‘Hijack’ Season 2’s Narrative Changes & Episode 1 Recap

January 15, 2026

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Warning: Includes SPOILERS for Hijack Season 2, Episode 1!

In Hijack Season 1, San Nelson (Idris Elba) boarded a plane on route from Dubai to London, only to realize that the aircraft had been hijacked. He took it upon himself to lead the passengers to safety by using his negotiating skills to barter with the hijackers. His goal was to keep everyone alive on board and ensure a safe landing. He mostly achieved this, albeit with some tragic losses along the way. Season 2 picks up about 2.5 years later, and while the show’s logline makes it seem as though Sam finds himself in a similar situation, and he does, there’s a shocking reveal at the end of Episode 1, “Signal,” that completely changes the game.

Sam Is the Hijacker This Time. Wait, What?

Sam on a train in Hijack.

Image via Apple TV

For Season 2, Sam is in Berlin and about to board a metro train to meet with someone from the federal office of justice. It’s unclear why, but what is immediately apparent is that there’s an uneasy feeling with him. It’s like he can sense something is about to happen on the train, yet he still hops aboard. Why he does this is revealed by the end of the first episode, at least in part. It completely flips the script for the show and raises plenty of questions about what happened to and with Sam in these last 30 or so months.

Apple TV deserves kudos for keeping the plot twist tightly under wraps by carefully wording the promotional logline. “A Berlin underground train and its commuters are taken hostage while, above ground, authorities scramble to save hundreds of lives. Sam Nelson is at the heart of the crisis on board, where one wrong decision could spell disaster.” Notice how it doesn’t say he’s trying to stop the hijacking. Because he isn’t. He’s actually the one orchestrating it this time, a detail that blew my mind and left me thoroughly confused.

It sounds ridiculous, almost unbelievable, that this stand-up corporate man who risked his life to save others during a terrifying hijacking would subject innocent passengers to such a horrifying ordeal. It’s a strange situation to reconcile, leaving fans thoroughly confused. Why would Sam do this? What has changed so much with him in these past 2.5 years that he would do such a thing? Surely there’s a good reason, but finding one that could justify these actions seems implausible.

Strange Events Raise Suspicion

There are events that seem odd from the jump in the show, one of Apple TV’s best thrillers. Before getting on the train, for example, Sam buys a soda from a vending machine, looks up at the screens and security cameras, then tosses the full soda into the garbage. He seems apprehensive about getting aboard, as mentioned. Once he does hop on, and even before he’s waiting for the train to arrive, he scans everyone around him as though he’s looking for someone.

He notices a young man with a backpack who looks suspicious and eventually confronts him. He gets the police on board involved, only to learn that the man was an innocent asylum seeker. He looked nervous, but not for the reasons Sam thought: seemingly, the man was about to do something rash, potentially carrying a bomb in his backpack. Now, despite his best efforts, Sam has raised the eyebrows of other passengers who stare him down and scoff at the fact that he just racially profiled an innocent person who was just looking for safety.

There’s something up with the train driver Otto (Christian Näthe) as well, who is clearly in on a nefarious plan and having second thoughts. He calls someone named Marko and tells him he can’t go through with “it,” whatever “it” is. When a security agent at the next station recognizes that Otto is in distress and calls in for him to be replaced, he zooms by the next station and keeps going, confusing everyone about what is going on. The train is now officially hijacked.

Sam gets into the cab and tries to stop Otto. All we know by this point is that Sam is looking for the man responsible for the Kingdom Airlines flight hijacking he was on years ago. There’s unfinished business, and it seems that Sam isn’t willing to let it go. This man caused such a traumatic event and seemingly got away with it scot-free. Still, Sam’s actions in hijacking a train to try to get to him seem far too extreme. There has to be more to the story.

Sam Is a Changed Man, and Not for the Better

Considering how beloved Sam was in Season 1, seeing this side of him in Season 2 is jarring, losing what made the show so great in the first place. Sam is the perfect hero, a handsome, well-dressed man who negotiates business deals yet somehow uses his charms to save hundreds of innocent people when he’s put in a precarious position. He risked his life for others and found clever ways to get word to authorities on the ground to help them. A sense of morality and goodness screamed through his persona in Season 1. In Season 2, he seems like a different person.

Even his demeanor when approached by a woman who recognizes him before he gets on the train is unsettling, like the real Sam is somehow gone. The woman is admittedly annoyingly persistent in her desire for small talk, failing to pick up on the fact that Sam isn’t interested in engaging or reminiscing about when they met years ago. She keeps bringing up how she was an intern at a company where he had been negotiating a deal, and she was enamored with his work back then, and still is today. He does his best to try and politely get away from her, being cordial but also somewhat rude. The entire exchange makes little sense other than to confirm that Sam is hiding something, he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s on that train, and there’s something distracting him.

A clue as to what’s going on could lie in an earlier scene, which shows Sam’s ex, Marsha (Christine Adams), holed up in a cabin alone. She looks despondent, and it’s unclear why, but the fact that she’s shown has to have some bearing on the plot. Her situation is being shared for a reason, and it could relate to what is going on with Sam. It may also be simply to shed light on the state of mind she’s in once she inevitably hears about her ex-husband and the horrible thing he’s doing in Berlin.

In the final line of the episode, Sam reveals what’s going on to Otto, who is confused when he tries to leave the train, but Sam won’t let him. “I’m hijacking this train,” Sam says as the soundtrack plays and Sam looks menacingly out the train cab window. The flip in his personality makes for an interesting plot point, a complete 180 of the script that still allows the show’s title to remain fitting without replicating the same situation in a different mode of transportation. But it almost seems too daring, too out there to believe that there could be any logical explanation for why Sam is doing this.

It’s not uncommon for shows to turn heroes into antiheroes and feature menacing characters who are delightfully likable, like Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in Breaking Bad and Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) in Dexter. But Sam Nelson from Hijack, one of the best shows streaming on Apple TV, doesn’t quite fit the mold. He’s a kind, confident, savvy man with a strong moral code that doesn’t divert when he does business, even if he probably negotiates cut-throat corporate deals. This person on the train seems guarded, nervous, a different person from the one we saw in Season 1. We’ll have to wait to see how it all pans out as the season progresses, and why Sam has gone from hijacked passenger to hijacking criminal. Stream Hijack on Apple TV.