Back in the far-away days of 2023, Apple TV dropped a series titled Hijack. Starring Idris Elba as Sam Nelson, a high-end business negotiator caught in the middle of a complicated and twisty plane hijack, the series was a surprise hit. Two and a half years later, Sam is back in action in Hijack Season 2, which transports the action from a Dubai airplane to a subway train in Germany.
While it’s always great to see Elba on screen, a second season of Hijack wasn’t necessarily a no-brainer, even with the hit status. After all, Sam Nelson isn’t a cop; he isn’t a man with “a particular set of skills;” he’s a businessman with an estranged wife and son who gets stuck in the middle of an impossible situation and has to work his way out. So why is Sam back? And how did the production transport the action from 35,000 feet in the air to way below the street in the German U-Bahn? Turns out the former was a little more organic than you might expect, while the latter was a wildly colossal lift that involved building two subway trains, a control room, and even a subway station.
“When you make a TV show, you spend so much time literally making the show, but you spend a lot of time with the character, and you spend a lot of time problem solving,” Jim Field Smith, the series co-creator and executive producer, and lead director for this season, told IGN.
In the case of Hijack, Smith describes the first season’s structure as trapping Sam Nelson in a “puzzle box” he needs to work his way out of – how to get safely off the plane and back to his family – in a similar way to how “you throw everything into making that season. You throw every idea in the writers’ room, it eats up so much story, you have to try everything. You have to water test everything, and so, on the face of it, it seems like madness to then just try and do that again.”
There’s one key factor that helped Smith and company approach the idea that they could make a second season of Hijack: the show’s pseudo-real-time format. While there’s some smoothing over of the timeline here and there, the entirety of Hijack Season 1 essentially occurs over the course of one seven-hour flight from Dubai to London, with each hour of the show taking up an hour of flight time. Because of that, “Sam only really moves as a character a few inches… You can't change someone fundamentally over the course of seven hours in real life.”
Smith also notes that because of the real-time format, there was no way of answering every single dangling question in Season 1, even if they hadn’t brought the show back for a second season. “Why were the hijackers [there] in Season 1? What motivated them to do this in the first place? What are the relationships between the crime lords in Season 1? What's the relationship between Sam and his son and his ex-wife?” There’s plenty of action that does happen on the ground in the first season, but because Sam is on the plane for the duration, “you don't get to explore these things as much as you'd like.”
So not only did Smith get to answer those questions with a second season, it also helps that the audience knows who Sam is and what his capabilities are.”You've got the shorthand with the character,” Smith explained. “You already know this guy, and you have your expectations of how this guy is going to behave, but now we're going to put this character that you know and love into a completely different environment and give him a completely new set of motivations.” In short? “There's unfinished business, and this is a chance to not just set the record straight, but to actually explore that unfinished business.”
“There's unfinished business, and this is a chance to not just set the record straight, but to actually explore that unfinished business.”That’s good in the broad sense, but with these sort of concept-driven action thrillers, there’s always a danger in going back to the well. For every Die Hard 2: Die Harder, there’s a Speed 2: Cruise Control or Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, a sequel that plays the same beats while missing what made the first one special. That was very much on Smith’s mind once they made the decision to bring Sam back into action.
“Why is this happening?” Smith asked rhetorically. “I wanted Season 2 to feel like a yin and yang partner piece to Season 1, and so I immediately started thinking in opposites. So in Season 1, he's a passenger on the plane that happens to be hijacked. He's essentially a passive character initially in Season 1, who has to get more and more involved, or chooses to get more and more involved. So I immediately go to the flip of that, and I think, well, what if Sam is actually the instigator of the events in Season 2? Rather than being a reactive character, what if he's causing events to happen?”
To go further down this road is to spoil some of the big twists and turns that happen as early as the first episode of the eight-episode season. But there’s a second, simpler reason Smith went in the direction he did. “Season 1 is 35,000 feet in the air. What's the diametric opposite of that? And my brain just went straight away to an underground train.”
As we pick up in Season 2, two years have passed since the plane hijack, and Sam has headed down a road of “revenge and justice” for what happened. This leads him to the U-Bahn – the Berlin subway train – he finds himself on for the next eight hours or so, along with hundreds of other passengers trapped in a brand-new hijack.
