Summary
Hijack Season 2 continues to benefit from an expanded focus, though “Outage” delivers the best suspense sequence on the train yet.
Honesty is the best policy, or so the saying goes, but I’m not sure Sam Nelson would agree. Throughout Season 2 of Hijack, he has been pretty understandably cagey, all the better to sell the inverted premise of Apple TV+’s claustrophobic thriller. But Episode 5, “Outage”, forces him into a corner where he has to open up, redefining the dynamic on the train and introducing many more variables to consider. Naturally, the more the passengers know, the worse and more erratically they behave. The result is probably the best train-set suspense sequence of the season thus far — rivalled, of course, by Freddie being dropped at the station — and by far the biggest, most explosive complication.
But this all continues to work thanks to the solid groundwork done in expanding the premise. “Outage” continues in that vein, pinging between different characters, locations, and perspectives, so the sequences aboard the locomotive are able to be a bit tighter and more urgent because they’re not dominating the screentime. Sure, virtually all of the good stuff is on the train this week, but we also get development in Beck’s investigation, a bit more from Zahra and O’Farrell, an unlikely team-up between Olivia and Faber, and some encroaching peril revolving around Marsha.
The train, though. As expected, the passengers have had just about enough, and Sam’s willingness to trade the asthmatic baby has allowed some of them to believe in the idea that he’s reasonable. Colin and Lukas think he might agree to let the kids off, which seems fair enough, but several other passengers think they shouldn’t take priority. Instead, they should all just club together and overwhelm the supposedly unarmed hijacker.
While this is going on, Sam deduces that Freddie’s killer, Jess, is in possession of what he presumes to be the detonator for the indeterminate number of bombs under the carriages. He has to try and recover it, but with rebellion fomenting, his plan to cut the power and use the darkness to swipe Jess’s detonator and leg it falls apart. Sam’s chased down and captured. The tables have turned. The passengers now think they’re in control, bursting into the cab to demand that Otto stop the train.
This is where the honesty comes in. Sam has to tell his captors the truth about their predicament, since he knows that if anyone disembarks, they all die. With Otto’s help, he shows them the bombs under the carriages — there turn out to be eight of them, one under every car. And he also gives them a brief rundown of what he’s doing, having been forced to hijack the train by some unseen string-puller so he can strong-arm the German authorities into handing over John Bailey-Brown. For the most part, they get it. But he doesn’t mention anything about Jess still roaming among them.
As it happens, he didn’t need to. Petra and Mei figure that out for themselves, and Petra tries to do something about it by asking a few awkward questions that force Jess to reveal herself. The other passengers snatch her detonator and insist that Otto stop the train, but this arms the bombs. Jess doesn’t have a detonator. Instead, she has a radio that doubles as a timer that she has to reset every 15 minutes with a series of codes in order to prevent the bombs from going off. The sequence of her trying to bargain for the radio back and being persuaded by Sam to read the codes aloud so they can be inputted is very solid, genuinely suspenseful stuff.
But Hijack Season 2, Episode 5 improves even further when one of the codes doesn’t work. The bomb in the rear carriage arms itself and can’t be stopped, so Sam, now free, has to rush all the way to the back of the train to send all of the clueless passengers up to the front. In the process, Petra gets knocked over by the throng, and Sam himself barely makes it as the bomb goes off to conclude the episode.
As a result of this, the convoy carrying John Bailey-Brown had to be halted, so if he’s thinking about an escape attempt, I suppose now would be the time. The rest of “Outage” is devoted to slowly developing the various other threads dangling loose from the core plot, and JBB is one of them, since we don’t quite know who wants him on that train, or why. Sam is operating on orders from someone mysterious, and he seems earnestly clueless about who it might be.
Of course, the suspicion is that it’s the Cheapside Firm, but O’Farrell spends the episode interviewing Stuart Atterton, and while he’s tight-lipped and resigned to his fate as an expendable part of a larger machine, he nonetheless implies that this isn’t a Cheapside job. It might be Olivia and Faber who get to the bottom of it, since the two of them are teaming up to figure out who sent Sam the CCTV footage of JBB arriving in Germany, since that seems to be the lure that was used to get him on the hook.
What we do know, thanks to Beck, is that this is serious business. His report from the bombmaker’s apartment includes a map of potential damage that might be caused by the bombs, and it’s substantial. He’s going after the bombmaker and trying to determine how Sam got in contact with him, which should be a helpful clue. Whoever the mysterious puppeteer is, though, Marsha remains in the crosshairs of her dangerous new rural neighbors, who already did away with the protection O’Farrell had assigned her in the previous episode. Things are getting pretty dangerous on all sides, and with only three episodes to go, things are probably going to get worse — for Sam, at least — before they get better.
