SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “Hijack” Season 2, which had its season finale on Wednesday.
“Hijack” Season 2 reaches the end of the line on Wednesday, March 4, with viewers finally getting to see whether arch negotiator Sam Nelson (Idris Elba) can save not only a train-load of people but also his ex-wife Marsha (Christine Adams), who is on the run from the same bad guys forcing Nelson to take a subway train hostage on Berlin’s U-Bahn underground system.
Ahead of the season finale, writer Jim Field Smith sat down with Variety to answer some key questions about the last episode, such as the fate of John Baily-Brown (Ian Burfield) whether Nelson and Marsha might get back together.
He also spoke about the likelihood of a third season for the hit Apple TV show, indicating that while he’s only just getting some space to breathe after delivering Season 2, there is potentially “more story” for Nelson – not least because he has only just discovered the real culprit behind his son Kai’s murder.
Read on to find out more about what Field Smith has planned for Nelson and the rest of the “Hijack” cast…
Did you always know Season 2 was going to be set on a train?
Once we’d come up with this idea that essentially “What if Sam’s the bad guy? What if we flip it on its head so it’s not that it’s happening to him again, it’s that he’s making it happen to other people?”…the initial instinct was just to do something that was as diametrically opposed to Season 1 as possible, both visually and thematically. So Season 1, it’s up in the sky, up in the open, blue skies, oxygenated environment. It’s aspirational — although it’s a hijacking — it’s jet travel, it’s Dubai, it’s a plane full of influencers. In Season 2, I was like, “What’s the opposite of that?” basically, but we still wanted him to be trapped in this kind of puzzle box.
We really wanted it to be a method of transport, and that just took me to train. The underground train feels to me like the absolute opposite of a jet liner traveling at 35,000 feet. And then the Berlin piece came because we wanted him to be somewhere in a city that was alien to him. We wanted to give him as much of an uphill struggle as possible. Because if you put him on the London Underground, you think, “Well, he’s not really out of his depth there. You know, he can hop off at Covent Garden and go and have a chat with the mayor.”
You shot some scenes in an abandoned underground station in Berlin. Was it creepy down there?
Yes, really yes. It was… Some of these stations were essentially on the wrong side of the [Berlin] wall. And so they had to seal them off so that people couldn’t board or alight at those stations. And they used to have guards down there patrolling with dogs. And when you go down into some of these locations, it’s like stepping back in time. You can see litter from the 1980s.
The other thing is, when you’re down in the tube network, you can be walking along a line that you’re told is a line that’s been put out of service and there’s no power … but there are other tunnels adjacent to that tunnel which are working tunnels, and you can hear the trains. And when you’ve got a curve up ahead of you and you can hear a train coming, it’s terrifying. We had guides with us saying, “Don’t worry, it’s not on this line,” but you can hear it coming and you can feel the ground rumbling, and you think, “Well, any second — ” And actually, because we did a lot of that scouting quite early on, it really infected the show.
Jim Field Smith on the set of ‘Hijack’ Season 2 (Courtesy of Apple TV)
Was it really necessary to kill off Kai (Jude Cudjoe) between Seasons 1 and 2?
I’ll turn that back to you, because this is a conversation we had a million times in the writers’ room. What else could we have done that would have pushed Sam to do the things that he does in this season? Because once you’ve decided we’re going to basically make Sam bad, or at least seem to be bad, and although we realize he’s being coerced, he is still doing some pretty morally questionable things.
Are Marsha and Daniel still together? Is there a chance that Marsha and Sam could get back together?
Marsha and Daniel are together in this season. She’s gone to get away from everybody, she’s not getting away from Daniel [specifically]. She needs that headspace. But of course, the big will they-won’t they of both seasons is obviously Sam and Marsha have this connection.
I think there’s always going to be this bond between them, and that’s why we wanted to end the show on Sam calling her and him hearing her voice. Because it doesn’t matter whether romantically they’re involved or not. It’s just these are two people that are intimately connected.
Did John Bailey-Brown survive the blast?
Anybody who was on that train would not have survived.
Obviously Sam and Otto (Christian Näthe) managed to get off…
Otto and Sam got off before the train exploded, I think is the implication, and John Bailey-Brown was obviously handcuffed to a pole.
Given we find out in the season finale that Stuart Atterton is the mastermind behind both the U-Bahn hijacking and Kai’s death, there’s obviously got to be a Season 3 so Sam can settle some scores. What can you tell me about it? Will it be on a boat?
I don’t really think so much like that. I think more like, is there more story for Sam? It’s not so much like, “Oh, could we do it again?” Because, of course, you can do it again. Do I want to do it again, that’s a different conversation. Right now I’ve literally just delivered this season.
If Apple decide they want another bite of the of the “Hijack” cherry, the question I will always ask is, what story is there for Sam? Not, where can we do it, but why? Of course, yeah, it could be on a boat. It could be on an e-bike, it could be in the back of a limo, it could be, you know, a submarine. Or it could transcend the “Hijack” format and it could move into a different arena. But that’s what I mean. The precinct is kind of irrelevant. It’s more about “Where could Sam go?”
As you said, Stuart’s still alive, there’s obviously beef between those two, so clearly, there’s different routes we could go down. I definitely don’t think we’ll be doing like, “Oh, Sam Nelson is now a guy that just bad shit happens to him all the time.” It’s got to be connected in the same way that Season 2 is connected to Season 1. If we did a Season 3, it would have to be connected to Season 2. You can’t just go, “Well, this is just a successful show, so we’re just going to carry on making it.” I’m not interested in that. I don’t think anyone’s interested in watching that either.
Season 1 and Season 2 of “Hijack” are streaming on Apple TV now.
