Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is a 2025 adult animated action series based on the Splinter Cell video games created by Ubisoft, and released for Netflix. The series was developed by Derek Kolstad, who also writes some episodes, and stars Liev Schreiber, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Janet Varney.
Legendary Black-Ops agent Sam Fisher (Schreiber) is called back into the field for a dangerous new mission with global stakes and personal implications that has him team up with a new Splinter Cell agent, Zinnia McKenna (Howell-Baptiste), and once again work with his old colleague Anna Grimsdottir (Varney), who is now the head of Fourth Echelon.
The series released on October 14, 2025. Kolstad said in an IGN Fan Fest video
that a second season is in pre-production the next day.
Previews: Trailer
Splinter Cell: Deathwatch includes examples of the following:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The first season seems to take place in 2026, the year after it premiered, since Diana attends COP 31, which is scheduled for 2026.
- Advertising by Association: The trailer boasts the series as being “from the writer of the John Wick franchise”.
- Bash Brothers: After saving her life from being snuffed out by heavily-armed mercenaries hunting her down, Fisher and McKenna operate as steadfast partners while delving deeper into the conspiracy surrounding Diana Shetland, all while having each other's backs during various firefights against the paramilitary muscle under Shetland's employ.
- Bloodier and Gorier: The Splinter Cell series is no stranger to violence given the amount of lethality that escalated as it went along, but Fisher and McKenna have absolutely zero mercy for their foes, and there's a Cruel and Unusual Death slipped in here or there such as one enemy being set on fire. Broken limbs, knives into the skull, bashing someone's face in with a fire extinguisher - it's easily the bloodiest canonical entry of them all.
- Cain and Abel: Charlie Shetland has his older sister Diana killed with her own plan to establish himself as the true Big Bad of the story, though he doesn't outlive her long.
- Continuity Nod:
- In the safehouse Sam brings McKenna to, the armory has karambits on the wall, like the kind Sam used as a melee weapon in Splinter Cell: Blacklist.
- The opening of the two-parter finale has a recreation of the penultimate mission of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, with the episode even sharing the title's name.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Xanadu project promoted by the Shetlands is perfectly respectable on the fact of it (artificial islands to generate clean and renewable wind, wave and solar power), but they cherry-picked their peer reviewers for the technology, then disappeared them before anyone could have second thoughts and express reservations on the project's cost-effectiveness. And when it turned out that the project isn't cost effective, Diana came up with a plot to crash an LNG tanker into a critical hub in Europe's power grid, creating a massive drop in the continental energy supply that only Xanadu can replace on short notice to get back in the black. And then as a second example, her brother Charlie altered the LNG tanker plan so that it would instead crash into the prototype Xanadu platform, killing Diana so he can take over the company.
- Dark Action Girl: Freya Niemeyer, a blonde German mercenary who is absolutely coldblooded in her efforts to take out McKenna and Fisher before they can escape the region with Shetland's data. Freya also stands as the Final Boss of the first season, throwing down against McKenna in a brutal Final Battle over control of the Lazarev.
- Designated Girl Fight: McKenna and Freya have one of these at the climax. The usual Cat Fight tropes are averted though, with the two opening the fight shooting at each other, switching to knives (and anything else in the room) when they run out of ammo.
- Deuteragonist: Both Sam Fisher and Zinnia McKenna share the protagonist role in equal measure.
- Downer Ending: Things aren't looking good for the world by the end of the series. Sam and McKenna fail to stop the Lazarev, and the only reason Diana doesn't succeed in crashing it - and its fluid hydrogen cargo - into Greifswald and causing a massive energy crisis is Charlie hacking it so he can crash it into Xanadu instead. Hundreds of people, including several world leaders, are dead, with the implication that the world's going to be thrown into chaos that Charlie intends to exploit for his own gain, though Sam assassinates him before he can get going with that.
- Eviler than Thou: Charlie turns out to be this for his sister Diana, having manipulated things so she gets killed, and he gets the fortune and power.
- In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It: As always, the series, as seen in the trailer, is marketed as Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Deathwatch.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: Just when it looks like Charlie has gotten away with everything, relaxing in his office, Fisher shows up and puts two bullets into him.
- MacGuffin: As laid out by Sam, the “entire Eastern Bloc” is tracking down McKenna due to her possession of a tooth ripped out of the head of her dead lover, which turns out to be the key necessary for unlocking a wristwatch filled with data detailing all of the Shetland Family's illicit dealings.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: McKenna is the Red Oni to Fisher's Blue. Where as McKenna is a younger, wrathful Fourth Echelon field operative who is determined to avenge the death of a loved one, Sam is a comparatively cool-headed veteran agent who tends to reign in McKenna's more self-destructive impulses as a pseudo-Mentor Archetype.
- Spry Old Guy: Sam is indicated to be in his sixties. He's still a highly capable Splinter Cell agent despite being retired for over a decade prior to the events of the show.
- Two-Keyed Lock: A three keyed lock. The Shetland files are stored in a data drive disguised as a false tooth, which can only be read by a customized wristwatch, which can only be decrypted using a specific waveform as key (An MP3 of "Eternal Flame" by the Bangles).
- Visionary Villain: Diana Shetland actually believes in Xanadu's mission of clean energy, if only so she can profit from it. It doesn't help that she had whistleblowers disappeared, and intends to create an energy crisis that only she can solve.