After an exciting first season that surprised many with its gripping screenplay, it was unexpected when “Hijack” got renewed for another season. And it won’t be a stretch to say that this new installment ranks well below the first season. The glue that’s holding this season together is Sam Nelson (Idris Elba), who maintains his poise and shrewdness, much like he did in the KA29 hijacking. Created by George Kay and Jim Field Smith, “Hijack” was the kind of series that offered thrills and valued its audience’s time when it came out in 2023, but the same argument can’t be convincingly made this time.
What makes this season watchable till the end is the elements from the previous outing that tie into the current storyline. But mind you, “Hijack” Season two has twists that provide impact, but the concerning conundrum is: How many of them really land? Naturally, when this season serves as a comma of the events that brought a superpower like Great Britain to a standstill, it is only strange that the stakes feel reduced in this one. While this season as a whole feels really underwhelming, it can keep you watching at least to know how it ends, and it’s definitely something to give credit for.
This article contains spoilers.
Hijack (Season 2) Recap:
Episode 1 “Signal”
Starting right outside a train station in Germany, where the camera rests on Sam Nelson, the events take off as he hops onto the rail. The U-Bahn is a key rapid transit route in Berlin, and it is assumed that Sam is here for a meeting at the British embassy. A woman called Mei Tan (Jasmine Bayes) introduces herself to Sam. When Sam is unsure about who she is, she jogs his memory by stating that she was the intern in an Ambank deal in Singapore that he handled, and she’s impressed by him.
Sam barely pays attention to her words as he is in jitters, displaying behaviours saying he doesn’t want to be in this place. We come to know that he was supposed to meet Arnold Goth (Niels Bormann), an official in the Berlin Ministry of Justice. Olivia Thatcher (Clare-Hope Ashitey), an employee of the British Embassy in Berlin, presents Arnold with CCTV footage she claims was sent to her by Sam, containing evidence of the chief hijacker of KA29 two years ago, entering Hamburg. Simultaneously, Sam spots a man in the train acting weird and walks to where the man is standing in the coach. Sam realises that Mei Tan is expecting a favour from him, so he cuts her off mid-conversation and asks her to share her resume with him.
We are shown that Marsha (Christine Smith Adams), Sam’s ex-wife, is living a secluded life in rural Scotland, away from all the dangers the family would’ve received post the KA29 debacle. Meanwhile, a bunch of bogus U-Bahn ID cards is found in an apartment raided by Detective Zoran Beck (Dejan Bucin), who’s with the German police. A man named Marko enters the underground track of the U5 line pretending to be a construction worker using his fake ID.
The train control centre in Berlin has Clara Berger (Lisa Vicari) in charge of the U5 line, on which Sam is travelling. Back to Sam, he informs a couple of local police officers inside the train about a dubious passenger, who gets thrown out of the train at the next station. During this, a group of British schoolchildren is aboard the train, and the driver, Otto (Christian Nathe), takes a break to use the toilet in the station. He is full of panic as he dials Marko, who doesn’t pick up, but shakingly tells himself that he can’t do this.
After some time has passed without him returning to his seat, Sam grows suspicious and requests that the station manager check on him. Otto comes out when the manager knocks on his door and negates her questions, saying he just needed a break. She sees that Otto is not in the right state of mind and informs the control centre that he should be replaced at the next station.
Otto re-boards the train and gets it moving. He increases the speed of the train, and we see Marko in the tracks, using a grinder to change the train lines. Sam reaches the driver’s cockpit through a set of keys he has in his possession and sees that the train has been diverted from its usual lane. He ushers Otto to stop the train. Now Sam takes charge, saying that he’s hijacking this train.
Episode 2 “Control”
The episode opens with the chief of Berlin police, Ada Winter (Christiane Paul), and her deputy, Roland Murnau (Christian Berkel), arriving at the U-Bahn control centre, accompanied by a British intelligence officer, Peter Faber (Toby Jones), who we saw in the final episode of the previous season. The Berlin police have been notified about this hijacking, and Sam speaks to them directly, insisting they obey his orders henceforth as the train is under his control now.
He demands the exact location of John Bailey-Brown (Ian Burfield), who he believes was the center of the hijacking two years before, and who is currently in Berlin in the custody of the German government. He further says that he’s aware that since John is a British national, the Germans are going to extradite him to the British embassy. Sam urges Ada and the rest to fetch him, threatening to kill people otherwise.
