Way back in the second episode of Season 2 of Apple TV‘s Hijack, it sure looked like the train blew up. Spoilers past this point but as we explained then, no, the train didn’t blow up… It was Sam Nelson (Idris Elba) manipulating events to make it look like he blew up the German U-Bahn subway train, without actually hurting anyone. Well, guess what happens in Hijack Season 2, Episode 5, titled “Outage”? The train blows up, for real this time… Or at least part of the train explodes.
In fact, the episode opens with a shot of a bomb under the train, beeping and counting down. And as it turns out, the train’s resident mole Jess (Karima McAdams) is the one monitoring and maintaining the bombs. It’s not a detonator, not exactly. Instead, Jess needs to enter a code for every single bomb under every single car at a regular pace, or they explode.
So yeah, turns out Jess isn’t the mastermind forcing Sam Nelson (Idris Elba) to hijack this subway; someone else is behind Jess, forcing her to enter the codes. And to be clear, while we’re all still pretending that Sam is on a mission of vengeance against Season 1’s co-mastermind John Bailey-Brown (Ian Burfield) for killing Sam’s son Kai (Jude Cudjoe), it’s becoming increasingly clear that’s not what is going on at all.
Not to get too off-track here (like the train), the return of Stuart Atterton, aka Gerald Taylor (Neil Maskell), who was behind Season 1’s plane hijack and is interrogated this episode by Sam’s ex-wife’s boyfriend DI Daniel O’Farrel (Max Beesley) clearly indicates that there’s more of a tie to Season 1’s hijack than has been let on.
Okay, back to the train. While the passengers finally step up and try to take down Sam, he explains A) there are bombs under the train, and B) he’s not in control of them. Who made the bombs, and who placed them there? That’s something they’re actively investigating outside the subway, and there too they’re beginning to realize Sam may not be behind whatever is happening. And that’s when Sam tells the passengers “I’m being forced to do this.” By who? “Doesn’t matter,” says Sam, because ultimately they’ll blow up no matter what. And that’s when we get the moment we’ve been waiting for all season… Sam teaming up with his fellow passengers.
It takes a little bit: Sam explains that he’s not the hijacker, he didn’t kill poor sustainability consultant Freddie (Albrecht Schuch), someone is watching him (though he doesn’t give up Jess), Otto (Christian Näthe) is also being forced to drive, and this seems to all be about trading all the passengers on the subway for John Bailey-Brown. But eventually, they tentatively accept his explanation, even though Sam is handcuffed to a subway pole for most of the running time. Oh, and he confesses that if he doesn’t free John Bailey-Brown, the people behind this will kill his ex-wife, Marsha (Christine Adams).
Everything is going smoothly (aka, terribly as usual) up until suspicious old lady Petra (Gabrielle Scharnitzky) messes everything up. She and Sam’s old intern Mei Tan (Jasmine Bayes) know — or at least strongly suspect — that Jess is the one who murdered Freddie, and is behind the bombs. While Mei leaves Petra on her own, the latter can’t help but meddle. Petra asks Jess for her phone, and while she says she doesn’t have a phone, Petra grabs her bag and along with the other passengers discovers Jess’s detonator, as well as the fact that she’s the oe keeping the hijack on track.
The freaked out passengers stop the train, which is a bad move because the countdown on the bombs begins to speed up. Jess, freaked out, explains that what she has is not a detonator, it’s a timer. There’s a code for each bomb, and she needs to reenter the individual codes every 15 minutes for each carriage, or the bombs go off. Sam explains that if they die, so does Jess, so she relents and gives the passengers the codes, stopping the detonations with mere seconds to go.
Well, three out of four of the detonations get stopped. The rear carriage, unfortunately, they’re too late to stop. Sam gets un-handcuffed from the pole, and proceeds to run through the train, getting everyone he can away from the rear car before it explodes. How long does he have? This is one of those movie/TV bombs, so juuuuuust enough time to get everyone clear of the explosion. One would think the bomb would explode at zero, but nope.
Oh, and Petra, for her sin of correctly identifying Jess as the secret hijacker/bomber, gets knocked to the ground in the process. So unlike the previous Episode 2 fake explosion, this time the train did blow up… Or at least, the rear carriage blew up. Did Sam make it out on time? Did Petra? Is anyone else hurt? And how will the hijack continue now that one of the cars has exploded? We’ll have to tune in next week to find out.
Hijack Season 2 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of Hijack technically premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV, though given time zones in the United States new episodes will hit the service at 9pm ET / 6pm PT on Tuesdays. We’ve listed the Wednesday dates below, just for posterity.
Here’s what we expect from the full list of episodes in Hijack Season 2 with premiere dates.
- Wednesday, January 14, 2026: Hijack, Season 2, Episode 1
- Wednesday, January 21, 2026: Hijack, Season 2, Episode 2
- Wednesday, January 28, 2026: Hijack, Season 2, Episode 3
- Wednesday, February 4, 2026: Hijack, Season 2, Episode 4
- Wednesday, February 11, 2026: Hijack, Season 2, Episode 5
- Wednesday, February 18, 2026: Hijack, Season 2, Episode 6
- Wednesday, February 25, 2026: Hijack, Season 2, Episode 7
- Wednesday, March 4, 2026: Hijack, Season 2, Episode 8 *Season Finale*
Where To Watch Hijack
Comic Book Club Live Info:
Discover more from Comic Book Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.