Helen Archer | On 30, Jul 2024

The 2018 6-part dramatisation of the Waco siege was quietly subversive. Though a story told and retold in documentary after documentary, to see it played out as a dramatisation – especially the final, fiery attack on the compound, which left 76 dead, including over 20 children – was an effective way of conveying the sheer terror inflicted upon its inhabitants.

It also boasted a fairly impressive cast. Taylor Kitsch took the role of David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians, while Michael Shannon played Gary Noesner, the FBI hostage negotiator with a crisis of conscience. He reprises that role in The Aftermath, a 5-part addendum by the same creators, brothers Drew Dowdle and John Erick Dowdle. While the first series was a fairly linear affair, this one weaves together the past, present and future of that particular moment in domestic American history.

Based on the book A Place Called Waco: A Survivor’s Story, by David Thibodeau and Leon Whiteson, it tells a less well-trodden tale than that of the siege itself.

Acting as both a prequel and a sequel, the series works with three separate yet interconnected strands – the young Koresh’s takeover of the cult from Lois Roden (J Smith-Cameron); the court case of five of the surviving Branch Davidians, who were charged with the voluntary manslaughter of four FBI agents killed during the siege; and the preparations, during that trial, for the Oklahoma bombing, via the embedding of an informant in the camp of the organisers. If it sounds like a lot to cover over five episodes, that’s because it is: each individual strand could probably be given its own series. That it never seems rushed is in itself something of an achievement.

The court case is told in parallel with the prequel, the backstory of the five accused filled in as they meet Koresh (Keean Johnson) – then going by his birth name Vernon Howell – and are persuaded to move to the compound. Defended in court by Dan Cogdell (Giovanni Ribisi), they want their story – and that of the violent government incursion which took so many of their friends and loved-ones lives – to be told, but are faced with the full force of the FBI’s efforts to vilify them. Portrayed neither as victims nor perpetrators – and while coming to terms with the various dangers they unwittingly put their families in – it is a refreshingly nuanced portrayal on the Branch Davidians.

The Noesner strand is the outlier, and yet it somehow holds the two other parts together. Abbey Lee plays Carole Howe, the informant who infiltrated the militant white separatist camp in Elohim City, Oklahoma, in an attempt to pass information about their plans to the ATF. Because the viewer knows what is coming – the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building, on the second anniversary of the end of the Waco siege, killing 168 people – it lacks some tension, but Howe’s story is an intrinsic part of the continuum of events which began in 1992 with the catastrophic standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

This all may sound like something purely for the Waco obsessives out there, but it’s also a series which is fairly engrossing in and of itself. While not without its faults – some exposition is a little clumsy, and certain characters feel a little tacked-on – it’s hard not to feel a certain sense of seriousness surrounding it. The events at Waco may still divide opinion, but Aftermath tells a story that feels ever-more prescient as the years go on.

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