Splinter Cell: Deathwatch review

Stealth isn’t the easiest thing to adapt from a game to a TV series. Playing Splinter Cell as Sam Fisher, we’re more than content to spend hours sneaking slowly through hallways and stairwells, crouching motionless for long minutes in the shadowy, observing enemy patrol routes, and carefully moving unconscious bodies to darkened corners to hide them.

But watching someone do it on an animated series? For 20 minutes at a time? It’s strenuous to imagine this being immersive, which is probably why the stealth sequences in the Netflix animated series Splinter Cell: Deathwatch don’t take long before turning into straight action. Deathwatch has as much shooting, knife fighting and car chases as it does stealth and sneaking – which is not in the spirit of the Splinter Cell games.

But for a TV show, our hero being more panther than ghost isn’t really a bad thing. Written and produced by John Wick creator Derek Kolstad and directed by Guillaume Dousse, the action in Splinter: Cell Deathwatch is tense, grounded and well-crafted. The episodes are compact and simple to read, with a simplified plot and relatively little dialogue. And Deathwatch does the most significant thing a video game adaptation can do: it makes me want to play a Splinter Cell game.

Winter cell

At the beginning of the series, we are introduced to an older, grayer Sam Fisher than the one we know from the games. Living a still life in a snowy and isolated country house in Poland, senior Fisher just wants to be left alone to drink scotch and read Moby Dick by the fireplace while his faithful dog sleeps at his feet.

We’ve seen this kind of activity from a retired hero before, though refreshingly we don’t have to see one of those cliched scenes where his former handler tries to get him back to work for one last job while he insists he’s retired, gone, gone. done with this life. NO. When a seriously injured agent arrives at his farm with a group of assassins on her tail, Sam doesn’t even complain about wanting to go back to work. He just goes back to work immediately. “There are no former Splinter agents,” he says later, meaning you never actually leave the agency.

The complete omission of the reluctant hero trope may be a side effect of the overall exuberance of the Deathwatch episodes. In an age where streaming series don’t have to fit into a specific time slot, we’re used to episodes longer than 30 or even 60 minutes, but each episode of Deathwatch is a tight 22 minutes, keeping the animated series lean and effective, with little time to filler or distract. This works to the show’s advantage, creating a active between episodes and making it simple to say, “Sure, I’ll watch the next one.”

Fisher isn’t the only substantial name in Deathwatch. Anna “Grim” Grímsdóttir, voiced by Janet Varney (“The Legend of Korra,” “State Against Evil”) continues to issue orders over the radio to the secret agency Fourth Echelon, and Fisher’s flashbacks give us another look at Douglas Shetland, Sam’s former companion and nemesis, whose adult children now run his company, Displace International. Deathwatch also introduces fresh recruits like hacker extraordinaire Thunder (Joel Oulette) and agent Zinnia McKenna, played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste (Barry, Killing Eve).

Baptiste’s McKenna is essentially the fresh Sam of the Fourth Echelon: the series begins with a botched extraction operation and ends with her seeking revenge on the people who tortured another agent to death.

Don’t worry, Sam is still the main character of Deathwatch, but halfway through the series, McKenna is also in the spotlight, to the point that if this were the show’s third season, I’d suspect Netflix was planning a spin-off for her. Or maybe a game, if Ubisoft still made Splinter Cell games.

Acting as a mentor to the juvenile agent himself, he is handled delicately: he is senior but not grumpy or condescending, she is eager but not reckless or dismissive, and there is almost no expected friction between them. Thank goodness. Much like the senior guy coming out of the retirement stereotype, I’m content to leave behind these types of tropes that we’ve seen many times before.

Am I alone?

Sam Fisher isn’t voiced by Michael Ironside, and yes, that’s both disappointing and annoying, even though I knew that would happen. Liev Schreiber (Ray Donovan, Spotlight) does the only thing you can do when trying to take the place of an icon: he gives a perfectly decent performance as the older Sam Fisher. It’s subdued and feels a bit flat, but of course it is: it lacks the unique gravel gravitas that Ironside brought to each of Fisher’s lines in the games.

Schreiber doesn’t try to duplicate or reinvent him, he just does the role brilliantly, which is all anyone other than Michael Ironside could do here.

The plot is quite slim, which again is fine, and with eight compact episodes there’s simply no time or even need for more. The good guys have recovered some of the data, but they don’t know what it means, the bad guys want it back and are hunting it down with an army of one-time killers, and a mysterious conspiracy hangs over the whole thing.

The series does a good job of keeping all the details of the evil plan an intriguing mystery for most of the series, although the eventual reveal of the bad guys’ machinations feels like something a minor James Bond villain would have prepared. It’s also disappointing that Fisher has absolutely nothing to do in the final confrontation, since it’s really McKenna’s story to end, not Sam’s.

But it’s not a bad show at all. The game is fast-paced, lean, and while there isn’t as much stealth as I expected, the action is gritty, solid, and quite intense. Deathwatch doesn’t give us the Splinter Cell we expected, especially without Ironside, but no show could really do that because let’s face it: what we really want is a fresh game, not a series. We don’t just want to watch Sam Fisher, we want to be him again.