[Nicolai P. Zwar]

HIJACK (Apple TV series) 3/10

I have five weeks of Apple TV to play with. That’s a nice window, but it’s made smaller by the Soccer World Cup… I have to watch the games!
So I gotta be selective. What to watch? Someone pointed me toward HIJACK, a seven part TV thriller about a hijacked airplane starring Idris Elba, and on paper it sounded like exactly my sort of thing. Seven hour‑long episodes, unfolding in real time, all set on a single plane. The unity of space and time… yes, please. I’ve always had a soft spot for stories that trap their characters in a pressure cooker and then turn up the heat.
And to be fair, the series does begin fairly promising. The opening episode ticks off the familiar disaster‑movie boxes: a cross‑section of passengers, a hint of their personal dramas, and Idris Elba as the designated hero. You settle in, thinking you know the shape of the ride. For a while, that’s almost enough.
Unfortunately, and this is where my longstanding suspicion of story arc television reasserted itself, somewhere around episode three or four the whole thing starts to sag. The hijackers, who should be the engine of tension, turn out to be astonishingly incompetent. Not the interesting kind of incompetent, either; more the “how did you people manage to hijack a plane? Can you even tie your own shoes?”. They are no threat, they are no danger, they seem pretty dumb, and worse, dull.

Oh, and let’ s not forget Idris Elba’s character, who is written as a supposedly hyper‑competent negotiator but behaves like the sort of man who corrects strangers’ grammar at dinner parties. He’s really annoying! The show keeps insisting he’s calm, rational and resourceful, while the evidence on screen suggests a man suffering from a particularly florid case of Dunning-Kruger. He argues with everyone, passengers, hijackers, all the time, about everything. If this is what passes for heroism, I suddenly understand why I don’t watch many series.
By the final stretch, the plot begins throwing out twists that make no sense, and instead of shocking you (which I guess they should), you just get a “WTF was that?” moment. By the end, I wished for Steven Seagal to turn up and mow them all down. Imagine, a TV show so bad, a sudden appearance of Steven Seagal would be a major improvement! That’s HIJACK.