‘Hijack’ Season 2 Review: Idris Elba Trades Planes for the Berlin Subway (Apple TV)

Thrillers about men who can single-handedly resolve a hostage situation share a peculiar trait. If those men are police officers, detectives, soldiers, spies, or professional negotiators, there is no real problem in seeing them return, again and again, to similar scenarios. After all, that is their job—or at least it plausibly could be. That is essentially what happens to John McClane (Bruce Willis) throughout the Die Hard saga, among other specialists in this particular brand of heroics. But what happens when the man who became a hero by resolving such a crisis is just an ordinary guy who does not actually do this for a living? How do you justify a sequel then? Do we really believe that lightning strikes twice, that the same person just happens to stumble into another extreme situation of the same kind? What are the odds?

To solve that little problem, the creators of Hijack found a possible solution for the second season. Not only by moving the action from an airplane to the subway, or by relocating the story to Berlin, but by coming up with a dramatic justification—at least one that holds for a while—to explain how Sam Nelson (Idris Elba), a man who negotiates corporate deals rather than life-or-death crises, might once again end up in this kind of situation. Explaining that justification means revealing something that becomes clear at the end of the first episode, so it will have to wait until later, with proper warning.

Before that, what we see is a visibly troubled Sam in Berlin, still investigating the events of the first season, even though a significant amount of time has passed. Taking the subway one morning, he begins to notice that strange things are happening around him. So much so that when an old acquaintance recognizes him and congratulates him for stopping that airborne hijacking, Sam barely pays attention to her, instead scanning his surroundings suspiciously—even reporting a Middle Eastern immigrant to the police. Paranoia aside, the series makes it clear that something is indeed wrong: the driver, Otto (Christian Näthe), is nervous; suspicious figures roam the tracks; and when Otto goes to the bathroom and tells someone on the phone “I can’t do it,” there is little doubt that Sam has once again boarded the wrong means of transport. Can this really be happening again?

Everyone in charge of Berlin’s underground transportation system seems alert to the problems Otto is causing—everyone except the passengers themselves. Despite delays and unexpected stops, they remain completely absorbed in their own world, seemingly oblivious to what is happening around them. They may well be the least curious and least aware group of commuters in the history of television fiction. And then, at the end of the first episode, the unthinkable twist arrives. SPOILER ALERT: the person hijacking the train turns out to be Sam himself. How is that even possible? Well, there are explanations. Eventually.

That revelation sets up a different kind of situation, and that is what the series proceeds to unravel over the course of eight overly long episodes—a season that probably could have worked better as a feature film. What would drive Sam, an unmistakably decent man, to hijack a subway train full of passengers? Any viewer will immediately sense that something lies beneath the surface, and may think they have figured it out once Sam contacts the control center and issues his very specific demand. But things are not quite that simple. There are not one or two but several dramatic twists—some of them occurring between seasons and revealed here in fragments—that gradually explain why Sam ends up hijacking the subway. At the same time, the series slowly—very slowly—introduces a whole range of other events unfolding in parallel. Or at least, that is what it seems to be doing. END OF SPOILERS.

The second season has even more credibility problems than the first, which already required a generous tolerance for the writers’ imagination but still functioned within its own flexible rules of plausibility. Here, the viewer is constantly questioning things that simply do not work, or that are taken for granted in an arbitrary way. The arrival of Toby Jones at the control center—and his immediate involvement in the investigation, despite no one being quite sure who he is—is just one example. Even more striking is the lack of communication between the people trapped on the train and the outside world. Perhaps in Berlin people do not spend their entire commute glued to their phones, but the series gives the impression that the passengers are always the last to realize what is happening right in front of them. And when the time comes to act, they seem firmly committed to the philosophy of “I would prefer not to.”

Elba remains the solid actor he has always been, but a problem becomes obvious almost immediately. We know his character will never commit a crime or kill anyone, which means that the supposedly risky or novel situation the series presents is, at its core, not really risky at all. And if something terrible does happen during the journey—and yes, of course it does—it is fairly obvious that it will not be Sam’s fault. On top of that, most of the exterior scenes feel forced, starting with Berlin’s transportation control center, staffed by a group of Germans who seem oddly incompetent for a system usually known for its efficiency. A similar issue affects the subplot involving Sam’s ex-wife, Marsha (Christine Adams), whose personal troubles play a key role in the narrative.

There is not much to recommend in this unnecessary sequel to a series that did not really need one. At best, it offers a brief mental trip to Berlin and a ride through its excellent subway system, convincingly recreated here, with stations that closely resemble their real-life counterparts. And there is also the mild interest of watching the actor from The Wire try to navigate a situation that keeps getting more tangled than expected. Beyond that, there is not much else to hold on to.