For people who decide to try Splinter Cell: Deathwatch on Netflix and aren’t familiar with Sam Fisher’s long and incredible career in the 2000s as the Pepsi of Metal Gear Solid’s Coke-fueled stealth video game genre, they’ll find a violent, slightly over-the-top, but quite gripping eight-episode spy show. But for those of us who have loved Splinter Cell for over 20 years and have waited over half that time for a new game, Deathwatch will be all of that, but also a little bittersweet.
First of all, the nice thing about “bittersweet” is that the show is pretty good! The characters are all fun and have important roles to play in moving the story forward, Liev Schreiber is an exceptional understudy to the games’ Michael Ironside as the voice of Fisher, and the series is paced well enough that I kept impatiently pressing “Next Episode” until I finished all eight parts – both time I watched it. The “bitter” comes from the realization that not only are we still no closer to a new Splinter Cell game, but this series is so far back in the timeline that we may not get much more time with my favorite sardonic super spy.
Yes, Deathwatch picks up decades after Splinter Cell Blacklist, the most recent game. Anna “Grim” Grímsdóttir heads the US government agency Fourth Echelon, responsible for ghost operations, and Sam Fisher lives a quiet life, without night vision goggles, on a farm in Poland. In fact, Sam has two lines of dialogue in the entire first episode. That’s because Deathwatch begins by tracking down young agent Zinnia McKenna (voiced by Kirby Howell-Baptiste) in the middle of an operation gone wrong; the fellow agent she was sent to Lithuania to extract is practically dead – a victim of torture, in fact. His youthful rage leads him to make a mistake that Fisher wouldn’t make, and soon after all hell breaks loose, with Fisher reluctantly getting involved in the whole mess and returning to the life he thought he left behind.
By the end of the first episode, I was intrigued and ready for the rest of the series — not to mention relieved that Sam was clearly going to be a central part of Deathwatch, and that showrunner Derek Kolstad (whose action resume includes creating John Wick) wasn’t simply resurrecting Fisher to try to pass on the Splinter Cell brand to McKenna and a new generation of agents of the Fourth Echelon. No, no; By the end of the second episode, Sam is truly the star of the show, and the first season is better for it.
As someone who means a lot to Splinter Cell – I’ve completed every game in the series (even Splinter Cell Essentials on PSP!) – the great Michael Ironside will always be My Sam Fisher. And it would have been especially fitting for Ironside to get the role here, since Deathwatch’s Fisher is advanced in age and Ironside himself is 75 years old. But whatever the reason, Schreiber got the call, and he does a phenomenal job bringing Sam’s dry humor, wry tenacity, and human compassion to life in his exchanges with his teammates, his enemies, and his dog, Kaiju. He gives Sam a toughness and toughness that are essential to Fisher’s character. I love him in the role and look forward to more of his Sam Fisher if we’re lucky enough to get a season 2.
It’s also worth noting how violent this series is – far more so than the games. Sure, you could kill everyone while playing, but Deathwatch doesn’t shy away from showing off the grisly details. You’ll see scalpels (and fingers) thrust into eyeballs, knives thrust into the sides of skulls, bullets fired into heads, knives thrust into guts, and worse. This is not a complaint, however; I liked what the violence brought to Deathwatch, because it helped illustrate how every encounter is life or death for these lone wolf spies who slink around in the shadows.
And speaking of shadows, yes, there is a lot of spy work being done in this incarnation of Splinter Cell. But if this was Blacklist, McKenna would play Ghost and Sam would play Panther. He accumulates quite a few corpses over the course of eight episodes – which I can only laugh about because it’s the exact opposite of how I usually play games. But anyway, yes, these agents do some cool ninja stuff in the dark, they choke people and use gadgets here and there – although unfortunately there are no sightings of Splinter Cell classics like the Sticky Shocker or the Sticky Camera (or the SC-20k gun, for that matter).
Returning to Sam’s supporting cast, I appreciated what each of them brought to the team: Grim has no patience or Fs to give, Jo provides the stability that Grim cannot while holding down the fort at Fourth Echelon HQ in Copenhagen, Thunder is a recruited Canadian hacker who quickly integrates into the team, and McKenna is a capable agent for whom the mission becomes personal. And on the villain side, Deathwatch resurrects a name familiar to Splinter Cell fans: Douglas Shetland. Although featured in flashbacks, Shetland has long been dead, but the series’ story revolves around his daughter Diana Shetlnd’s dedication to transforming Doug’s company, Displace International, from a private military contractor into a clean technology company whose impending Project Xanadu could power the world with renewable energy.
Does the plot get a little absurd towards the end? Sure, but then again, so do games. On a related note, I appreciated that, whether intentional or not (and I tend to do it on purpose), Deathwatch alludes to a few missions from the best of all games, Chaos Theory, without outright retreading them. In fact, the final two episodes are titled “Chaos Theory: Part 1” and “Part 2.” Other Easter eggs from the past include not one but two very familiar sound effects: There’s the classic three-lens night vision goggles that light up, of course, but I particularly enjoyed the radio/communication activation sound ripped straight from the franchise’s original Xbox days.
Getting back to the bittersweetness of this series, while there’s nothing stopping Ubisoft (who produced this show) and Netflix from keeping the animated Splinter Cell alive for many years to come by simply doing flashback seasons that take us back to Sam Fisher’s super-spy days, the more likely reality is that this Old Man Sam won’t be around for the long haul due to the nature of where this series is begins with Fisher’s life. If that turns out to be the case, that either means that this series itself will be with us too briefly, or that Schreiber’s Fisher will hand the reins to Howell-Baptiste’s McKenna, which audiences might resist, because it would be like killing off Batman and making it a Robin series. I find the first solution more likely – after all, Netflix only gave The Legend of Lara Croft (which, in all honesty, was not a movie). good show) two seasons, and even the stellar Castlevania only had four seasons. Additionally, historically speaking, Sam Fisher East Cell burst.
But for now, I’m just going to enjoy the fact that we have Splinter Cell back in our lives, the series is a superb (if too brief) ultraviolent adventure lasting just over three hours in total across eight 22-27 minute episodes, and maybe, just maybe, that might convince Ubisoft to get going on this Splinter Cell remake that had announcement four years ago and he hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