The train is now moving in a new line called U8 via the service tunnels and is adrift from its original line, U5. One of the passengers, unable to remain calm, pulls the emergency brake lever, which causes the train to stop. Sam pressures Otto to get the train moving again, but Otto replies saying that the emergency brake should be reset manually for that to happen.
Sam asks him to go to the coach and do it without alerting the passengers. Otto obliges and makes his way amidst the people in the train, who question whether everything is under control. As he does his job, Otto doesn’t utter a word and returns to his cockpit. A passenger comes to the front coach just behind the driver’s cockpit and worriedly asks Otto about the situation at hand, but Sam whistles him away by reassuring him that things are normal.
Sam negotiates with Ada and reminds her that he will ensure the safety of the passengers only if John’s location in Berlin is determined. After the train moves forward for some time, it again comes to a halt due to a carriage blocking it in its line. When Sam commands Ada and the control centre to remove the carriage, Ada agrees and buys some time to hatch a plan.
She summons the GSG 9 (a unit of German police responsible for counter-terrorism, hostage rescue, and high-risk operations) and orders them to go to the Alexanderplatz platform line where the train is staying put and rescue the passengers, arresting Sam in the process. Concurrently, Beck’s forensic team, through their searches into the identity of persons in the bogus ID cards, achieves a breakthrough when they find a burner phone in Marko’s apartment, where the last call he made was to Sam.
Olivia, after noticing the presence of British intelligence at the embassy, goes to the U-Bahn control centre and informs Faber and the German police about Sam’s identity, along with the evidence sent to her by him. In the train, a passenger named Freddie knocks on the driver’s cabin and demands answers, which makes Sam use force and confine him to the cockpit along with him.
Without receiving a clearance from Clara and Ada, Sam escalates things by affixing Freddie’s hands with a briefcase that may contain an explosive inside it, and makes him walk to the evacuated Alexanderplatz platform. The control centre sees the passenger used as bait through the station’s cameras, but Ada calls this a bluff carried out by Sam and gives the green signal for the GSG 9 to storm into the station. Sam loses his patience and pulls the trigger he’s having in his hand that sends the cameras to black.
Episode 3 “Baggage”
Episode three starts right after the explosion caused by Sam, which we find out was indeed a bluff. As the cameras are out of the equation, the control centre has no eyes on what happened, so they believe Sam has killed a passenger. This news broke out on the TV and the internet by a worker at the control centre, leaking it to one of his friends in the press.
Sam maintains the act and gets them to move the blocked carriage. He also remains focused on getting John’s photo, now demanding it within the next thirty minutes. A thick, black smoke engulfs the deserted Alexanderplatz platform, and we see Sam finding Freddie, who is unharmed, and jumping back with him on the train.
The tensions are rising in the control centre as Ada feels the pressure, also with Peter Faber keeping her on her toes. Olivia uses this opportunity to brief them that Sam is an M&A specialist and that he was involved in the infamous KA29 fiasco. We get to know from Olivia that Sam’s son Kai, who played an active role in Season One, was killed during a car accident on this very same day, ostensibly by John, as Sam believes. Sam is now being used by Cheapside as a pawn to free their potential leader. Ada directs Clara to utilize this information to their advantage by conversing with Sam and altering his plans. When Clara does the same, Sam doesn’t flinch and remains resolute in what he asked.
When Olivia tries to confirm whether John entered Hamburg by going through the city’s entry records, she amusingly finds no evidence supporting that. But she finds that someone else has accessed this data, and when she digs more, finds out that it is linked to an IP outside the organization, tracing to a location called Schwabische Strasse.
There happens to be a safe house in Strasse where they suspect John Bailey-Brown is hiding with the help of British intelligence. When Ada is informed by Olivia about her doubts, she confronts Faber, who doesn’t deny it. This raises eyebrows as Ada also tells Faber that he will have to bear the consequences if John’s photo is not sent to Sam. Faber makes a phone call to his colleague in the British intelligence, Robert Lang (Arsher Ali), who is with John in the safe house, and asks him to find out how the information was leaked.