One initial problem with the change of scenery? There aren’t as many places to hide. In the first season, the action traveled throughout the plane from the cockpit to the galleys, and explored all the different classes from business to coach. But beyond using every part of the airplane, there’s another huge difference between an airplane and a subway that completely changed how the Hijack writers needed to approach the season.
“In the writers room, the ‘scales falling away from our eyes’ moment was that on a plane, you have a contract,” Smith said. “You have a ticket, and you have a seat, and you have an unspoken contract agreement with everybody on that plane that we've all agreed to get on this plane at this time and fly from A to B. And once that plane gets hijacked, you're not even getting out of your seat. On a train, and particularly on a subway train, it's random. The people that are on that train are completely random. And the moment where Sam gets on that train and the doors are shut, that seals the fate of every single person on that train.”
A subway train ride is also (hopefully) exponentially shorter than your run-of-the-mill airplane ride, so you have a fundamentally different environment for the characters, including Sam. “It goes from being what you'd expect to be a transient environment to being this locked-door prison,” Smith added.
Another big change? Sam is able to move around more freely in the environment of the train, versus being locked in his seat on the airplane. In fact, to mildly get into spoilers here, “none of the passengers on the train even know it's been hijacked until episode four. So there's three whole episodes where the passengers don't even know the train has been hijacked, and that's a really joyful time in the show where we're playing with: When are they going to find out, and how long can this secret be held from the passengers before they before they figure it out, and then potentially start to fight back?”
That’s all well and good from a story perspective, but from a technical perspective, Season 2 was as big of a challenge as Season 1, if not moreso. Smith is a director who wants the space to be as accurately represented as possible, down to replicating the exact dimensions of a U-Bahn train. Part of that is practical: Though most of the second season was filmed on a set in London over the course of nine months, at some point they planned on going to a real U-Bahn station, and it needed to match. But it’s also a technical challenge entirely different from filming on a plane. Smith recalled that once the plane is at 35,000 feet in Season 1, other than a few exceptions, it’s “not doing anything particularly unusual.” It’s also relatively contained, since most of the time, it’s just sky on the other side of those windows. Contrast that with a subway, which has windows in the front, back, and sides, so you can see the environment passing by at all times. “You can’t fake that,” Smith said.
Not only did they wind up building a train and surrounding it with LED walls to simulate the subway tunnels and platforms speeding by outside the windows, but they also created a train that could actually move like a real subway train so that the actors didn’t have to pretend they were wobbling back and forth (we’re looking at you, Star Trek).
In order to accomplish this, one of the two trains Hijack built – “interior train” – is on a hydraulic rig composed of two separate carriages. The U-Bahn in the show is supposed to have four carriages, but because you can’t see between the second and third, they only needed to build two cars for the train, both on hydraulic and pneumatic rigs. Smith adds that while allowing actors to not have to pretend to sway back and forth was part of his push for accuracy, it also has a story reason, as “we actually use it for dramatic effect in the final episode. That swaying motion becomes really important.”
But what of the second train? That one was built for both interior and exterior shots, and it was also built as a “real working train” that could move in and out of the equally accurate train station and tunnel sets. This too had a practical reason: Shooting in a real station and filming with real trains “is a nightmare.” As Smith explained, not only is a train enormously heavy, but you can’t turn it around. A car can be pulled over and a shot reset, but trains involve months of checking with “planning and logistics and permissions and safety issues.”
In fact, the second train was so realistic that when Hijack did film their opening scene at Berlin’s real Hauptbahnhof station towards the end of the nine-month shoot on a busy Monday morning, the Berlin-based crew was confused when they were shown scenes of the constructed, on-set part stitched together with the real station in a rough assembly of the scene.
“My editor, Dave, had cut it together, and I wanted to show it to the crew in Berlin, because I wanted to show them what we were matching to and what we were flowing into,” Smith said. “And our Berlin-based crew were watching this over my shoulder on my iPad, and they said, ‘When did you film this?’ And I said, ‘We filmed this across the last nine months.’ They were like, ‘but when were you here filming this?’ And I said, ‘No, what you're watching is our shot on our set in London.’ And they literally couldn't believe it. I knew we were onto something when the real life Berliners were fooled.”
