When a bomb exploded on 21 December 1988 onboard Pan-Am 103, it killed all 259 passengers and crew and another 11 people on the ground, near Lockerbie in Scotland. It must be strange, then, for the friends and family they left behind, to watch the last moments of their loved ones dramatised, not once but twice in the space of a year. A few months after Colin Firth’s Lockerbie aired on Sky, the BBC brings us The Bombing of Pan Am 103, a six-part, forensic deconstruction of the tragedy and its aftermath.
“This was an act of war,” Scottish investigator DCS John Orr (Peter Mullan) announces gravely. “And now we have to find out who we’re fighting.” And so, this is how The Bombing of Pan Am 103 unfolds. On a cold December night, a broken-up Boeing 747 rains fire on the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, scattering debris over an 850-square mile crime scene. On the ground, a team of Scottish police officers – including Orr and young DS Ed McCusker (Connor Swindells) – attempt to hold things together. There are grieving families, trying to confirm the fates of their beloved, not to mention a landscape littered with potentially valuable information. And so, the wheels move into motion with one question in mind. “I need to find out if this was an accident,” says Orr, “or if it was a bomb.”