With the hijack’s news making it to the internet, the passengers in the train see this through their phones and start feeling unrest, thinking they may already be in danger. Peter gets John’s photo to Ada, which she sends to Sam, and in this moment, the German police find out that the briefcase was a hoax used by Sam upon sending a robot to discover the scene.
The smoke was caused by the electronics in the station being damaged. Meanwhile, Beck informs Ada about the bomb maker Marko making a call to Sam and adds that even if the briefcase contained no explosives, there could be a bomb elsewhere. Sam sees John’s photo and heaves a sigh of relief. We now get to know clearly that Sam is not the main villain, and he’s acting like this to save his ex-wife from Cheapside’s goons, who have her as a target.
When Sam sends John’s photo to the Cheapside assassin he’s communicating with, he gets a reply with an order to get John on the train. Exhausted and out of options, Sam repeats the same to Ada in the control centre, which worries her more. Otto and Freddie realize that Sam is like them and decide to help him. Suddenly, the train stops with the power going out and the lights off.
Otto and Sam talk in the tunnel outside the train since Sam thinks they are being listened to and watched inside the train by someone working for Cheapside. Sam asks Otto to find a landline and get the British police to help them. When Sam leans down accidentally after he’s dropped something, he is shellshocked to see explosives attached beneath the train.
Otto panics when Sam tells him about this, and they find out that Freddie is dead back in the cockpit. Unsure of what to do, Sam breaks down but moves Freddie’s body onto the deserted platform. Cut to where Marsha is, she spots a black SUV staking out her house and confronts a man named Nick Ridge in the car. Seeing an axe in her hand, he pleads with her to listen to him. Faber and his men, having noticed that the train is not moving, arrive at the station.
Sam informs Ada that the train is rigged with explosives, which forces her to restore the power, which helps move the train. In the bright lights, Faber and his unit see Freddie’s body on the platform. Sam sees Faber, sitting in a sunken state, as the train passes the station. Unable to back down, Sam claims that his threats were real the whole time and asks Ada and everyone to comply with his requests. The passengers see the body of Freddie and the swarm of intelligence officers on the platform, now aware that they are all caught in a terror attack.
Episode 4 “Switch”
This episode begins by Clara agreeing to bring John to Sam. Sam informs the passengers about the bomb, while also holding his position as the hijacker, not letting them aware that he himself is caught in a trap. Sam has an intuition that whoever killed Freddie must be a passenger and says to Otto that they must soon find out who that is.
Marsha’s boyfriend and Metropolitan police officer, Daniel O’Farrell (Max Beesley), gets to know about Sam’s involvement in the hijack in Berlin through the British chief of police, Zahra Gafoor (Archie Panjabi), who is also Daniel’s ex. It turns out that Nick Ridge is hired by Daniel to watch her. When Nick approaches Marsha, it makes her more stressed as she shuts the door in his face, saying she is not in need of company.
Sam figures that if he looks at the cameras, he’ll know the identity of the killer inside the train. But the USB flash drive, which video-records the events in the cockpit, is encrypted and only the control centre can access it. Sam orders the passengers to throw their phones overboard, and before Mei Tan throws her phone, she conveys to Sam via a covert note that one of the passengers, Andres, had blood on his hands some time before and is acting weird. Sam dismisses this anyway, as he doesn’t think the same while looking at Andres.
There’s another incident onboard the train where an asthmatic child is uncontrollably crying without their inhaler. Sam pauses for a moment and promises the father that he will arrange for the baby to disembark at some mid-point. A passenger named Jess (Karima McAdams), who’s also a medic among the passengers, tends to the baby.
As Sam makes his way back to the cockpit, Mei Tan stops him by telling him that she knows he is not the perpetrator. Sam, this time, curses her and asks to get back to her seat without creating any ruckus. The control centre asks Sam to honour the handover of John and the passengers at a ghost station called Bergmannstrasse, to which he agrees. But he replies that before that, he wishes to release an asthmatic baby to its mother at a maintenance point en route to their agreed destination. Ada and Clara agree to arrange for that to happen.
Mei Tan can’t help but notice that a bigger ploy is happening, and she gets to know from a fellow passenger that Andres was sneaking into the front carriage when the power was off. This deepens her speculations. She finds a bag stuck in one of the vents in the train, and when Andres finds her, he asks her to hand it over. A tussle ensues as she resists, and in the process, the bag slips down, revealing that Andres has drugs stashed in it. So, the killer is still not to be found, and Sam decides to pass the USB flash drive to the mother of the baby, hoping it’ll reach the authorities through her.