Despite the devotion to authenticity, there is one set that is semi-fictional: the U-Bahn control center that the Berlin police and others use to track the increasingly erratic hijacked subway train, which features an enormous board with blinking lights straight out of a ’60s or ’70s conspiracy thriller. It was an important set for Smith, because unlike the multiple ways to visualize where an airplane is geographically, it’s much harder to figure out where an underground subway train is in space. In real life, the U-Bahn control room is full of digital screens, which Smith found “not very compelling,” let alone “not very good visual representations of the network. It's schematics. It's very dry visual imagery. So I was quite disappointed, and I was sort of scratching my head about how to tackle this problem.”
An idea presented itself while visiting a train station in Berlin. Smith was chatting with one of the station managers, who explained that the new digital system is actually a front for the old system – and in fact, the subways still run on the old system, just not out front and readily accessible. So Smith and his director went down to a “mothballed room in the station,” where the manager explained there are five or six hubs for the network, and the actual control room is now run from a remote control center. There, in the middle of the room under a plastic sheet, Smith could see ”all these lights twinkling, and they pulled the sheet off to reveal something that is pretty similar to what you see in the show, on a much smaller scale. And it was a complete light-bulb moment.”
What Smith loved about the retro-control panel was the physical representations of where the trains are on the network, something they expanded on in the imagery used in the season. But what he loved even more was that “it was analog, and the machine was humming and clicking and bleeping, and I thought about wanting to work in a world of opposites. In Season 1, air traffic control is digital. It's radar, it's screens with digital data on it. This is the opposite of that: It's relays and switches, and it's things that you can hear.” So yes, the production used “some license” in this case, “but really necessary license to help the audience and the characters in the control room understand what they're dealing with.”
There’s one relatively more subtle change from Season 1 to Season 2 that was vitally important: the color palette. Whereas Season 1 is bright and light as befits a luxury airline, Season 2 took inspiration from its underground Berlin setting to infuse more greens, browns, and grays. While merely setting things on a subway is a large part of that – there just aren’t as many light sources – there’s another thematic reason for the change: Sam.
"He's trying to get to the end of the tunnel. And so the train and the network that he's in is the manifestation of his own problem.”“I'm using the visual imagery and the color palette of the show to reflect Sam's mental state in Season 2,” Smith said. “He's trapped in a literal and metaphorical maze. He’s trying to find his way out. He's trying to get to the light. He's trying to get to the truth. He's trying to get to the end of the tunnel. And so the train and the network that he's in is the manifestation of his own problem.” Smith did add that Berlin’s nickname as “The Gray City” helps in that respect, along with the brutalist architecture, but adding to that is the trains, which Smith feels are “bursts of yellow that cut through the landscape.”
Ultimately, creating a whole new look for Season 2, along with building intricate and extensive sets, was all part of the challenge for Smith. “I’m forcing myself to push it as far from Season 1 as I can, partly for my own sanity, but also to keep challenging myself and my team to solve these problems, and in doing so, to do their best work. It would have been easy to set Season 2 on another plane, and it would have probably looked and felt pretty similar, but I couldn't have done that. I expended all of my plane-related love in Season 1. I've got to find a new environment. I've got to find new ways to push myself. And I want to be out of my depth a little bit. I want to be scrabbling to get a foothold, and that's when I do my best work.”
So what of Season 3? If Season 1 was set on a plane, and Season 2 is on a train, would Smith follow the lead of the late, great John Candy and set a third season in an automobile?
“Listen, anything is possible,” Smith said, laughing. “Would Sam ever get on any other method of transport? I don't know. I think he might just take an E-bike, but I don't think that makes for a very good season. I think the jeopardy of running out of battery is probably not enough for a global TV series. I always say to people, I'd watch Idris Elba peel an egg, and that's not going to make a good season either. But my point being, I think there's life for Sam Nelson. It's always interesting seeing Idris’s portrayal of that character, and putting that character through the wringer. So you know, whether he's in a car, on a bus, on a speedboat… If we do bring him back, I'm sure we'll find some way to put him through hell again.”
Hijack Season 2 premieres January 14 on Apple TV.
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