gulf War.

Once Megrahi is found guilty of the crime and sentenced to 20 years in a Scottish prison, Jim takes a deep dive into conspiratorial waters, and considering that it’s based on Jim’s book, creator/writer David Harrower’s series posits his activities as justified. However, it does so with only moderate success, since it’s quickly clear that, all storytelling rigging aside, he’s on a wild goose chase that’s supported by merely anecdotes and whispers, not tangible evidence.

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth depicts Western officials as shady and Megrahi and his family as sorrowful and sympathetic. Alas, Jim chases flimsy threads that amount to little, save for a couple of people “confirming” his suspicions with more unverifiable circumstantial tidbits that, together, come across as considerably less credible than the government’s primary narrative.

In its final two episodes, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth confronts the three enormous elephants in the room: Namely, that Jim has possibly been taken in by the unreliable Megrahi, whom he meets with and vociferously supports; that in his effort to exonerate the convicted bomber, he callously hurts his wife and kids, the families of other Lockerbie victims, and his own reputation; and that he’s unwilling to accept the court’s outcome because doing so would mean having to finally deal with his despair over Flora’s passing.

Nonetheless, despite understanding that his saga is really about Jim’s misery and the seemingly misguided course of action it inspired, Harrower is beholden to present the physician in a positive light. Thus, Jim is convinced that Megrahi didn’t do the heinous deed (because during his dying days, he was surrounded by his loving family!), and that the government is hiding something, and that—as Murray states outright—the Muslim world’s hatred of the West is more or less deserved.

Throughout, Jim is presented as a hard-nosed activist with tunnel vision, and Firth wisely refuses to sand his sharper edges. The result is a performance that captures the man as a frequently unlikable fanatic who’s so certain he’s correct, he refuses to consider the possibility that he’s lost his way and is wasting the life—and alienating the family—on which he should be concentrating.

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth strives, in its closing scenes, to bestow its protagonist with a happy ending in which reconciliation is easily achieved and questions about the Lockerbie bombing remain, thereby validating his cause. Yet it comes across as a show that knows, deep down, that it’s a cautionary tale about grief, and is just required—by nature of being based on its main character’s book—to pretend that it’s a heartening tale of searching for conspiratorial truth.