Netflix’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch Review
For people who decide to give Splinter Cell: Deathwatch a try on Netflix that are unfamiliar with Sam Fisher’s long and incredible run in the 2000’s as the stealth video game genre’s Pepsi to Metal Gear Solid’s Coke, they’re going to find a violent, slightly over the top, yet pretty captivating eight-episode spy show. But for those of us who have loved Splinter Cell for over 20 years and waited more than half of that time for a new game, Deathwatch will be all of those things but also a bit bittersweet.
First, the sweet part of ‘bittersweet’ is that the show is quite good! The characters are all fun and have important roles to play in moving the story forward, Liev Schreiber is an outstanding understudy to Michael Ironside from the games as the voice of Fisher, and the show is paced well enough that I kept eagerly pressing “Next Episode” until I finished all eight parts – both times 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 show is so far along in the timeline that we might not have 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 is running shadow-ops US government agency Fourth Echelon, and Sam Fisher is living a quiet, night-vision-goggle-free life on a farm in Poland. In fact, Sam has all of two lines of dialogue in the entire first episode. That’s because Deathwatch begins by tracking young agent Zinnia McKenna (voiced by Kirby Howell-Baptiste) in the middle of an op gone bad; the fellow agent she’s been sent to Lithuania to extract is quite dead – the victim of torture, in fact. Her youthful rage leads her to make a mistake Fisher wouldn’t, and before long all hell has broken loose, with Fisher being very unwillingly roped into the whole mess and back to the life he thought he’d 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 and hand off the Splinter Cell brand to McKenna and a new generation of Fourth Echelon agents. No, no; by the end of the second episode, Sam is very much the star of the show, and season one is better for it.
As someone to whom Splinter Cell means a lot – I’ve completed every single game in the series (even Splinter Cell Essentials on PSP!) – the great Michael Ironside will always be my Sam Fisher. And it would’ve been particularly fitting for Ironside to get the role here, since Deathwatch’s Fisher is advanced in age, and Ironside himself is 75. But whatever the reason, Schreiber got the call, and he does a phenomenal job bringing Sam’s dry humor, wry toughness, and human compassion to life in his exchanges with his teammates, his enemies, and his dog, Kaiju. He lends Sam a toughness and gruffness that’s critical for Fisher’s character. I love him in the role and I 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 show is – far more so than the games. Sure, you could kill everyone when playing, but Deathwatch is not shy about showing the grisly details. You’ll see scalpels (and fingers) driven into eyeballs, knives jammed into the sides of skulls, bullets fired into heads, knives rammed into guts, and worse. This isn’t a complaint, though; I liked what the violence= brought to Deathwatch, because it helped illustrate how life-or-death each encounter is for these lone-wolf spies slinking around the shadows.
And speaking of the shadows, yes, there is plenty of spywork done in this incarnation of Splinter Cell. Though if this was Blacklist, McKenna would be doing a Ghost playthrough and Sam would be playing Panther-style. He racks up quite the body count across the eight episodes – which I could only chuckle at because it’s the exact opposite of the way I typically play the games. But anyway, yes, these agents do cool ninja stuff in darkness, they do choke people out, and they do use gadgets here and there – though sadly there are no sightings of Splinter Cell classics like the Sticky Shocker or the Sticky Camera (or the SC-20k gun, for that matter).
Getting back to Sam’s supporting cast, I enjoyed what each of them brought to the team: Grim has neither patience nor F’s to give, Jo brings the steadiness Grim can’t while holding down the fort at Fourth Echelon HQ in Copenhagen, Thunder is a recruited Canadian hacker who quickly ingratiates himself to the team, and McKenna is a skilled agent for whom the mission gets personal. And on the bad guy side, Deathwatch resurrects a name familiar to Splinter Cell fans: Douglas Shetland. Though featured in flashbacks, Shetland is long dead, but the show’s story revolves around his daughter Diana Shetl nd’s dedication to turning Doug’s company Displace International from a private military contractor into a cleantech company whose imminent Xanadu project could power the world with renewable energy.
Does the plot get a bit nonsensical towards the end? Sure, but then again, so did the games. On a related note, I did appreciate that, whether it was intentional or not (and I’d lean towards it being on purpose), Deathwatch does allude to a couple of missions from the best of all the 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 tri-lens night vision goggles turning on, of course, but I particularly appreciated the radio/comms activation noise being ripped straight from the original Xbox days of the franchise.
Circling back to the bittersweetness of this series, while there’s certainly nothing stopping Ubisoft (who produced this show) and Netflix from keeping animated Splinter Cell alive for many years to come by simply doing flashback seasons that take us back to Sam Fisher’s prime super-spy days, the more likely reality is that this Old Man Sam isn’t going to be around for the long haul by nature of where this show starts us in Fisher’s life. If that proves to be the case, it either means this show itself will be with us all too briefly, or Schreiber’s Fisher will hand the reins to Howell-Baptiste’s McKenna, which audiences might resist, as it’d be like killing off Batman and turning it into a Robin show. I find the former to be more likely – after all, Netflix only gave The Legend of Lara Croft (which, in fairness, was not a good show) two seasons, and even the stellar Castlevania only got four seasons. Plus, historically speaking, Sam Fisher is Splinter Cell.
But for the time being, I’m just going to enjoy the fact that we’ve got Splinter Cell back in our lives, the show is a great (if all-too-brief) ultraviolent romp for just over three total hours across eight 22-27 minute episodes, and maybe, just maybe, it might convince Ubisoft to get its ass in gear on that Splinter Cell remake that got announced four years ago and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
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