Lockerbie drama is a punch to the gut with a stellar performance from Colin Firth

It is strange the way that certain television genres gravitate to particular times of the year. High fantasy in the scorching summer, murder mysteries in the Christmas gloom, and, now, complex historical injustices to kick off the new year. Following in the footsteps of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which galvanised the public discourse in January last year, comes Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, a new Sky Atlantic five-part dramatisation of the fallout from the worst terror attack in the history of the United Kingdom.

December 1988: a young, ebullient PhD candidate, Flora Swire (Rosanna Adams) boards a plane for New York. She is travelling to spend Christmas with her American boyfriend, but a bomb explodes over the Scottish town of Lockerbie and Flora, along with the other 258 occupants of the aircraft and 11 people on the ground, are killed. “The scale of this disaster is unmatched,” a local reporter, Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton), declares amid the fiery wreckage littering the streets. At their home in the village of Finstall, near Birmingham, GP Jim Swire (Colin Firth) and his wife Jane (Catherine McCormack) slowly realise that the breaking news – of a plane crash in the Southern Uplands – concerns the flight that Flora, their daughter, was on.

The death of his eldest child sends Swire on a quest for truth. Not justice, which is fleeting and fickle, but an understanding of how and why his daughter died. Swire’s campaign – which stretches across the Thatcher, Major and Blair governments – will turn him into a minor celebrity. Stunts, including carrying a marzipan bomb on a transatlantic flight and going off-piste to visit Colonel Gaddafi in Tripoli, will bring him to the attention of the public and the authorities. But, at its heart, this is the story of a man trying to come to terms with a trauma he cannot fully understand. All the geopolitics, all the diplomacy, all the espionage – what matters to Swire is finally achieving some resolution. It is a journey that will take him on a strange trajectory, from bereaved father to political campaigner.

The first episode of Lockerbie: A Search for Truth depicts the night of the crash, from both the perspective of passengers in the air and the Scottish natives on the ground. It is a sequence rendered unflinchingly, almost reminiscent of the frenetic violence that raised the curtain on the first season of The Last of Us. “Where’s my house gone?” a little boy weeps. “Where’s my mum and dad?” And then the series – directed by Otto Bathurst and Jim Loach – pauses. A scene showing the bodies – hundreds of them – laid in columns in Lockerbie’s ice rink, as Swire paces in long shot, sets the tone for the show. Distressing yet resolute.

At the core of this is Colin Firth, who presents Dr Swire as a man of quiet integrity engaged in an almost fanatical pursuit of understanding. “You failed to keep your passengers safe,” he rails at a Thatcher-era minister. “You failed in your duty.” The supporting cast (including reliable British faces, like Mark Bonnar, and Iranian actor Ardalan Esmaili, who convincingly inhabits the convicted bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi) orbit this stellar performance. But from the moment Swire realises his daughter has died – a gut punch that many viewers will find hard to watch – to the bitter end of his fight, this is Firth’s show.

This puts a lot of pressure on the figure of Swire, who became controversial within the Pan Am Flight 103 families’ movement for his tactics, not to mention his support of Megrahi’s claims of innocence. This is, after all, not a simple story. There is no shadowy organisation – like the Post Office, say – definitively pulling the strings, no villainous mastermind – like Paula Vennells – to hold to account. Sky has deployed the rather hammy subtitle “A Search for Truth” in apparent deference to Swire’s book, which bore the slogan “A Father’s Search for Justice”, but the Lockerbie story is one devoid, ultimately, of either truth or justice. This telling favours Swire’s perspective on Megrahi – so different from the findings of the Scottish court that convicted him – and takes a line that many will disagree with. Truth, in the end, rarely comes with certainty.

But the story must be told. Not just from the morbidly voyeuristic perspective that so often governs our fascination with acts of violence, but from the slow, forensic unwinding of an obscured truth. Lockerbie: A Search for Truth contends that international diplomacy was privileged over families being allowed to truly grieve. And while absolute truth might prove elusive, even a partial understanding sheds light on the conspiracy of systems that leave emotional wounds untended.