We cut to Nick returning to his car, where he is confronted by a couple of locals who believe he is planning to do something sinister to Marsha. They hold him at gunpoint and shockingly kill him, throwing his body into the back of their car. This gives out a signal to the audience that these two may be Cheapside’s spies.
Beck finds out through the security cameras that Sam has dropped a coaster on a bin in a pub named Foxhole nearby, before boarding the train. Meanwhile, Faber is trying to extradite John, but Ada directs the German intelligence to hand him over. When Faber takes the German intelligence to the safe house where John is hiding, Lang comes out with Brown and assures Faber that he will take care of him. It remains unclear whether both Faber and Lang are complicit in this hijack. Lang, along with a few British intelligence officers, begins to transport John.
The asthmatic baby’s mother has arrived at the maintenance point, and Sam allows only the baby to get off the train, with Jess carrying it. After Jess has handed over the baby to its mother, Sam steps down to deliver the baby’s bottle, which presumably has the USB flash drive inside it. As he’s giving the bottle to the baby’s mother, he says that she will need it, which subtly alerts her. When he returns to the train, he notices a sharp piece of metal sticking out in the entrance of the cockpit. Once he gets in, he notices a torn fabric on Jess’s shirt, where he realizes that she is the one who has killed Freddie.
Episode 5 “Outage”
Despite being the shortest of the lot, episode five pushes the show into the endgame territory. The passengers have had enough following Sam’s orders and plot to stage a rebellion. Meanwhile, Sam looks at Jess hiding something in her bag. To find out what it is, he pushes Otto, which causes the train to jolt.
This causes a remote control to slide out of Jess’s bag, which meets Sam’s eyes. The passengers concur on confronting Sam as they deduce he doesn’t have a weapon with him. So when Sam heads down the carriage, the lights flicker for a moment, and the passengers use this opportunity to tackle him to the ground. He’s tied to a pole now, with the passengers demanding answers.
He breaks it to them that the train is rigged with explosives, but nobody believes his words. He further adds that John needs to get on this train, and if this handover doesn’t happen, the bombs will go off. This makes the passengers angrier that they are being used as collateral for a con man in this situation.
One of the passengers opens the bottom of the train and finds out that Sam’s claim about the bomb is true, but the situation is far worse. There are actually eight bombs in total, two under each carriage. Sam tells them that no one is in control except the assassins, and they all need to comply if they want to get out of the train alive. With the seriousness of the situation dawning upon them, the passengers unwillingly abide by the rules.
On the outside, Olivia meets with Faber, who says that Sam is a patsy with the real hijackers staying in the shadows. Faber also mentions that Project John Bailey-Brown was kept secret, with him personally overseeing the operation. But he confides that someone else may also know of this. Zahra brings Daniel to Stuart Atterton (Neil Maskell), the leader of the KA29 hijacking from the previous season.
He’s in prison now and is offered privileges by Daniel, and possibly a reduced sentence if he gives them information about the hijack in Berlin. He replies that the original plan was for him to die on that plane two years ago, and he knows nothing more. Simultaneously, Beck visits the foxhole pub and comes to know by asking around that Sam met with a British man the previous day. Back to Marsha, she is starting to believe that the two locals may not be as innocent as they seem. They agree to take Marsha hostage and show up at her door, staging that one of them is injured. In parallel, the baby’s mother has now identified the USB flash drive that Sam hid in the bottle.
In the train, as Jess is holding onto her bag tightly, the passengers sense that she’s hiding something in it and forcibly try to take it off her. They successfully achieve their purpose and are now looking at a detonator. Sam pressures Jess to reveal more information on how to diffuse the bombs. She initially hesitates but confesses that she manually needs to reset the timer every fifteen minutes by inputting some codes to avoid the detonator from reaching the armed state.
As the countdown on the detonator reduces, Sam and the passengers ask her to give them the codes, but at the time of inputting them into the device, the bomb reaches the armed state. This creates a panic as Sam asks the passengers to get him off the pole and rushes down the carriages, announcing that every passenger needs to move forward away from the rear carriage. As he is elbowing his way down the train, the episode ends with the bomb exploding.
