Hijack: Season 2

Honestly, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this review. Mostly because this series didn’t bother to spend a lot of time on itself. It’s seriously one of the worst examples of a weird cash-grab second season I’ve ever seen of a show that should have just remained a limited series. Season one was actually a little fun, but this is an absolutely dismal season of television. Dreary and dark and confusing and half in German. And, yes, there’s a hijack in this one, just as there is in the first series. But this time it’s a train! But not a train, train. An underground metro train. In Berlin. Which I believe is called the U-Bahn. Which, if you think about it, is a really dumb thing to hijack since, you know, it’s on a track and there are terminating lines and everything. But, hey, the show is called Hijack, so they gotta hijack something. And the Speed concept was already taken, so no buses. Oh, wait! We also have the novel and three film adaptations of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. So, yeah, this subway thing has already been done to death as well.

Reprising his role is Idris Elba as professional corporate negotiator, Sam Nelson. He’s made it through the whole plane thing, but is now pressed back into action because I think maybe someone has kinda-sorta kidnapped his ex-wife, Marsha (Christine Adams). But not really. To even begin to explain the incredibly convoluted plot here would make me barf twisting myself into knots. It’s complete nonsense. Like they took a script, tore it up, threw it into the air and had the interns try to gather the pages and make something whole out of it. But like a couple dogs, a baby and a goat or two were let into the room before the thing was reassembled and they just cobbled together the remnants that weren’t ingested. It was that incoherent. But worse than that is the fact that the vast majority of this thing happens in dark train tunnels and dark subway cars filled with a bunch of indistinguishable passengers and action that mostly consists of people talking in hushed tones and the occasional infiltration of police in balaclavas with laser sites. But, first, we are “introduced” to some of the aforementioned passengers on the train. There are supposed to be hundreds of them, but we really only see a couple dozen (to presumably save on extras costs) and are given some insight to even fewer. The main issue being, we can barely see their faces, and the intros themselves are incredibly cursory and surface. So, when they are in peril on these train cars, we’re like… uh, are we supposed to care about any of these folks who we know nothing about? It’s like there was a plan for some backstories, but they just kind of forgot to follow through. So the train is essentially just filled with a bunch of NPC cardboard cutouts that we have absolutely no feeling for or about.

On the production side, there is the murk of the underground that hinders not only our viewing, but our understanding of where the hell anything is taking place. It’s more than a small issue that every single underground station in Berlin looks exactly the same. Which I assume makes it convenient to film because you can just use the same stop over and over again, but it makes for a monotonous and disorienting experience for the viewer. The sound production is incredibly drab as well. Everything is super-muted and hushed. Like the blanket of dimness somehow puts a damper on the sound of everything. The dynamics just feel off. And because of both the repeating scenery and supressed sound, the whole season just drags. It’s the slowest action drama series I’ve ever seen. Episode after episode with absolutely nothing happening. The train starts. The train stops. They kill the power. Sam calls into the train control center to tell them the train will explode if they don’t turn the power back on. So, they turn the power back on. And then there’s this whole thing about Sam’s dead son and some bad guy who is somehow involved, but he’s being controlled by another bad guy, who is, in fact, being controlled by another bad guy. And we have to read half the stilted exposition because it’s in German. It’s just a slog.

On top of the glacial pace, foggy production and confusing plot points, we have some really dumb writing. There is a point where all a person has to do is push a button on a panel in the train to save a bunch of people. Again, there are hundreds of able-bodied people available to push said button, but to build suspense (which isn’t suspenseful) they rely on a dying woman who’s been shot in the chest to push that damned button. Why, when there is nothing technical involved beyond putting a palm on the thing and pressing? No idea. There’s also a whole thing where the people in charge of ending the hijack are afraid to take out the hijackers in front of the press for some reason. Hijackers — who are not the actual hijackers, mind you, but are being compelled to be hijackers because of the aforementioned stacked bad guys — who they think are keeping hundreds of people captive and threatening to blow them up. Because the public would be opposed to the cops taking down dangerous terrorists who are claiming they’re going to murder tons of people? What in the world are we doing here? To add, all the people who run the trains from the command center have this dinky electronic wall map of the current subway system, but keep losing the train that Sam Nelson is on because they don’t have a map of the whole system? Like they literally didn’t realize there are tracks and lines down there that aren’t active? The people who control the whole system? I mean, Google that shit. And, in the end, the same cops who didn’t want to shoot anyone on camera now seem determined to shoot the bad guy when it would have been just as easy to tackle and arrest him. Because, wouldn’t it be better to arrest the guy and not kill him so you can find out what he knows? It’s all a mess.

There is no urgency from any of the characters. Or anywhere. There seems like there’s some sort of timer on the events, yet they just keep stopping and fucking around. Sam Nelson is strangely overly-attached to his ex (as he kind of was in the first season), and they use the dead son trope to motivate his re-attachment. A son who was totally fine at the end of season one, but they managed to kill off-camera between seasons. Why? Who knows. I just truly hated this thing. Humorless and German for no other reason than Apple TV+ loves serious international productions. It really didn’t need to happen in Berlin, but I swear they just wanted to make us read to make this seem more prestige or something. To me, it just made me hate it more because I couldn’t just have it on in the background with all the damned subtitles. German ain’t pretty, either. The thing ended and I actually booed. Ms. Hipster and I then looked at each other and said simultaneously, “Good riddance.”

MORE SEASONS

Hijack: Season 1