Stream It Or Skip It?

Season 1 of Apple TV‘s Hijack was entertaining as hell, despite being patently absurd at times. One of the reasons, of course, was Idris Elba’s intensity as professional negotiator Sam Nelson. But the other reason was that the show’s creators knew that every episode needed action and some twists, and kept things moving at all times. With the scene shifting from the sky to underground, will the frantic pace of the first season be maintained?

HIJACK SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: The shot fades in and we see Sam Nelson (Idris Elba) standing outside a train station in Berlin. Snow flies around.

The Gist:  Sam is in Berlin to meet with Olivia Thatcher (Clare-Hope Ashitey) at the British Embassy. She has called in a rep of Germany’s Federal Office of Justice because Sam feels he’s found evidence of who orchestrated the hijacking of Kingdom Airlines flight KA29 two years ago; he was a passenger on that plain and almost singlehandedly thwarted it.

He’s about to board U5 train on the U-bahn, which is Berlin’s subway system, but he sees something suspicious. He’s a bit distracted, though, by Mei Tan (Jasmine Bayes), a woman he met at a security convention after the hijacking. But he tries to keep an eye on a man with a huge backpack.

In the meantime, Berlin police chief Winter (Dejan Bućin) and a group of officers bust into an apartment; the person who was there is gone, but it did seem like whoever it was was making explosives, detonators, and a fake U-bahn employee ID. Indeed, we see a man in U-bahn construction gear (Albrecht Schuch) toting a huge bag into the tunnels, just as a shift is ending.

The train’s driver, Otto (Christian Näthe), is visibly nervous as he takes the U5 out, and he calls for a “700” to the control center as he pulls into one of the stations. The operator (Lisa Vicari), who is working her first night shift, finds out that “700” is a “bathroom break”. But what Otto is doing is calling the guy with the tote bag.

Sam gets the police officers riding the train to zero in on the man with the big backpack, getting all three of them off. He also has a platform worker check on Otto, who locked himself in the restroom. The platform worker tells the woman at Control that Otto needs to be replaced at the next station, but when he gets there, Otto locks himself in the driver’s booth and takes off. That’s when Sam gets into the booth and assures Otto that everything’s under control. That’s also when the worker manually diverts the tracks to send the U5 off the screen at the control center.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We’re not sure if Season 2 of Hijack, co-created by Jim Field Smith and George Kay, will be real time like the first season was, but it still reminds us a lot of  24.

Our Take: Smith, who directed the first episode of Hijack Season 2, and Guy Bolton play an interesting switcheroo on the viewers, especially those who watched the action-packed first season. During the entire first episode, we were a bit cynical about the goings-on, thinking that this will be almost the same thing that befell Sam Nelson in Season 1, only this time it happens on a commuter train instead of an airliner. The first episode even fakes us out a bit with Sam thinking the young man with the backpack was suspicious.

But it’s all a smokescreen, as we find out at the very end of the episode. Sam is after someone, and it’s related to not only the airliner hijacking but something that’s directly affecting the well-being of his ex-wife, Marsha (Christine Adams), who is isolating herself in the country — or so she thinks.

While we’re busy as viewers just waiting for the train to get hijacked — after all, that’s what the show’s title indicates will happen — we are definitely being misdirected by the goings-on. Elba plays Sam like a guy who has internalized the experience from the KA29 hijacking, thinking that anyone he sees that’s remotely suspicious-looking may be only a few minutes away from putting the train in jeopardy. Even when that turns out to be a false lead, we know that something is brewing between the driver, Otto, and the fake subway construction worker. But what we don’t know is who is setting this whole thing up, and when we do find out, it’s a pretty damn good twist.

Now we have to find out the why. And, given the tightly-paced, if not sometimes absurd, action of the first season, we get the feeling that Smith and his writers have a lot of the same planed for Season 2, which is actually one episode longer than the first.

Performance Worth Watching: Idris Elba has basically mastered the everyman action star trope, and all of what he’s learned over the years is what we see in Sam Nelson.

Sex And Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Sam tells Otto exactly why he was able to get into the driver’s booth.

Sleeper Star: One of the holdovers from Season 1 is Archie Panjabi as Zahra Gahfoor, and we’re looking forward to seeing her get involved here.

Most Pilot-y Line: When one of the new operator’s colleagues tells her, “Nothing ever happens on the U5,” you know that something is about to happen.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Things take a little while to develop in the first episode of Hijack‘s second season. But once we learned exactly what was going on, we were locked back into what we expect to be a fast-paced season, with the usual excellent performance from Idris Elba.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.