The Bombing of Pan Am 103 Review 2026 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Netflix of course got in their take on the Lockerbie disaster first with their production called simply “Lockerbie”, airing a few months ago. In it, the producers took a specific point of view, that of campaigner Jim Swire and his pursuit of the truth as to who were the perpetrators of the appalling mass murder. Its conclusion was that the man eventually sentenced to imprisonment in Scotland for his alleged part in the awful crime, Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, may have been innocent and that the actual perpetrators were therefore still at large.
That’s not the position of this six-part BBC production which patiently snd painstakingly takes us to its considered verdict that Megrahi was indeed guilty and so deserved to go to prison although of course he was later released back to Libya on compassionate grounds when he was diagnosed as having only months to live, although he actually survived three years in his deteriorating condition.
Both series took a long time to build up their respective cases but having watched both, I’m no further forward in knowing what to believe. What I will say is that in terms of television entertainment, if that’s even the correct word on such a sensitive subject as this, I would have to say that I found this one to be much drier and less engaging than its predecessor. Perhaps it was its lack of focus on any of the families of the victims either on the flight or on the ground, but in the end I found each of the programmes to be bogged down in the details practically to the point of being bored by the leaden pace at which it progressed.
Instead, it focused far more on the investigators of the crime, both from the local Scottish police and naturally the FBI representing the American side. Questions are unsurprisingly raised, as they usually are, about the covert involvement beforehand of the CIA, but no real conclusion is drawn from the proceedings as presented, leaving me to infer that the director got so bogged down in the admittedly painstaking detection process that they forgot to inject genuine drama into the narrative. That may seem like a rather inhumane comment given the human extent of the disaster, but too much of the viewing time was taken up with overlong conversations amongst too many people. A little dramatic licence could have been taken to enliven matters especially when each episode naturally commenced with the customary legend about combining characters and imagining dialogue to further the action.
I’m afraid the acting didn’t impress me much either. I’m guessing the lack of a star name leading the cast was a deliberate ploy to stress the everyday nature of the families dealing with the aftermath of the disaster and those tasked with investigating the bombing but for me it didn’t pay dividends. And just quite why Eddie Marsan was forced to adopt an American accent for his character is anybody’s guess.
By episode 6, when we reach the 12-year delayed trial of the convicted Megrahi and his acquitted co-accused Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, there was no sense of catharsis when the verdicts were delivered, but perhaps this was as it should be given the length of time it had taken for justice to run its course and indeed, if it was justice at all that just one man was convicted for such a wide ranging act. It ended solemnly, with a memorial service in the open air at the site of where the plane fell, as the names of the victims came up on screen to the backdrop of a forlorn piper.
However, I found the series overall to be a mixture of the moving and the slow-moving, erring, I thought just a little too much, if understandably, on the side of gravitas.
