Across eight episodes, Splinter Cell: Deathwatch tells the closest thing we’ve had to an original Splinter Cell story since 2013’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist. It’s appropriately on-brand in its global scope and focus on hot-button issues like renewable energy, but it’s also couched in pretty personal terms, with explicit connections to characters last seen way back in 2005’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. That means some of it might be lost on new viewers, and those who have understandably forgotten the events of a video game from 20 years ago, but luckily, I’m on hand to recap the whole thing in comprehensive insider detail.
Speaking of the games, I’ve also provided a more detailed run-down of precisely how Deathwatch is connected to them. The Netflix series is canon and builds directly on familiar events and characters, but I’m obviously not going to clutter all this plot summarization with a bunch of Easter eggs.
Episode 1, “Up from the Grave”
An action-packed, largely exposition-free premiere lays out the essentials of Deathwatch. Some familiar visual signifiers, sound effects, and characters help to situate existing fans in a familiar world, but this is a new story in it. The only Splinter Cell agent we see in full regalia isn’t Sam Fisher, but a new agent named Zinnia McKenna.
McKenna’s on a mission in Vilnius, Lithuania, to retrieve an asset and the “Shetland Files”, though explanatory details are thin on the ground. McKenna sneaks and bludgeons her way into the target building, but finds the asset having been beaten to death with a hammer. The discovery spikes her vitals, implying she knew the dead agent. After pulling his tooth with a pair of pliers, she sets about taking revenge on the whole building, against orders, leaving only the group’s torturer chief, Gunther, and his right-hand woman, Freya, alive.
McKenna escapes, barely, but is injured and stranded behind enemy lines, since 4th Echelon falls victim to a cyber attack and has to go dark. Anna Grimsdottir, the Head of Operations, sends McKenna a set of coordinates via payphone.
The coordinates lead to Suwalki, Poland, where a much older and ponytailed Sam Fisher now lives in rural isolation with a cool dog named Kaiju and some other animals. After hearing on a World News Media broadcast that Diana Shetland, the daughter of his former friend turned betrayer Doug Shetland, is now in charge of her father’s company, Displace International, Sam lounges around reading, drinking whiskey, and having flashbacks to his relationship with Doug. His reverie is interrupted by the sudden arrival of McKenna, who’s followed by a group of goggled goons. Fisher kills them all and finally picks up the phone to Grim, asking her where she wants him to take McKenna.
Episode 2, “Dinner First, Talk Later”
A brief cat-and-mouse chase doesn’t last the length of “Dinner First, Talk Later”, which also makes the bold move of killing off what seemed like the Big Bad. Sam Fisher certainly isn’t as spry as he used to be — peep the detail of him barely being able to remember the code to his safehouse — but he can still get about when needs must.
Fisher takes a still-unconscious McKenna to a safehouse in Gdansk, Poland, while Gunther and his associates burn Fisher’s farm to the ground and pursue him using hijacked Echelon technology. Fisher baits them to a cafe and leads them on a merry dance through the streets while he picks them off, eventually coming face-to-face with the supposed ringleader. Surprisingly, Fisher thumbs out one of his eyes and stabs him to death.
When Sam returns to the safehouse and asks McKenna why the entire Eastern Bloc seems to be after her, she replies by implying they’re really after the tooth she extracted from the asset in Lithuania. Since Grim had mentioned the Shetland Files, this presumably connects to whatever is going on with Displace International. The only development we get in this regard is Diana pooling her shares with her half-brother, who has just turned 21, to oust the board and assume full control of the company. Something tells me her plans to pivot the Private Military Company into renewable energy aren’t entirely above-board.
Episode 3, “Welcome to the 4th Echelon”
A slower-paced installment sheds a bit more light on proceedings while also introducing a new character and giving Grim a bit more to do. It shouldn’t take a genius to work out that Displace International has been pulling the strings of the group chasing Fisher and McKenna, but it’s nice to have a clearer sense of what they’re after.
There’s something fishy going on with their green energy contracts. This is explained to Fisher by McKenna, who takes him to the home of Lukas Kersetz, a CIA plant inside Displace, to whom the tooth McKenna is carrying around once belonged. As surmised, they were in a relationship that violated professional boundaries. The tooth contains half of a file damning Displace, the other being hidden inside Lukas’s wristwatch, so Sam has to sneak through his apartment, which is full of Displace’s goons, in order to retrieve it.
