Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Hijacking Of Flight 601’ On Netflix, A Scripted Retelling Of One Of The Longest Hijackings In History

Because hijacking stories involve a lot of personalities — the hijackers, the crew, the law enforcement or other person trying to foil the hijackers, etc. — shows and movies surrounding them aren’t just pure thrillers. There’s some attempt at connecting viewers to the people involved, just to raise the stakes and see if they survive the hijacking or not. A new Colombian series is a fictionalized account of a 1973 hijacking that became the longest one in mileage and time in Latin American history.

THE HJACKING OF FLIGHT 601: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman in a flight attendant’s uniform looks at her wrist, with three dots drawn on it. She has a gun pointed at her head. It alternates with scenes of the same woman, earlier in the timeline, getting ready for work, looking at the blister developing on her heel.

The Gist: “Bogota, 1973.” Edie (Mónica Lopera) is scrambling to get out of her apartment to get to her flight; she is a flight attendant for Aerobolivar, and is due to work on flight 601 out of Bogota. Her three young sons are wreaking havoc, and the babysitter hasn’t arrived. At one point her youngest son locks himself in the bathroom, and when Edie pushes her way in, she accidentally knocks one of his permanent teeth out with the door, prompting an emergency dentist visit.

The airport is buzzing as usual; two men (Alian Devetac, Valentín Villafañe) are in the parking lot; one is holding a cake box, another is taping a gun to his thigh. They have plans for flight 601. After getting weighed by their supervisor Manchola (Marcela Benjumeca) — it is 1973, after all — Aerobolivar’s stewardesses (again, 1973) stride through the terminal, led by the beautiful Bárbara (Ángela Cano). Bárbara makes sure that a rookie stewardess, Marisol (Ilenia Antonini), is projecting the right image, and also gets the brushoff from a married pilot with whom she had a fling.

Edie tries to get Bárbara to cover for her, but Manchola is on to her, and tells her over the phone to arrive on time or lose her job. Edie tries but doesn’t make it, and Bárbara leaves the inexperienced Marisol as the only stewardess on the flight, citing that there’s only 43 passengers and she should be able to handle it. In the cockpit, Capitan Lucena (Christian Tappan) is dealing with an experienced co-pilot, Lequerica (Johan Rivera).

As Edie is dealing with being fired by Manchola, going over her head to Mustafá (Enrique Carriazo), the airline’s newly-promoted director, on whom she has dirt that will help her keep her job, the two men execute their plan. They want the plane refueled in Medellín so they can fly on to Cuba, which is a long haul for the DC-3. When a passenger needs water for his medicine, the hijackers try to get Marisol to do it, but she passes out from fear.

Captain Lucena tells Lequerica to call ground control and lie that the hijackers are requesting another flight attendant when they refuel in Medellín. Despite being fired, Edie is the only one who steps up to board that plane, in exchange for a new contract from Mustafá. When she gets to the airport in Medellín, she’s surprised to find that Bárbara is already there; she wants to help her friend on this flight — and she likes the adventure of being on a hijacked plane. Little do they know that they’ll be on that plane for days.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The most recent show that reminds us of The Hijacking Of Flight 601 is Hijack, despite the fact that Flight 601 takes place 51 years ago and Idris Elba is nowhere to be seen.

Our Take: Created by Camilo Prince and Pablo González, The Hijacking Of Flight 601 tries to thread the needle between being a serious hijacking thriller and being a campy treatise on the hijack-crazy era the early 1970s actually was. The story is based loosely on a hijacking that took place on May 30, 1973 which hopscotched around Latin America for a total of 60 hours, making it the longest in mileage and time in Latin American history.

Perhaps the nature of hijackings back then, when the perpetrators had political motivations and no intentions of hurting anyone, are what led Prince and González to give the show a more personal, soapy treatment. The story is going to be more about the crew in the air and on the ground that did what they could to keep their passengers safe, of course; these stories always are. But the first episode seems to put a real emphasis on the personal, especially when it comes to Edie and Bárbara.

They’re best friends but also opposite sides of what it meant to be a career woman in the early ’70s. Edie is constantly juggling, while it seems that Bárbara glides through her life, being completely put together and having affairs with married men. It’ll be interesting to see how each of them handle being the point people during this hijacking; they’ll likely be the ones that have the most interaction with the hijackers themselves.

What we’re wondering is how well the creators and their writers are going to be able to maintain that balance between thriller and soap. As the situation gets more dire and the crew and passengers try to figure out how to defeat the hijackers, we get the feeling the frothier parts of the story will fall away. That kind of transition can work, as long as there isn’t a jarring tonal shift.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Bárbara tells Edie that they’ll be on a beach in Havana in four hours, but the cockpit finds out that the coordinates the hijackers want to go to aren’t anywhere near Havana.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the show’s music coordinator, because the needle drops in the first episode are all stellar, with Spanish versions of songs like “House of the Rising Sun” setting the mood.

Most Pilot-y Line: Bárbara tells Imogen to keep saying “66 times 7” in Spanish to help her smile.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Hijacking Of Flight 601 is entertaining and looks great; we just wonder if this thriller/soap hybrid is going to maintain dual tones throughout the series.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.