I took one for the team and watched the Netflix series about the bombing of Pan Am 103 over the weekend, and I am now officially disgruntled. There's a lot to quibble with about the clearly low-budget effort by UK filmmakers – and, oh, I'm including it all – but my main takeaway is this: the United Kingdom is not our ally and hasn't been for a long time.
The riveting title of the six-part series is The Bombing of Pan Am 103, and it was created by British novelist and screenwriter Jonathan Lee. A better title would've been How the Stupid and Evil Americans Screwed Up Again.
It was developed by a guy named Adam Morane-Griffiths and produced by World Productions as a BBC–Netflix co-production. Yes, that's enough to set off all the alarm bells and throw all the red flags.
Nevertheless, I persisted.
Connor Swindells, Patrick J. Adams, Merritt Wever, and Peter Mullan star in the new limited series The Bombing of Pan Am 103. Now on Netflix.
— Netflix (@netflix) July 30, 2026
The tragic bombing of a transatlantic flight over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 unites the local police and the FBI in a hunt for the… pic.twitter.com/lyoChF3K44
The show, obviously, is about the December 21, 1988, bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The flight was headed from London Heathrow to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport when it exploded over Lockerbie as the result of a bomb put on the plane in Frankfurt.
I was a junior in college at the time – and the same age as a group of Syracuse University students who were returning home from a semester abroad and were on the flight – so I remember it well. Bombings and hijackings by Middle Eastern terrorists were sadly pretty common in the 80s.
Broadly, the show covers the multinational effort to track down the terrorists over the course of several years; it's a scripted drama that is interspersed with actual news footage from the time. It focuses mainly on a group of Scottish police and one FBI official who spearheaded the investigation that eventually led to the conviction of Libyan terrorist Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.
You might be surprised to find out that the real heroes – the ones who picked up on all the small clues, solved the entire thing, and really, really cared – were in fact the local Scottish police department and the old ladies of Lockerbie who made scones and cleaned uniforms. The U.S. and the FBI were mere hindrances in the U.K.'s courageous battle for justice.
This is not to undermine the sorrow and sacrifice of Lockerbie; they lost 11 residents, who were killed by falling debris, and were instrumental in helping local law enforcement locate evidence and recover the victims. Unimaginable.
The not-so-subtle inference made in the series, however, is that they cared way more than those heartless Americans, who lost 190 of their own and were over 3,000 miles away from the site. Also, Americans are stupid, evil, greedy, and racist.
The Superficial
There are some quibbles that need to be mentioned. The wigs sported by nearly all the characters were bad and distracting, taking away from the seriousness of the subject. The faux-D.C. settings were an abomination. There are no skyscrapers in DC! The lack of meaningful glimpses into the lives of the victims was an unforced error and detracted from the seriousness of the investigation.
The Serious
They think we're stupid. The only American characters portrayed as actual humans in the entire series are the victims' families and a rogue Senate staffer who helped them, and the main FBI guy is made out to be a self-serving jerk who exists merely to keep information away from the competent U.K. authorities. Which could well be, of course, but I have a feeling the U.S.'s far superior investigative skills, foreign intel, and evidence-processing capabilities might have played a role.
We're also evil and greedy. That's mostly the airline executives, but it's also our intelligence services who, according to the show, withheld crucial evidence at every turn, which prevented Scottish officials and the old Scottish ladies making them scones from solving the case sooner.
And, of course, we're racist. And inordinate amount of time is dedicated to the FBI questioning the family of a Muslim American student who died on the plane; he wasn't involved, but how dare the American government investigate if a Muslim from Dearborn, Michigan could have played a role.
The obvious subtext of the show: the Americans are worse than the terrorists.
The Conclusion
The U.K. isn't our ally. A bold conclusion based on a BBC-Netflix series, perhaps, but one that's also backed up with some data.
A survey released in June by the European Council on Foreign Relations shows only 10 percent of Europeans see the U.S. as an ally – and they're increasingly worried we won't defend them militarily.
European confidence in an American “security guarantee” has hit a historic low, a survey suggests, with only one in 10 people across 15 countries seeing the US as an ally and majorities in all doubting it would come to their aid if they were attacked.
Well, why should we?
If Britain and the rest of Europe increasingly view America as the villain, perhaps it’s time we started taking them at their word. The BBC can keep its bad wigs and self-congratulatory revisionist history, and America should keep its money.
(Oh, and the DOJ currently has Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi in custody for his role in the bombing, so this story isn't over yet!)
