Idris Elba’s Apple TV Thriller Is Best Binge-Watched

WARNING: SPOILERS ahead for Hijack season 2, episode 1.

Idris Elba’s unexpected second season of the Apple TV thriller series Hijack offers passable entertainment and paint-by-numbers thrills best suited for a quick binge rather than a weekly episodic release.

Hijack season 2, episode 1, reintroduces Elba’s business negotiator Sam Nelson, who last season led an effort to end a mid-flight hijacking on a commercial airline traveling from Dubai to London. This time around, the story shifts to a subway train in Berlin, Germany, with an intriguing new twist – Sam’s the hijacker.

Hijack season 2 takes place roughly two years after the plane incident, set in the present day. From the jump, Hijack season 2 shares many similarities with its predecessor – polished set design, pristine visuals, and a plot-driven narrative that establishes characters more like chess pieces than human beings. As Sam points out, this series is one big poker game, and viewers may be quick to call its bluff.

Hijack Season 2 Is Occasionally Gripping But Mostly Uninspired

Hijack season 2 is enjoyable, and fans of hostage-driven thrillers like these are sure to like the genre tropes it recreates. By the end of the first episode, things become so chaotic that it’s nearly impossible to predict what’s going to happen next. The season 2 premiere is one of, if not the, best episodes of the season, establishing a bumpy ride with abrupt stops, sharp turns, and at-times frustrating suspense.

Hijack is certainly an intelligently designed series. The plot carefully walks the line between complex and convoluted, and upon a re-watch, things make more sense in retrospect than they do in real-time. That said, I found much of the moment-by-moment mystery held together by withheld information, almost as if you could feel the intentional lack of explanation crafted by the writers through the characters.

Common sense doesn’t always apply to the character and narrative developments in Hijack season 2. Spanning eight episodes and almost as many cliffhangers, the series can seem overly serious a majority of the time, only to be glued together by a twist fueled by shock value that makes the series feel like it’s playing too safe, afraid to up the ante with something truly imaginative or jaw-dropping.

A good chunk of the series, somewhere between half and a third, features German-speaking characters, so be prepared to read subtitles. That element would be less noticeable if Hijack season 2 picked up the pace in its more static moments, as the series is missing the type of sustained tension that would keep viewers hooked from start to finish. Episode 1 starts strong, but it’s almost as if the more we find out about the hijacking and the mystery behind it, the more deflated and stagnant the series becomes.

Hijack Season 2’s 8 Episodes Are Best Binge-Watched

In a modern streaming world where second seasons are more likely to have their runtimes reduced, I was surprised to learn that Hijack season 2 has eight episodes, compared to last season’s 7, especially because this story only needed six. Apart from a few subplots, all directly connected to Sam’s main trajectory, the series mostly switches settings between the train and the control room, where German intelligence and safety officers attempt to free the hundred or so hostages.

Having seen all of Hijack season 2, I have to recommend waiting until the finale comes out in March to binge it in a few sittings. Binge-watching is the only way to get the most out of this series, as it’s too emotionally hollow to look forward to every week compared to a show like The Pitt, for example.

As with season 1, Hijack’s greatest strengths are also its weaknesses. It’s gorgeous, self-serious, and suspenseful, but perhaps too much of all these things – too clean to be gritty, too intense to be anything but, and too many bait and switches that try and fail to distract viewers from an inevitable outcome. Much like the hijacked train and season 1’s plane, Hijack’s final destination is too plainly mapped out.

The best way to describe Hijack after two seasons is perfectly passable. It meets all the criteria of a thriller series on paper, looks fantastic, has a strong lead performance with a global superstar, is easily marketable, etc. What’s missing, however, is a human element, a spark that makes us care about the characters apart from the fact that they are innocent people in danger. This makes Hijack feel a bit soulless.

As great as Elba is, Sam is not a very inspired protagonist. He’s driven by the most basic human motivations and external forces, and is too rigid to be accessible, which are criticisms of the writing, not his performance. Without Elba, or an A-lister of his caliber, I’m not sure this series would have any draw whatsoever. With its too-classic feel and overly-modern design, Hijack season 2 is engaging but simply unremarkable, and better binge-watched in March.