[And there will be spoilers ahead .... ]
First and foremost: Of course Sam Nelson was not going to sacrifice any innocent person's life for anything he had planned for the train he had hijacked. His threatening to sacrifice that man was just a ploy to get the people running the trains in Berlin to do what he needed them to do.
This raises, at least to me, the interesting question of can you predict what a character will do in a TV series or movie based on who the actor was, or more specifically, what characters the actor has previously played. Even in The Wire, in which Idris Elba played someone high up in a drug cartel in Baltimore, he displayed a conscience and a heart. That in itself was why I was sure that Sam, who was an honest man with a big heart in the first season of Hijack, wouldn't trade in an unthreatening person's life in the second season.
Of course, actors occasionally do switch from playing heroes to villains. Elba has indeed done that a few times. Ronald Reagan played a bad guy for the first and last time in his acting career in The Killers. He would go into politics after that, and become Governor of California and then President for two terms. Not the greatest President, in my humble opinion, though almost any predecessor looks good in comparison to the current occupant. I was surprised to see Eddie Redmayne play a villain in the brilliant Day of the Jackal -- after his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything -- but he was charismatic in Jackal, and I saw, after a bit of research, that he's played lots of villains in his career.
Back to Sam, we also in the third episode of this second season find out that the reason he hijacked the train was to save his former wife from the brutal people who hijacked the plane in the first season, and in between the two seasons killed his son. Lots of tension building up, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.
See also Hijack 1: Don't Miss It! ... Hijack 2.1: A Tale of Two Vehicles ... 2.2: What Is Sam Nelson Really Up To?