In the meantime, Grim travels to Canada to recruit a hacker named Thunder, who can help them get the 4th Echelon network back online. He eventually agrees to accompany Grim and fixes the system in about five minutes. When he first meets Fisher over video call, though, he shows off about knowing his Polish cover name, which tips Fisher off that the bad guys must know it too. This Thunder guy’s useful even when he isn’t trying to be.
Elsewhere, Diana takes the stage at a climate conference as a keynote speaker and reveals her grand plans for Xanadu, a man-made, self-sufficient island powered exclusively by renewable energy. The precise way in which this fits into what’s going on with Fisher and McKenna is yet to be revealed, but it likely isn’t anything good.
Episode 4, “Scars of Bagram”
It has taken half the season, but in Episode 4, Fisher and McKenna finally make it back to 4th Echelon after a hairy chase sequence. McKenna still won’t open up to Fisher, though, which is a shame, since his past with the Shetlands, which is teased a bit more here, is clearly integral to what’s going on.
“Scars of Bagram” is so-called thanks to a flashback to Bagram, Afghanistan, which finds Fisher and Doug Shetland having a pretty serious argument about what’s going on behind enemy lines. Fisher’s past with Doug and his daughter is complicated and still largely unclear. In the present day, Displace International has ostensibly shut down its subsidiary PMC, Black Arrow, but they’re getting mercenaries from somewhere. Diana’s press tour after the Xanadu announcement has made her a bit of a celebrity, but it’s clear she’s hiding something.
Thanks to Thunder, who manages to find a code split between Lukas’s tooth and his wristwatch, which is unlocked by the waveform of The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame”, 4th Echelon discovers that Diana is hiding the financial ledgers behind Xanadu, which is actually deeply in the red. However, if she gets her sovereign nation-state off the ground, there won’t be any extradition laws to get her back. There are also many more encrypted files, including one titled “Green Gables”, which clearly means something to Sam. However, the file needs to be combined with the original device to be accessed, and the original device is Diana’s phone, which will need to be stolen from her next public engagement in Hamburg, Germany.
The episode ends with another brief flashback showing that Sam sent Diana a book when she was a child — Anne of Green Gables.
(L to R) Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Zinnia McKenna, Liev Schreiber as Sam Fisher, Janet Varney as Anna Grimsdottir and Joel Oulette as Thunder in Splinter Cell: Deathwatch. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025
Episode 5, “Simple As That”
Splinter Cell: Deathwatch really feels like it’s on-mission in Episode 5, even though it isn’t quite Splinter Cell action as you might want it. But Fisher — now with a haircut, looking exactly like Sean Connery in The Rock — and McKenna are both live in the field, attempting to swap Diana Shetland’s phone with a decoy so that they can unlock the Green Gables file.
McKenna poses as a journalist and Fisher as her driver, giving them both separate tasks to accomplish. When Diana’s useless assistant leaves her phone charging in her room, Fisher has to race him to steal it, while McKenna ends up being occupied by Charlie, who almost sees through her cover. We also learn that Gunther is alive, albeit wearing an eyepatch, and he has magically confirmed that Fisher is in the building (despite 4th Echelon messing with the CCTV feeds).
The phone swap is successful, but Zinnia goes after Gunther alone and ends up getting caught and kidnapped, which Fisher witnesses just as she’s being dragged away. We also get treated to another flashback here that reveals Fisher testified against Douglas Shetland in a military tribunal that ended in his dishonorable discharge. Shetland was getting carried away in Bagram and on other operations, endangering the lives of other personnel. The episode also opens with Freya sabotaging the engine room of a Russian warship, so something else is clearly afoot.
Episode 6, “The Man is the Mission”
The upside of McKenna getting captured in the previous episode is that it prompts Sam Fisher to go off the grid and get back in the field for real. The downside is that it reveals he’s probably a bit too old to be doing that.
