Toward the end of “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth,” Jim Swire (Colin Firth) meets a woman who asks about the pin on his lapel. When he explains it’s to honor the victims of the infamous bombing, her face draws a blank. More than 20 years earlier, Jim lost his daughter in the 1988 attack, which brought down a commercial airliner over the small town in Scotland. As the crash’s memory has started to fade in the public consciousness, Jim — a real-life physician, to whom the series is dedicated — has waged a long and lonely crusade to uncover the truth of how hundreds of people lost their lives.
That effort is still ongoing; the trial of alleged co-conspirator Abu Agila Masud will begin next year, following his indictment in 2020. This reality poses a challenge to screenwriters David Harrower and Maryam Hamidi, as well as directors Otto Bathurst and Jim Loach, in dramatizing Swire’s memoir “The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice.” The five-episode season, a co-production of Sky and Peacock, quite literally starts with a deadly, harrowing bang as fiery plane parts rain down on the Scottish countryside, killing 11 locals in addition to the 259 passengers and crew. But it soon follows Jim into the gloomy, tedious weeds. There are no smoking guns in Jim’s investigation — only yearslong legal cases that hinge on technical details like the metal composition of a tiny bomb component. “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” is an accurate reflection of its subject, even when that subject doesn’t make for a heart-pounding thriller.
Firth, by far the most famous member of the cast, sets the tone as the mild-mannered Swire, a gentle man driven to obsession and outrage by his family’s tragedy. Much to the chagrin of his wife Jane (Catherine McCormack, stuck in the thankless role of neglected spouse) and their two surviving children, Jim throws himself into the role of spokesman for his fellow bereaved. The attack is quickly pinned on the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, or PFLP-GC, but Jim continues to press the authorities with more difficult questions. When and where did the bomb board the plane? What security failures allowed it to get there? What regimes may have lent support to the extremist group in pursuing its aims?
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At first, Jim keeps the case in the headlines by staging provocative stunts like carrying a fake bomb through airport security, calling attention to lax inspection protocols. (This scene is almost quaint to watch from the other side of the Sept. 11 attacks, a calamity that falls partway through the show’s 20-plus-year timeline.) But once two suspects are identified and extradited from Libya at Jim’s personal request to strongman Muammar al-Gaddafi (Nabil Al Raee), “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” enters the fluorescent-lit world of courtrooms, legal appeals and cataloging evidence.
“Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” has the paradoxical feel of being both overlong and excessively truncated. Jim’s funneling of his grief into a quixotic search for certainty, rather than moving on, is as much a thematic trope as his wall crammed with data and theories is a visual one. The most intriguing relationship in the show is not between Jim and his loved ones, but between the amateur investigator and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili), the alleged bomber Jim comes to believe was wrongfully convicted. (He goes so far as to provocatively call Abdelbaset the attack’s “271st victim.”) The show opens with a flash forward to Jim and Abdelbaset’s first face-to-face meeting — but their relationship, a strange mix of unlikely empathy and understandable suspicion, is largely confined to the final two episodes, even as individual scenes like a mournful wrap-up montage stretch on long after their impact is made.
If the goal of “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” is to reduce the number of exchanges like Jim’s encounter with the young woman unfamiliar with his foundational trauma, it’s a qualified success. The series is a handy primer on the basics of what happened and who it affected, especially after the world’s attention shifted elsewhere. But it also struggles to place Jim’s plight in a broader context. A conversation with his frequent collaborator, journalist Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton), about the reasons for other countries’ anti-Western animus feels out of place, though the topic is important to acknowledge. “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” focuses on one man’s all-consuming emotions. It doesn’t have the space for geopolitical concerns, even if it could stand to make some.
All five episodes of “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” are now streaming on Peacock.