‘Lockerbie: A Search for Truth’ Review: Colin Firth Lends Depth to a Peacock Historical Drama That Sorely Needs It

Appropriately somber and sincere-of-purpose, Peacock’s new limited series Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is, to the surprise of nobody who has been watching a lot of TV or reading my reviews recently, an important and powerful story dressed up in an ill-fitting suit.

The five-hour drama consists of two gripping episodes, then two meandering episodes and finally a conclusion of hastily resolved catharsis. Carried by a raw, heartbreaking lead performance by Colin Firth, it’s consistently watchable, but lacking the necessary focus to be truly exceptional.

Not to be confused with the Netflix six-parter, Lockerbie, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth — airing on Sky Atlantic in the U.K. — this one is based on Jim Swire’s memoir and adapted by Scottish playwright David Harrower.

The series begins in December 1988 with doctor Jim Swire (Firth) and wife Jane (Catherine McCormack) saying farewell to beloved daughter Flora (Rosanna Adams, conveying enough joy in five minutes for that memory to linger). Flora is catching Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York City, where she’s spending Christmas with her boyfriend.

The Swires and countless other families are shattered when the plane is destroyed by a bomb over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing the 269 passengers and crew, as well as 11 people on the ground.

Perplexed by the British government’s slow investigative process, Jim spends the next three decades seeking answers regarding who bombed the plane and how the tragedy was allowed to occur. The search for the truth includes multiple meetings with Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi and one notorious marzipan “bomb,” continuing through the trial of the two Libyan men named as suspects.

It’s a tiny bit odd that 2025 will see this pair of Lockerbie-related series — a 37th anniversary commemoration of an unspeakable tragedy that, in its moment, united multiple countries in grief and outrage but has, like so many other tragedies, seen its profile fade over the years. The Lockerbie disaster will remain an eternally open wound in Lockerbie itself, and for Syracuse University, which lost 35 study-abroad students. But it’s my hunch that there are whole generations now with limited to no awareness of it, and countless other people who will watch Lockerbie: A Search for Truth and remember historical details up to a certain point and no further.

That sad reality is what Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, at its best, is about. It’s an exploration, through one bereft man’s dogged journey, of how impossible it can be to progress past the unimaginable — and the pain of realizing that other people have moved on to the next unimaginable horror, closure be damned. Like grief itself, there’s something ephemeral and unresolvable about the series’ theme, thrown into inconsistent contrast against the desire or need to follow Jim Swire’s story and the Lockerbie story in a disappointingly concrete way.

For a while, the inconsistency isn’t a problem. The opening two episodes are properly distressing, especially the way that Harrower and director Otto Bathurst treat the disaster itself. It isn’t exactly exploitative, but there aren’t enough trigger warnings for the nightmarish depiction of that December evening, the fireballs in the sky, the terrifying hail of debris, fields scattered with charred bodies and the craters that are both literal and represent holes in families’ lives that can never be filled. The first episode features at least 30 minutes of mayhem and carnage, in which the only “relief” is the escalating dread and then sorrow at the Swire household as they come to realize what has occurred. It’s edge-of-your-seat television interspersed with emotional agony, with Firth and McCormack grounding the intimate part of the story and Sam Troughton, as a Scottish reporter who certainly feels like a composite, capturing the disorientation in Lockerbie.

The immediate aftermath in the second episode is nearly as effective, as the series follows Swire’s pain, the early organization of family grief groups and the confusion at the failure of the British or American governments to launch an independent inquiry. In a moment of escalating chaos, shown here via news and documentary footage, fingers were pointed at various Middle Eastern countries and terror groups, causing the story to get lost in the international maelstrom surrounding the first Iraq War, then 9/11 and then the subsequent war in Afghanistan.

It’s a story that became incredibly diffuse and confusing, in which certain moments that played as climactic on the global stage — the 2000 trial in the Netherlands was an unprecedented moment of international law — weren’t actually conclusive, at least not for Swire.

This becomes an issue for the show, because it’s easier to dramatize Jim Swire as a dogged independent investigator than as an incapacitated father, and it’s easier to treat Swire as a man driving the plot of the investigation than as man using the investigation as a coping or sublimating mechanism. The series is more comfortable depicting what Jim is doing rather than what Jim is feeling — even when the fleeting glimpses of the latter are much more effective and a much better showcase for Firth, who’s more than prepared to dig deeper, but is only sporadically given that opportunity.

The third and fourth episodes become a frustratingly nonstop saga of Jim Swire making and disassembling all-too-familiar conspiracy boards in various offices and apartments, coming and going to various trials, visiting and revisiting Libya. He’s constantly stuck sharing the screen with composite characters — Troughton and Mark Bonnar as an attorney who does… nothing are among several recognizable and wasted supporting players — or bold-type historical figures who never feel like real humans. He’s also constantly repeating to people that he wants answers, when the truth is that, as of 2024, this is not a case in which there are concrete answers.

The gap between how potent the scenes with Jim and Jane are and how mechanical the scenes with Jim and Gaddafi — or Jim and bombing suspect Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili) — are is massive. Though the desire to treat al-Megrahi, still the only man convicted of any crime related to Lockerbie, as a full character and present him and Jim as parallels (two men, two fathers, whose lives were forever changed by December 21, 1988) is a worthy one, I don’t think Lockerbie: A Search for Truth ever comes close to an understanding of al-Megrahi.

Aspiring to cardboard empathy for al-Megrahi, though better than treating him as a simple caricature, ends up limiting the series’ opportunities for empathy for Jim and especially Jane. Firth is likely to get all the praise, and his contained unraveling is compelling. I found McCormack to be every bit as good, but less fully realized as a character. After delivering the most powerful moment of the entire series toward the end of the first episode, Jane is reduced to playing variations on “You’re so trapped in the past that you’re neglecting the family that’s still alive!” tropes for nearly three hours.

If I had to guess, I’d say the show understands that it’s becoming as distanced from its emotional center as Jim is, as obsessed with making this a whodunnit at the expense of a story of self-care and healing. But I wonder if these same beats would have played more successfully in a feature film or a tighter miniseries.