Episode 6 “Junction”
We resume episode six with the U-Bahn control centre unable to track the train due to the explosion. So the convoy, with Lang transporting John, is at a standstill. Lang then receives instructions to return John to the safe house. Stuart paces back and forth in the prison when he hears news from Daniel that John may join him in prison soon.
Stuart looks clearly unnerved, and it gives a feeling that he may not be totally blind to whatever’s happening in Berlin, as he claimed to be. In the train, Sam wakes up with a high-pitched sound ringing in his ears. As he gets up, he sees the rear carriage is a lost cause, but thankfully, no passenger has been affected by this. Sam takes time to compose himself and asks Jess to call whoever’s in charge.
When Jess calls the person she’s communicating with, it is none other than Lang who picks up the phone on the other end. It is now crystallized that Lang has been with Cheapside all along, and that’s why he insisted to travel with John, to personally see to it that his mission is accomplished. He is not happy that the handover has not happened, and, having a detonator in his hand, he threatens to use it. But Sam intervenes and assures him that he will find a way to get John on the train. This calms Lang’s nerves. We also get to know that Lang is reporting to a higher figure in Cheapside. Jess says to Sam that she killed Freddie only to stop the train and the assassins from murdering Marsha.
Sam informs Ada that the handover should still happen and asks them to get in contact once they pass a particular signal. Ada vows to comply, but when Otto tells him that they have passed that signal just a while ago, Sam comprehends that the control centre has lost visuals due to the explosion. At the embassy, Olivia and Faber seek the help of the British intelligence.
Regarding Marsha’s situation, she lets the locals in, and as they are talking, she sneaks out, saying she needs to gather the first aid kit, which is in the other room. The locals quickly figure out that she might have escaped, and rightly so. Marsha is hiding behind a wall some distance away and misdirects them to travel in the opposite direction from the woods. She grabs their car keys, which they’ve left in her hut, and finds the car, but is traumatized to see Nick’s body in its back. The locals arrive at the car, and Marsha gets away, now marching into the woods on foot.
Jess gets word from Lang that the Bergmannstrasse station is full of police. This worries Sam as he is afraid that an ambush might be in store. As the control centre cannot track the train now, Sam plans to use it to their advantage. He and Jess team up to get down on the tunnel and manually switch the rail lines so that they avoid Bergmannstrasse altogether.
Once they are done, Sam says he’ll cue Otto to start the train and pick them up. They set this plan in motion and changed the lines. But Otto is responding to a call from a fellow passenger inside the train, where someone fell down during the explosion and has been unconscious since. Otto checks on her and apologetically tells her he can’t do anything to help her. During this encounter, Sam spots Otto not in the cockpit and becomes anxious that the police might be nearing their location.
Simultaneously, the asthmatic baby’s mother brings the USB flash drive to the control centre, which shows Jess brutally strangling Freddie until he stopped breathing. The German police arrive at the tunnels in Bergmannstrasse, on Ada and Murnau’s order. They zero in on Sam and Jess’s location and confirm to the control centre that they have spotted them.
Sam also sees them and looks for Otto to start the train. When the police place a shooting marker on Sam, he takes Jess hostage by pointing a gun at her head. The police request Murnau’s permission to take a clear shot at Sam, which Murnau approves. We hear the train’s sound approaching, and as it nears Sam, the police take their shot.
Episode 7 “Contact”
The penultimate episode of this season ups the ante and gives a flavour of the ending. Opening with Marsha, we see her in the wilderness running on an injured leg, hiding behind the trees, and biding her time. The two locals are searching for her, along with the dogs now. Marsha finds an area in the woods with a signal and manages to contact Daniel and send him her location.
Jess and Sam are back on the train, and it is apparent that they have escaped at the right moment, but Jess is injured due to the gunshot. Jess questions Sam and Otto about how the police knew that she was the killer, as they wouldn’t normally fire at an hostage. They both admit to the USB flash drive they smuggled out of the train to the control centre.
Cut to Faber, he tells Ada that Sam is being coerced to perform this hijack, but she demands proof. Faber finds Sam’s laptop, which was in police custody, and believes it to contain who sent Sam information to sign up for this hijack. Even with the British intelligence’s support, Faber is not able to crack into Sam’s laptop because it is heavily encrypted. When the British intelligence says that this level of encryption could only have been possible with someone on the inside, it raises Faber’s concerns. But he suspects only the people in the German police and intelligence, rather than his own subordinates.
