Summary
A notch above Hijack Season 2’s tame premiere, “Control” is a nice exercise in tension-building crisis management, as two competent sides take part in a pitched battle.
If you were worried about Hijack Season 2, and there was reason to be given its relatively tame premiere, then Episode 2, “Control”, should hopefully provide a nice corrective. Some of the fundamental issues are still baked in — it’s really obvious Sam isn’t going to cross any significant moral lines, and a train is still a much less interesting setting than a plane — but the tension is ratcheted up a fair amount here, and some stellar cinematography helps to give even relatively mundane scenes a real sense of quality.
The secret, I think, is competency. This episode gives us a clearer sense of who Sam’s up against in the short term, and they’re people in believably difficult positions making the decisions that seem to make the most sense at the time. Too often, drama is born of sheer idiocy, and I’m glad that Hijack is resisting the impulse to have its more authoritarian figures — public transport executives, police, special forces, etc. — be cartoonishly stupid. That helps to make the core conflict a lot more engaging, since either side can feasibly outsmart the other at any moment.
Let me lay it out this way. On Wagon 2600, which is now technically missing after it disappeared into some maintenance tunnels in the premiere, we have Sam and his reluctant ally, Otto. Sam finally makes his demands clear in “Control”. He wants the German police to locate John Bailey-Brown (the villain from the first season), whom he believes is in Germany, and he’s very clear that if this doesn’t happen, people will die. He’s also very careful not to say that he’ll personally harm any of the 200 passengers aboard, just that they’ll be in danger, a distinction that nobody comments on.
In the Network Control Centre, we have Clara, who is only two weeks into the job, and then eventually Chief of Police Ada Winter, and Peter Faber, a British intelligence agent played by Toby Jones. Towards the end of the hour, Olivia, who has become suspicious after Sam stood her up at the meeting with the man from the Federal Office of Justice and after hearing about U-Bahn delays on account of a terror incident that involves a British assailant, turns up to identify Sam, giving the authorities a bit of a leg-up in the negotiations.
Not that this makes a great deal of difference. Sam’s resolute in his mission, and is willing to let the idea that he might start killing people fester, obviously hoping that nobody calls his bluff. The bulk of Hijack Season 2, Episode 2 revolves around a stalemate, with Sam’s train blocked by another locomotive that Winter and co. are pretending has broken down and needs maintenance before it can be moved. During the delay, both sides try to learn more about what’s happening to strengthen their respective positions; Winter turns to Faber, while Sam and Otto venture into a platform control room to get eyes on the platform and the stuck train.
Predictably, there’s a wild card — the passengers. We still aren’t very familiar with any of the individuals on the train, but “Control” shunts one to the forefront. His name is Freddie, and he’s the first to have enough of Otto’s obvious delaying tactics. When he goes to confront him, though, he overhears Winter on the radio talking about hostages, forcing Sam to drag him inside and rope him into the plan.
This season could stand to include more of Sam actually negotiating. There’s a bit earlier on where he helps to calm down a situation involving the passengers becoming suspicious of Otto, but he’s mostly confined to the cockpit, and his radio conversations with Clara and Winter mainly just see him reiterating the same thing. It’s the same with Freddie, to whom he straps a briefcase he brought with him and instructs to walk onto the next platform. The idea is to threaten Winter into moving the train by implying that the briefcase contains a bomb. But Sam isn’t doing anything subtle or clever here; he’s just using fear to grease the wheels.
The big climax of the episode is beautifully shot and very effectively tense, with GSG9 — German Special Forces — waiting to descend on Freddie, Sam counting down, and Winter calling his bluff. The whole thing is complicated by the sudden, unexpected arrival of a random station manager, and it works like gangbusters in the moment. But it’s also a bit undermined by the fact that I — and I assume everyone watching — don’t believe for a moment that there’s a bomb in the case. Even though Sam closes out with the line, “I didn’t want to have to do this,” followed by all the station cameras going off to imply something has been detonated, there’s simply no way. So, that sucks.
But it’s a means to an end. Ultimately, Hijack Season 2 comes alive a bit in Episode 2, which is a bit more than can be said for the premiere, proving the show still has the visual and suspense-building chops to justify this second outing, even though it didn’t feel all that necessary. Can it sustain that tension across another six episodes, though? That remains to be seen.
