‘The Bombing of Pan Am 103’ Review: Netflix’s Lockerbie Drama

“If the word Lockerbie will be associated with this terrible tragedy,” intones a priest at a memorial ceremony, “perhaps it will also be spoken of in the future with admiration through the example of its people.” And so it is in The Bombing of Pan Am 103, Netflix’s new chronicle of the 1988 attack that claimed 270 lives.

It is the people of this small Scottish town, Jonathan Lee’s drama makes clear, who rushed to one another’s aid in the crisis, who worked tirelessly to pursue answers, who embraced mourners from around the world. As a tribute to their compassion and tenacity in the face of horror, the six-part miniseries is above reproach — respectful and respectable, laudatory but dignified.

As a story trying to stand its own test of time, however, the series leaves something to be desired. Better equipped to pore over the past than reflect on its enduring significance, The Bombing of Pan Am 103, starring Connor Swindells and Patrick J. Adams, delivers a less-than-memorable portrait of an indelible event.  

To recap, for those who do not recall the original events (or, for that matter, the 2025 series Lockerbie: A Search for Truth): On the night of Dec. 21, a commercial plane en route from London to New York exploded about 60 miles outside Glasgow, killing everyone on board plus several more on the ground.

If what exactly had transpired was not immediately obvious — it takes the better part of the Michael Keillor-directed premiere for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to determine it was a bombing at all, and then four of the next five hours to figure out who was behind it — the magnitude of the destruction is.

The physical debris was scattered over a massive area of roughly 800 square miles. The emotional and political wreckage was spread further still, with victims from 21 countries (including 179 from the U.S., spurring the involvement of the FBI), hundreds of bereaved and countless witnesses, detectives, lawyers and more involved in the aftermath.

With a scope so unwieldy, Lee does what he can to keep his drama efficient, sensitive, human-scaled.

From that vast population of people directly affected by the incident, he trains his attention on a few key figures, including a dogged Scottish police officer, Ed McCusker (Swindells), and a slippery FBI agent, Dick Marquise (Adams).

In relaying the unimaginable destruction of the event, Lee eschews sensationalism for sobriety. Graphic violence or gore are nowhere to be seen, and even the crash itself is depicted through the horror of Lockerbie residents stumbling outside to find their world transformed into rubble and hellfire, rather than through the terror experienced by those on the plane.

At its best, this restraint dovetails with the story unfolding before us. The Scottish and American teams piece together their theory painstakingly over time, poring over clues as small as a torn clothing label and negotiating every single disclosure with their counterparts across borders. Similarly, Lee assembles his story via small but striking details: the eerie orange of a burning sky at night, the blood-red smattering of pins on an evidence board, a child’s shoe lost in the grass.

But the necessity of paring down such a massive event has the effect of flattening the very elements that ought to give it its texture and heft — namely, the people involved. McCusker and Marquise, the closest thing this shifting and sprawling ensemble has to main characters, are allowed barely any room to be individuals with their own motives or personalities. Instead, they’re made to symbolize everything valiant and determined about the Scottish investigators and everything well-meaning but misguided about their American colleagues, respectively.

A few of the supporting players stand out despite the vague archetypes they’re given to play — notably Peter Mullan as a wonderfully gruff police superintendent, Merritt Wever as a relentless advocate for the victims and, less favorably, Eddie Marsan affecting a bizarre Southern accent as an FBI bomb expert. But for the most part, the further the narrative strays from the search at its center, the clunkier its reliance on synecdoche becomes.

An otherwise forgettable cop (James Harkness) is described as having a good memory, so that he can later bemoan this quality, so that he can stand in for every first responder traumatized by recollections of that night. A local (Phyllis Logan) spearheading the effort to return victims’ effects to their families spouts clichés like, “We just saw something that needed to be done, so we did it,” so that we can understand the entire population of Lockerbie to be generous and resolute by extension.

Meanwhile, as dogged as the characters are in pursuing questions of who and how, the show is rather less interested in reflecting on what any of it means in a bigger-picture sense. We’re told the incident led to sweeping reforms in the airline industry, but not what those changes actually were. We’re informed the global implications of this crime are huge, but given no sense of what changed internationally as a result.

The very existence of this show would seem to prove the bombing left a lasting impression on the Scottish psyche, but the precise contours of that impression go unexplored. If the logic is that those who lived through those days won’t need any explanation, the flaw is that four decades on, the ratio of people who clearly remember Lockerbie to those who don’t is only shrinking.

Or perhaps the show’s lack of bigger answers is simply an acknowledgment that there are none, really, to be found. No amount of historical context can soothe a devastated parent’s pain. No geopolitical analysis can justify a community’s heartbreak. No outcome can bring back the lives that were ended.

In that light, the bare fact that hundreds of people were murdered that day, and that hundreds more stepped up to comfort their loved ones, to bring the perpetrators to justice, to agitate for change, is worth trying to remember in itself, however imperfectly. If The Bombing of Pan Am 103 struggles to find the specific humanity of its generic characters, the impulse behind creating them in the first place — to commemorate those departed, and those who cared about them — cannot help but feel touchingly humane.