At the control centre, they figure out that the train has diverted from its line and guess that it should be on a line called the U6. Lang and his convoy, along with John, arrive at Bergmannstrasse, but Jess conveys to Lang that they had escaped the German police a while back, so an alternate station needs to be fixed for the handover.
Lang replies that there’s a train depot at Britz-Süd, and it’s on the surface, so that may be an ideal place. Jess agrees, and Lang walks up to Brown, saying that this could be his only ticket out. An agent who’s with Lang and John detects something fishy with Lang and confronts him in the station toilet. But unfortunately, Lang overpowers and kills him.
Cut to Marsha, she is still running in the deep wilderness and sends a message to Sam’s phone, specifically stating not to allow Cheapside to use her against him. Sam’s phone is in Olivia’s hands now, which she also retrieved from police custody, and reads this message sent by Marsha. The hijacked train is now running low on power due to the explosion.
When Sam asks why, Otto says that it is the damaged rear carriages that are causing the train to slow down. And he suggests decouple those carriages to solve their problem since the train is connected by two-car sets combined. Olivia, on the other hand, plays Marsha’s message to Ada, but she sends the GSG 9 units anyway, to intercept the train on the U6 line and rescue the hostages.
Sam, Otto, and Jess plan to use the current situation to shuffle most of the passengers to the rear and get them off. But the lights suddenly go off, and the train stops. The strike team has arrived on the U6 line, and they step on the train. They start evacuating the passengers. Sam arrives at the rear and dials Ada. He pleads not to let them kill him since the bombs will go off if the handover doesn’t happen at Britz-Süd. Jess is not willing to surrender to the police and kills herself by a cop. Ada doesn’t disagree with Sam and allows him to carry on. The screen switches to Stuart in prison, receiving a burner phone from a prison guard, signalling that he may be deep in this.
Episode 8 “Terminal”
The final episode of this season opens with Beck tracing the bomb maker and getting to know exactly where the bomb is placed. The bomb maker adds that the only way to stop it is by the person holding the trigger, as these bombs are air-gapped. Back in the train, Olivia contacts Sam and plays him Marsha’s message. Sam is deeply concerned that she is willing to sacrifice herself and remains rigid on taking the train to Britz-Süd to complete the handover.
We finally get a vision that Stuart is the main orchestrator behind this hijack, as his motive is to eliminate John to become the head of Cheapside firm. He dials Lang and tells him that John should be on the train even if it means Lang putting him there himself. He also reminds Lang that he’ll get his share of the kingdom’s money only if both Sam and John are dead. There are still 100 prisoners left onboard, and Ada sends an update to Lang to take John to Britz-Süd.
The control centre learn more about Marsha, with her photos submitted to them by GSG 9, and becomes aware that her real name was Mona Hakimi and that she was a combat medic trained by Moroccan special forces. Olivia spots the tattoo on her wrist and connects it to the photo on the coaster Sam left on the bin in Foxhole Pub pre-hijack. Through another photo, where Jess is standing beside four ex-military personnel, we get to see that one of them is Lang. The media has now got live coverage on this hijack, and the control centre sees the train entering the depot on television.
Faber finds a body in Bergmannstrasse’s toilet, and it doesn’t take long for him to put two and two together that Lang has been the mole all along. He passes this information to Olivia. At the Britz-Süd depot, Sam releases the passengers one by one, with the police already at the spot to safeguard them. In the prison where Stuart is, Daniel and Zahra demand that he be searched. Inside the cell, Stuart watches the handover live on a television.
The wilderness run is still not over for Marsha, but there is a chopper sent by Daniel to fetch her, and it is scrambling to find her in the dark woods. After running long, Marsha has returned to her hut and notices the helicopter flying above her. She starts a fire and once it burns vividly, goes inside and hides with an axe by her side, in case the locals spot the fire before the chopper.
The convoy, driving around with John, arrives at Britz-Süd and waits until the last passenger is escorted away from the train. When John asks Lang what the agenda is after he gets on the train, the latter rudely shuts the former down by saying he will find out. This doesn’t make John happy, and he firmly stands his ground, telling him he won’t get on the train until he knows what is going on. Mei Tan is the last passenger to walk away, and she asks Sam whether he’ll also be joining them.
