Summary
Hijack is deliberately inscrutable to kick off Season 2, keeping its cards very close to its chest in “Signal”. It isn’t until the very end of the episode that the more novel hook of the sequel is revealed.
Let’s be clear — the premiere of Hijack Season 2 only works because it’s called Hijack and, after the first season, we know what to expect. It very much has the swagger of a show with an established audience with a cemented set of expectations, because “Signal” offers up very little to go on, and yet the tension is high regardless. And then a well-timed last-minute reveal tips everything on its head. It’s a solid ending to an otherwise pretty rote and deliberately inscrutable Episode 1.
We’re two years after the hijacking of Flight KA29 in Season 1. Sam and Olivia are supposed to be attending a meeting with a man from the Federal Office of Justice, for reasons that are explained later in the episode, but that I may as well reveal now, since they underpin most of what we see. Sam is looking for the man behind the Kingdom hijacking, and seems to be pretty close, with CCTV stills picturing a man photographed at Hamburg border control who is Sam’s prime suspect. But it’s Olivia who shares this information, since Sam is elsewhere.
Sam is on the subway. This is the hook of Season 2 — a Berlin subway train is hijacked, though most of “Signal” is about the build-up to that event, as we see snippets from multiple perspectives that help to lend some shape to the event but deliberately leave a lot of questions unanswered.
For instance, the police raid a safehouse and find a circuit board and a photo ID that we subsequently see being flaunted by a man working on the subway tracks, obviously an imposter saboteur. The driver is shaky. There’s an Asian man with a backpack who seems nervous. You get the idea.
This all works because we know the hijack is coming, which means every new passenger who gets onboard — including a woman named Mei Tan whom Sam cursorily knows but clearly can’t be bothered talking to, and a bunch of kids on a school trip, including a particularly nervy student named George — is both a potential hijacker and a potential victim. The lack of expositional dialogue helps to streamline the premiere a lot, even though it can become a bit frustrating simply because of how obvious the moving parts are.
Sam’s also in a bad mood. He’s surly and unsociable and constantly scanning around in a state of heightened paranoia. I think Hijack Season 2, Episode 1 overplays its hand a bit here. There’s a major twist at the end, which we’ll get to, but I saw it coming because of how obviously in-the-know Sam is about what’s happening, and how clearly out-of-character he’s being. We’re supposed to assume that his demeanour is an outgrowth of his experiences in Season 1, which is fair enough, but it’s a bit overdone and deliberate for that, and there are a couple of other clues as well.
One is the moment when Sam directs the police to a shifty-looking Asian guy who’s nervously carrying a big backpack. The police drag him off the train, which subsequently leaves the platform, but when he’s searched, he isn’t carrying anything of concern. So, our option here is that Sam is now so paranoid that he has taken to racial profiling, or that something else is going on. It’s obviously the latter.
We might as well talk about the twist, then. At the end of “Signal”, Sam bursts into the cockpit — is it still called a cockpit on a train? — to accost the driver, Otto, for pushing the locomotive much faster than he needed to. Otto was supposed to be replaced at a station after Sam tipped someone off that he looked a little unstable — he was earlier calling the guy in the tunnels, Marko, claiming he “can’t do it” — but he stayed the course, locking the train doors and speeding out of the station when he was supposed to stop. It seems like he’s committed to his mission and that Sam is thwarting him.
But! Sam essentially tells him to suck it up and introduces himself as the guy who’s hijacking the train. All his previous behaviour — like pointing the finger at the Asian guy to draw the police away — was part of his master plan. But what’s he actually up to? Well, that’s for subsequent episodes to figure out. But it’s a pretty cool way to end the premiere.
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