Hijacked
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I had a bit of a ponder last night. It was late and the house was dark and quiet and I was streamed to death and couldn’t stream anymore.
TV is weird these days. You either feel like you’ve seen everything, or haven’t even scratched the surface. On Saturday night I found myself engrossed in an absolutely preposterous new show on Apple TV called “Hijack”, a self-explanatory multi-parter which was only partially redeemed by having Idris Elba in it. I was absolutely transfixed by how much the actor who played the captain of the aircraft resembled Mike Pence, but this meant that I was mostly rooting for the hijackers, which wasn’t easy because they kept being outsmarted by just about everybody on the plane, to the point where I was rolling my eyes at how dumb they were. Elba is the alpha-male heroic Harrison Ford character here, but first he must gain the hijacker’s trust, which takes him all of about 8 minutes or so (turns out he is a “corporate negotiator”, and at one point he picks up one of their guns, which they dropped in a scuffle, and returned it to them. Such a clever lad…). Some passengers notice him currying favor, and are none too pleased, especially a few Karen-like women who seem scarier than the hijackers themselves.
By the way, the reason they are in this mess is because Pence, the pious married-with-children pilot who keep a family portrait in the cockpit, has been fucking one of the stewardesses, which of course the hijackers know in advance (they are apparently smart in spurts) and thus use against him by threatening to blow her head off unless he allows them to access the locked cockpit. Against the strenuous objections of his by-the-book co-pilot, he relents, but not before smashing her repeatedly in the face as she tries to restrain him. Not sure this bit is in the manual.
And so on and so on. The hijackers endlessly wander the aisles, holding what may or may not be guns loaded with blanks (a passenger claims to know this because he used to work for Egyptian intelligence and can tell, although when pressed he admits that he could be wrong, which understandably pisses everybody off), yelling at any passenger who moves or speaks, until one of the bad guys gets stabbed with a pair of scissors (never explained how this was allowed in somebody’s carry-on) while attempting to keep a passenger from procuring insulin in the overhead bins for his diabetic Father. The hijacker slowly bleeds out and dies, but not before Elba tricks him into making a phone call to his “mother”, where he spills the beans on what is going on, not realizing he’s actually talking to the voicemail of Elba’s estranged wife, who has to be beyond fucking confused at this point, as she’s in the midst of a major job interview and has enough on her plate already.
As you can see there’s lots of back-story happening on the ground, as everybody scrambles to find out what’s happening on the plane while juggling their appallingly disjointed personal lives. As previously noted Idris is separated from his wife, who is now sleeping with a London cop, who is separated from HIS wife, who works for some British anti-terrorism-type service. Of course she’s the one trying to crack the case, so everything is neatly connected, otherwise this could go on for eons.
At one point the hijackers call their superiors on the ground to update them on things, and the call goes straight to voicemail. This was my favorite bit of the entire show, and one of the few doses of realism. Tell me this hasn’t happened to you?
Various governments (the plane was flying from Dubai to London) get involved, along with NATO jets, who are 2 seconds from shooting the plane down (they spotted a hijacker with a gun through a rogue open shade) before they are dramatically told to stand down, which makes sense because there are lots more episodes to go.
Which leads me to the point that……I assumed the entire series was available. It’s all been pretty inane, but it doesn’t take much after a few beers and I was invested now and thus content to push through until the wee wee hours to see how it all ends. I still have no idea what the hijackers want, for instance, although we do find out that all of them are Brits, which seemed pretty obvious to me based on their accents but seemed to stun everybody else. Whatever. Also, a big deal is made that they are are NOT terrorists, but rather part of some organized crime syndicate, although I’m not quite sure what the difference is, quite frankly.
I foolishly did not check in advance, and eventually discovered that only a few episodes dropped (there are 7 in total) and I have to wait until next week for the next one. And so on. And this pissed me off because I just know I’m not going to feel desperate enough in the weeks ahead to go back to this shit. I’ll surely be hijacked (sorry) by some other equally dopey streaming series, and this sort of thing will happen again.
I blame the pandemic for this. It became acceptable to sit on the couch for 7 hours at a stretch while having your intelligence insulted. We’re all Tiger King veterans, after all.
Which brings us back to last night, where I refused to watch anything and just sat in semi-darkness and thought about all the time I’ve already wasted watching dumb crap like Hijack.
So I flipped on a light and started reading a book…
In a bit…
—tf