Joining iconic tough guys like John McClane and Jack Bauer in the Unlucky Action Hall Of Fame, Idris Elba’s Sam Nelson is back for the promise of another really bad day. In 2023, the first season of Hijack was a hit for Apple TV and garnered an Emmy nomination for the Wire star who was once rumored to be the next James Bond. It’s a great part for Elba, who plays a mix of worry and heroism well. He can sell the kind of guy who’s thinking through all the options and potential scenarios in a moment of serious tension. Elba finds notes of vulnerability in characters like John Luther that make them more interesting than the stoic superhero route that sinks similar projects. He’s the main reason the first season was a hit, and he’s the main one a second season exists.
But should it? Hijack feels like a great example of something that arguably should have stayed a one-hit wonder, at least on paper. How do you get Sam Nelson into another international drama? Sure, audiences looked the other way when 24 did it over multiple seasons, but even that became a bit of a punchline. It turns out that the way to get around Sam Nelson being involved in a second hijacking is to make him an active participant in it. The twist ending of the season premiere of Hijack answers how the show is going to get Sam into another bad day: by making him the architect of it.
Most of “Signal” is a bit of a fake out, leading viewers to believe that Sam Nelson happened to board a Berlin train on the same day that terrorists planned to take all of its passengers hostage. Elba plays Sam as suspicious of something happening on the train from the minute we see him, although that could be because of the trauma related to the emotional wounds from the hijacking two years ago (or what the twist ending reveals he was planning to do). The writers cleverly plant an acquaintance, Mei Tan (Jasmine Bayes), in Sam’s path that allows for a lot of expository dialogue as she asks things like “What are you doing in Berlin?” It seems, at least at first, like he’s headed to the British Embassy, where he has a meeting scheduled related to the British Department of Justice.
While Sam tries to avoid his chatty old colleague, the episode cuts to the Embassy, the mission control center for the train system, the terrorists initiating the plan, and even once to Sam’s old wife Marsha (Christine Adams), who appears in her one scene to be way off the grid and avoiding all contact. Does she know what Sam’s doing today?
Importantly, we witness two key figures in the plan. First, there’s a man disguised as a construction worker who switches the train track so the vehicle goes down a closed one to a remote place off the grid. More importantly, there’s the anxious conductor Otto (Christian Näthe), who almost scuttles the plan with a panicked phone call but ultimately goes through with it, speeding up the train as it goes off to its stranded destination.
The writers also sketch some passengers who will clearly become a part of the fabric of the season as hostages or possibly even accessories. Primarily, there’s a group of British students, including an awkward young man named George who’s clearly a bit scared of public transportation, crowds, or both. There’s also, at first, a man in a hoodie with a red backpack who seems suspicious. Of course, it’s a fake out, and the thing to take away here may be that a few of the students see Sam racially profiling an innocent person. It might make them less likely to trust him in the future.
All of this tension that hints at Sam Nelson being forced into a hero role again is a façade, at least for now. Once Otto has taken the train off its designated route, Sam uses what looks like a key to get into the locked conductor booth. He tells Otto, “I took care of the police.” It turns out he was using the racial profiling of the Urdu-speaking man to get law enforcement off the train. “Otto, listen to me,” he says. “I’m hijacking this train.”
Is Sam in a sort of Jigsaw Killer situation, forced to do this for a greater good? Probably. It sure seems possible he was placing pieces on the chessboard before Otto stopped the train. Just think of all of those shots of him looking nervously around the cars, scoping out potential threats to his plan, or his obvious annoyance at the encounter with Mei Tan and that moment when it looks like he might not get on the train with her. Was he having second thoughts?
As long as we’re on practical questions, why speed up the train? Sure, it increases tension in the moment when it looks like the guy hand-cranking the track is gonna end up like Dennis Hopper at the end of Speed, but does it really make sense? It only ups terror in the passengers, likely death to your collaborator, and raises red flags back at the control center. Although maybe Otto just panicked. He seems like a panicky guy.
The bigger question is: Will viewers go along with a show that seemed about as self-contained as can be now that its setup appears to have shifted? The key word there is “appears.” There is no way that Sam Nelson is now the bad guy. But at least creators George Kay and Jim Field Smith aren’t just running it back and setting a team of terrorists on poor Sam again. Instead, they’re playing with the formula in a way that effectively changes expectations. Let’s see if that pays off.
Stray observations
- • There’s a musical connection between the seasons. The first opened with the sounds of “Trouble Blues” by Sam Cooke, while the second kicked off with the great “Lost And Lookin’” by the same legend. Sam clearly likes Sam.
- • Jack Bauer and John McClane are the most notorious examples of unlucky-hero dudes, but an even better example of stretching a one-off concept may be the fact that Fox ran a show called Prison Break for multiple seasons.
- • The first season of Hijack had some issues with suspension of disbelief, but its craft (tight editing, effective cinematography) was hard to scoff at with . That appears to be the case again as this episode moves at an excellent pace, coming in relatively short compared to bloated streaming shows and introducing us to the players and four settings—train, embassy, control center, Marsha’s cabin—that will probably shape the season. Let’s hope the pace continues or the questions about whether or not this sophomore outing justifies its existence will only grow louder.
Brian Tallerico is a contributor to The A.V. Club.