Sam doesn’t give a straight answer but insists that she go. When Sam also tells Otto to get off, he refuses and exclaims that something is wrong, pointing at John fidgeting with Lang. It has become clear to Sam and Otto that John is not happy with the handover. Sam looks over and recognizes Lang from their meeting at the Foxhole pub as the “trigger man”, which catches him by surprise.
Lang has had enough and forces John to step on the train along with him. Lang cuffs John to a pole, but before he can exit, Otto locks the doors and gets the train running back on track. The control centre watches this but doesn’t understand what Sam is doing. As the train enters the tunnels, the climax unfolds. Lang enters the cockpit and points his gun at Otto, asking where Sam is. Sam comes out from one of the carriages and asks Lang to do what he came to do. Sam thinks that if only Lang can pull the trigger, he won’t do it unless he’s also on the train.
When Sam confronts John about his son’s death, John lets out a huge laugh, saying if that’s what Lang has made him believe. Sam looks at Lang, and he admittedly says that is what he had to do to make Sam perform the hijacking. Sam glances at Otto, and he pulls the brakes just in time for the detonator in Lang’s hand to slip out. A mini brawl breaks out with Lang firing shots, and he knocks Sam down, before fleeing the train with the trigger.
He runs a little distance and, after hiding behind a wall, pulls the trigger, causing the bomb to explode. Trusting that Sam and John are both dead, Lang dials Stuart in prison and says he completed the operation, but stresses that he should be paid more than agreed since there was a huge risk involved. But as Sam and Otto emerge alive from the exploded train and come near Lang, he runs away. But Stuart has heard that one of his targets is still alive, and he can guess who.
A prison supervisor has overheard Stuart’s call with Lang and makes Zahra listen to it, where she proudly says they finally have him. Elsewhere, the chopper spots the inferno set up by Marsha and takes control of the situation by catching the locals red-handed. The guards open Stuart’s prison, and as he runs out trying to escape from them, they pin him down. Daniel leans down and says Sam is alive, and so is Marsha. Stuart is agitated as his plan has gone up in flames, but there is nothing he can do now.
Cut to Lang, the police authorities surround him in the streets and have him at gunpoint. Sam was also chasing him, and he said to Lang that it was over. Lang receives a phone call, but before he takes it, he is shot down. As Sam is catching his breath after all this, Olivia comes to him and hands over his phone. When he dials Marsha, he is grateful to hear her voice, and so is she, as the screen cuts to black.
Hijack (Season 2) Ending Explained:
What does Lang’s death and Stuart’s fate mean for Sam Nelson?
Even though this season tied up the subplots neatly in the finale, it can’t be entirely denied that a couple of them added little to no value. Comparing this with the previous season is inevitable since it handled many of the same elements with more care and depth. For instance, Beck’s subplot is unevenly matched to the main narrative as he finds information only later, which the audience had already seen earlier.
Despite Marsha’s subplot being positioned as a crucial one, it felt like it was dragged on unnecessarily, with the locals not being committed and strangely not using their dogs until the very end. The substantial ingredient in a show like “Hijack” is to have a gripping screenplay and rhythm, which is not one of this season’s major strengths. But with everything said and done, this season didn’t completely go off the rails, literally. Now Sam Nelson has successfully managed to avoid the clutches of Cheapside, yet another time.
And it is only natural that the terrorists will grow more cautious and return with a bigger plan next time. As Lang was only a messenger who played his part, there is a high probability that Cheapside will continue to infiltrate and pull more people to their side. Since they are an international crime syndicate, their next move will be of high calibre, and some of Stuart’s allies, possibly also in other countries, may come forward to break him out of prison.
Also, now we’ve seen hijacks in flight and train, the next season, if it is renewed, could venture into buses or ships. The biggest development to come out of this season is exploring Idris Elba’s character as how far the survivor’s guilt eats him up and haunts him psychologically. In spite of portraying him as a wealthy M&A genius, the ghosts he carries are very tangible, which keeps the undertone that he is just like any other human. We can only hope that in the next season, the pacing is tightened so the tension doesn’t evaporate between episodes and the weaker subplots don’t hamper the core survival heat the writing wants to produce.
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