On December 21st, 1988 a bomb planted in Pan Am Flight 103 from London Heathrow to New York JFK blew up in the air over the small town (population 3,500) of Lockerbie, Scotland. The crash killed all 259 people on board and debris from the explosion killed eleven residents of the town. At the time it was the second deadliest act of aviation terrorism in history, surpassed only by the Air India Flight 182 bombing three years prior. It remains the single deadliest terrorist attack in British history.

The attack exposed a number of serious security flaws in airline operations, most notably a failure to match baggage with ticketed passengers which allowed an unaccompanied piece of luggage containing a bomb to be loaded onto several different airplanes before ultimately being loaded onto Pan Am 103. X-Ray screenings did exist at the time but failed to detect the bomb. There was also a failure of intelligence sharing between various international law enforcement agencies that could have prevented the attack.

I knew some of this going in, and I learned a lot more while I was watching it. I learned a lot about how the families of the dead had to work for years to get a decent flow of information from the FBI regarding the case. I learned how the FBI and CIA withheld actionable intelligence for fear of exposing their own operatives and thus compromising US national security. I learned about what it took to finally get tougher security screenings enforced as a routine procedure. But mostly I learned about the horrific impact this attack had on the tiny Scottish town it (literally) landed on.
A major theme throughout is how the Scottish investigators had to negotiate, beg and push back against the CIA and the FBI just to gather the evidence needed to prosecute the murder of their own citizens. Competing interests don’t stop competing just because there are bodies on the ground.

So what about the show itself? Is it well done? Yes, quite well done in fact. My cynical expectation going into a show like this is that it might shamelessly milk human misery for dramatic tension. But that didn’t happen. The overall tone of the show is extremely sober, reflective and professional. It’s also quite uncomfortable in places. There are scenes depicting angry family members demanding answers that the FBI either doesn’t have or isn’t able to give due to national security concerns. I actually felt bad for FBI Special Agent Dick Marquise, standing up at a podium trying to talk to the families of the victims, essentially being personally put on trial for all the grief and pain they were dealing with. Being the one who gets screamed at by angry family members of the dead must’ve been a brutal ordeal. The families themselves, naturally, had much greater pain but there are so many of them the show can’t focus on any one of them much. There are a few that get some recurring appearances but the story focuses on the folks of Lockerbie and the investigators.

I also liked that the show spent some time on the difficulty of making a viable prosecution of the eventual suspects. The pressure on the prosecutors must’ve been astronomical. They had to get a guilty verdict using evidence pieced together over the course of a decade, work with witnesses whose memories couldn’t possibly be as sharp in the present as they were ten years ago, and then build a compelling argument with fragments of bombed out debris as their best physical evidence.

As per usual, the show is very nice looking and very well crafted in all technical respects. The story is (as far as I can tell) extremely faithful to the real events, with minimal dramatic license taken to make it into watchable television.
I looked up other reviews and I saw the same thing repeated over and over again. Reviewers praised the show for its respectful handling of the subject matter, its shunning of cheap sensationalism and its treatment of the everyday people affected by the attack and how this event upended their lives.

Nobody is made out to be a superhero. Nobody is made out to be a martyr. The Libyan intelligence agents who carried out the bombing are mostly unseen peripheral characters until the very end, and their motives are clearly explained. (Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi ordered the bombing as payback for various American military strikes against Libya). This gives the narrative a clear focus without turning it into a shamefully exploitative action adventure.

So this one gets high marks from me. I hesitate to give it a numerical score or a letter grade because the subject matter is extremely serious and real, but if I had to, I would say 9.5/10. Telling a true story in a compelling way while remaining respectful and refraining from sensationalism is hard to do. But The Bombing of Pan Am 103 demonstrates that it can indeed work.