Idris Elba’s new TV thriller is supremely daft but wildly entertaining

When Apple TV announced the second season of Hijack, the next reasonable question was, could Sam Nelson realistically chance upon another plane hijacking? Hasn’t he been put off air travel entirely?

No and yes, because the second season is a train hijacking on the Berlin U-Bahn underground, and Sam (Idris Elba) takes a flight to get to the German capital.

In some ways, this is Hijack as it was first envisioned: writer George Kay’s inspiration for the thriller came while he was stuck in the Eurostar tunnel, musing on how the passengers would cope in a crisis.

I’m not going out on a limb in saying the first season of Hijack was supremely daft. There was a gimmicky real-time element, Sam boarded the plane with no possessions and nothing to do (birthing a whole discourse about ‘rawdogging’ flights) and then at the end of a bloated seven-part run, he helped to land the plane.

If the first season of Hijack was the embodiment of a breezy, upbeat ingénue, this second is a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, powered by raw grit and resentment. 

Gone is the nonchalant smile Elba’s corporate negotiator boarded the KA29 flight with. Instead, he arrives on that Berlin platform a bag of nerves, with what could be a reasonable case of PTSD when it comes to using public transport. 

From here, I’ll try to speak as obliquely as possible, for there are significant twists we would not want to spoil.

This time – the trailer revealed this, so I don’t think I’m giving too much away – Elba is closely involved in the chaos, and not in a Superman sort of way. It’s a magnetic prospect because Elba is even more interesting to watch when he’s playing the anti-hero – think of his crooked pedigree as a small-specs-wearing drug kingpin in The Wire.

So what has happened since we last saw Sam emerge, battered but unbeaten, from that plane? There are morsels of information about his small-time celebrity (a Financial Times article on the plane drama) and some maybe repercussions for those involved (an inquest). 

That doesn’t explain why Sam is acting so shifty, but we soon learn he’s suffered a severe personal loss. There are some issues with this. If, like me, the entire first series of Hijack is a bit of a blur in the rearview mirror, you’ll be scratching your head to try and remember whether this tragedy happened in that final London tarmac scramble.

It didn’t, but it is still linked to the hijacking of the Kingdom Airlines flight, because Sam believes the same people who commandeered the cockpit also killed his loved one. Not that they’ve faced the consequences, so Sam wants answers.

That’s how the show engineers lighting to strike twice, because this second time, Sam is the lightning rod.

Running parallel to the drama underground is the official response team on terra firma, with a superb set of additions, including Christiane Paul as a steely police chief who’s put in charge of listening to Sam’s Taken-style monologues on the train radio. 

She’s aided in Berlin tube HQ by Toby Jones – who, unsurprisingly, elevates proceedings – as enigmatic MI5 operative Peter Faber. He materialises to help, with some fairly obvious ulterior motives in tow. It’s not just Faber. You soon realise that everybody is up to something or other. 

There’s also a returning cast from the first season. Max Beesley and Archie Panjabi’s establishment figures are fire-fighting back in London, under the pretence of having things to do, while Sam’s ex-wife, Marsha (Christine Adams), is holed up in a remote woodland cabin. More could have been done to make their cutaways gel with the high-stakes drama in Berlin.

But it’s worth commending the sharpening of those stakes. A train doesn’t have the same in-built frights of a plane, so it takes more thought. With one eye on the (over-stretched) eight-episode runtime, I kept wondering how they would keep it up. Yet the show finds a way.

They’ve also managed to fix the hammy bit-part player problem of the plane, with a more realistic buffet of train passengers. These include a Brits abroad school trip, a former colleague of Sam’s, a gormless train driver and a granola bike dude who probably frequents Berghain.

Some issues do remain. That outsized runtime. And despite all the machinations behind the scenes to make it make sense, this is still a preposterous premise with some truly arch characters. 

But it’s just as ludicrous as it is an unpretentious good time. Like the first, there will be crowds of viewers waiting to push off the platform and board this tube carriage.

The first episode of Hijack season two is available to stream on Apple TV.

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