The clever twist of this episode is that it makes out Fisher is on his way to rescue McKenna, who is being tortured by Gunther, but he’s really after Diana. After diving around like he’s in a John Woo movie, he finally finds her, while McKenna is left to facilitate her own escape and deal with Gunther. She does so by melting his head in a furnace and sending a picture to Freya, who is still undercover aboard the Lazarev, telling her she’s next.
In the meantime, we get a bit more explanation about what Diana and Charlie are up to. The Green Gables file contains thousands of redacted documents, most pertaining to the development of renewable energy technologies. Most of those technologies, including Xanadu’s proprietary wave generators, were tested at a tech firm in Hamburg called Green-X. After Green-X’s CEO, Hans Klimt, criticised Diana and her approach to Xanadu publicly, the lab burned down with him inside it, which is a bit suspicious, to say the least.
A shape is beginning to emerge, with the Shetlands potentially faking the viability of their technologies to sell to the highest bidder, but there’s still plenty left to uncover in the final two episodes.
Episode 7, “Chaos Theory, Part 1”
Aptly titled, the penultimate episode of Splinter Cell: Deathwatch opens with another flashback sequence, this one reworking a classic scene from Chaos Theory in which Fisher kills his former friend, Doug Shetland. Shetland’s plan for global destabilization had become a little untenable for the morally inflexible Fisher. Several of the lines are lifted wholesale from the game, with some minor changes.
Back in the present day, Fisher has his stand-off with Diana, who is still pretty upset about the fact her godfather killed her father. She describes Xanadu as a “Hail Mary” to “preserve her father’s legacy”, but doesn’t offer any more clarification than that. She and Fisher part ways, but it’s a nice touch to see her being visibly rattled in the elevator afterward.
Meanwhile, Thunder has decrypted another Green Gables file. This one is a blueprint for the Trans-European Natural Gas Terminal in Greifswald, Germany, a strategic partnership between Russia and the rest of Europe, supplying all of Western Europe with cheap energy. By the principles of classic cowboy economics, Diana is either planning to buy it out or blow it up. McKenna, who has been picked up by Fisher, figures out which. Freya is aboard the Lazarev, a fluid hydrogen transporter ship — in other words, a floating bomb. If Diana blows up the terminal, energy prices will soar, and she’ll be uniquely positioned to bail Europe out of a crisis. That’s what Xanadu is.
Fisher and McKenna suit up. They need to stop the ship before it reaches the terminal.
Episode 8, “Chaos Theory, Part 2”
In the finale of Splinter Cell: Deathwatch — I’ve written a more detailed explanation of the ending if you’re interested — McKenna and Fisher board the Lazarev, which is now an eerily quiet ghost ship. Everyone aboard is dead, and the ship is still in motion, so Sam heads to the engine room while McKenna rushes to the bridge, both with the intention of stopping the vessel dead in its tracks.
In the engine room, Fisher triggers the booby trap that Freya left way back in Episode 5, so that option’s out. McKenna, meanwhile, heads to the bridge, but is immediately ambushed by Freya, setting up her second Big Bad showdown. In a violent confrontation McKenna almost beats Freya to death, but she gets up like a zombie to set off a grenade that kills her and destroys the bridge, preventing Fourth Echelon from taking control of the ship remotely.
Elsewhere, Diana arrives on Xanadu to display the island to all of Europe’s leaders and brightest minds, pitching it as a fully scalable solution to renewable energy. Predictably, the flaw in her master plan turns out to be her own half-brother, Charlie, who had already hacked into the Lazarev‘s systems before Fisher and McKenna arrives. He has a new destination for the ship — Xanadu itself. Wiping out half of Europe’s political leadership will create a power vacuum that he can slip right into. It’s a version of Diana’s plan, but a more extreme, sudden, and merciless one.
The boldest aspect of Splinter Cell: Deathwatch‘s ending is that Charlie’s plan is successful. Xanadu is destroyed, and Diana is killed in the explosion. Fisher and McKenna barely make it off the Lazarev. Fourth Echelon has to take its medicine; even the president has nothing to say. As he almost drowns, Fisher has another flashback to Doug. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he still feels a kinship with him, and a responsibility to Diana. He and Kaiju attend her funeral from a distance, and just when it seems like Charlie has gotten his way, the series ends with Fisher emerging from the dark and, presumably, shooting Charlie to death.
