Now, Ubisoft and Netflix have picked up the franchise for Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, a new anime-style adventure, with John Wick creator Derek Kolstad at the helm, and animation by Danish/French Sun Creature Studio and the French studio Fost. Deathwatch isn’t the hard reboot some fans may have been hoping for; it’s more of a supplementary component in the franchise. Still, for newcomers, there’s plenty of action and intrigue that could entice viewers to dive deeper into the franchise. And for series vets, Kolstad and company explore the setting in a way the games never could, making Deathwatch a satisfactory watch.
The premise of Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is simple: Former CIA paramilitary officer and Navy SEAL Sam Fisher (now voiced by Liev Schreiber) is forced out of retirement to help a new agent, Zinnia McKenna (The Good Place’s Kirby Howell-Baptiste). After a mission for the Fourth Echelon, a covert unit that answers solely to the President of the United States, McKenna is left gravely wounded and stranded in the field.
As the story unfolds, Fisher and his team have no choice but to use traditional stealth tactics against a far more complex digital threat, tackling issues like corporate espionage and disinformation campaigns around global warming. Meanwhile, Fisher’s past comes back to haunt him in the form of his old friend turned enemy Douglas Shetland (an essential ally and then antagonist in the games). This time, Douglas is also joined by his children, who use the promise of saving the world from global warming as a blunt weapon to wield against their competitors.
Splinter Cell games have always straddled the line between letting you feel like a cloak-and-dagger hero with all the cool gadgets and tech, and showing the emotional, physical, and mental repercussions of what Fisher and those like him do to fight terrorist threats. The franchise leaned especially hard into this angle of morality in wartime in its last game, Blacklist, and the new show’s first season is directly tied to the video games (with some creative liberties for the sake of the adaptation). As a fan of Netflix’s Tomb Raider animated series, I don’t always see an adaptation retreading old narrative ground as a bad thing, especially if it’s exploring aspects of the setting we haven’t seen before. Deathwatch does so by digging deeper into Shetland and Fisher’s relationship, regrets, and futures, as well as their legacy.
Shetland and Fisher’s history used to be amicable: They were the godfathers of each other’s children. However, after an incident leading to the death of an interrogation suspect, Shetland grew disillusioned by their work in the U.S. military. When Fisher gave evidence against Shetland that led to a dishonorable discharge, their relationship soured. Shetland went on to fund his own private military company, Displace International, and Fisher continued his work as an agency spy and operative.
Deathwatch covers the final stage of their relationship, during which Shetland makes it clear they aren’t so different. They’re both capable of incredible violence, but they’re being wielded by two different masters. Shetland is controlled by whoever pays the most, whether that be foreign governments or criminals, while Fisher is controlled by the US government.
That’s a damning accusation, even though it isn’t particularly new for the franchise. The Splinter Cell video games see players, as Fisher, taking out terrorists with lethal, violent precision. The 2004 game Pandora Tomorrow has Fisher claiming that being a terrorist and a U.S. agent aren’t mutually exclusive. The accusation comes with crystal-clear clarity: Every operative like Fisher has done something horrific in pursuit of their heroic objective of saving lives. Deathwatch manages to capture that sentiment throughout its entire eight-episode run.
That’s particularly felt in the show with the introduction of Shetland and Fisher’s legacies, the people who step up to continue their work. For Shetland, it’s his two children, Diana (Kari Wahlgren) and Charlie (Aleks Le). They’ve decided to seemingly move away from their father’s infamous legacy to the more honorable goal of averting climate change.
However, Displace International is a false front. The company is hiding a violent scheme that threatens all of Europe, and the Shetlands are using their father’s old contacts to help them. In spite of their good intentions, Diana and Charlie are unable to see another way to achieve their aims, so they use their father’s morally repugnant methods of hiring terrorists and criminals to kill and torture to get what they want. Yes, they want to stop global warming, but they also want to benefit personally and financially from it, and they’re willing to cut moral corners to achieve those goals.
Fisher and McKenna, for their part, are both unable to escape the grip of the U.S. government and the horrors it asks of them. McKenna is taking over Fisher’s past role, leading to the “old guard works with the newbie” dynamic that’s become an obsession in long-running franchises recently, from Wolverine and Laura Kinney in James Mangold’s 2017 film Logan to the MCU’s Young Avengers ramp-up to the new Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice movies.
At first, I wasn’t sure I liked Deathwatch’s take on this dynamic. McKenna and Fisher’s relationship doesn’t really capture the emotionally wrought intensity of the mentor/student dynamic of Logan, where X-23 emotionally depends on Logan to help guide her. But this quieter dynamic between Fisher and McKenna once more touches on the morality of war, and how the only legacy spies get seems to be the experience of rotting from the inside out.
This isn’t the first time Fisher has questioned his role or work in the franchise — he’s disobeyed direct orders before in the video games, and, spoiler alert, he does again in this series. But seeing that rebellion mirrored through McKenna, a much younger agent who still shares Fisher’s anger and disenchantment about the relationships and people they’ve lost throughout their years, is particularly poignant in conveying how their roles in the Fourth Echeleon don’t feel like heroic spy power fantasies. There are no heroes here, just broken people.
This lack of heroes ultimately seems to be what Kolstad and his team want audiences to take away from Deathwatch. While the finale is dynamic, with some truly fantastic animation, the ending is so bleak that I waited through the end credits to see if there was more. The finale feels like it’s primed to explode, but it winds up as more of a dud grenade.
It’s possible that’s intentional: a sharp reminder of why Fisher and McKenna are so disillusioned in the first place. Even with all their gadgets, the preparation, and the backing of the US government, they can’t always win. People die. On the other hand, showrunners are rarely sure they’ll get another season (especially on Netflix!) so trying to conclude a story within a season’s parameters is beneficial for both the creator and their audience, even if the creator feels they have more story to tell. This is the case for Deathwatch, where Kolstad planned for two seasons, but only one was greenlit.
Yet, even if this story was planned for a second-season continuation, the ending of Deathwatch still feels loyal to Splinter Cell as a franchise. There is no cliffhanger, but Fisher and co. come to grips with a pretty damning failure. It’s a raw, devastating conclusion that left me sitting in silence for a while. Longtime fans of the franchise will delight in getting to know more about the Shetlands and the emotional turmoil that still plagues Fisher and his connection to the family, but new fans also get the opportunity to step into material that tackles tough issues with the maturity it deserves.
Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is available to stream exclusively on Netflix.
