“Coordinated Flight” – aired on February 3, 2020
Writer: Matthew Lau & Martha Gené Camps
Director: Marisol Adler
Grade: 4,5 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
Manifest continues to build on an entertaining second season with another well-balanced outing. The show’s success in fabricating a plethora of small and large-scale storylines that somehow remain connected for the most part is perhaps its most underrated asset. It allows, by extension, room for (1) throwbacks to scenes from earlier episodes without having them appear out of place, (2) nods to characters mentioned or seen in the past without deviating from the narrative at hand in the current episode, (3) and character growth, spread over several episodes, while keeping the viewer preoccupied with other worthy storylines.
Are there some clunky sequences along the way? Sure. Does one episode or another inevitably suffer from narrative overload at times due to frantic pacing? Every now and then, yes! Yet, keeping the stakes high in a serialized sci-fi/paranormal genre involves taking risks as long as they contribute to world-building and result in compelling stories. Manifest passes the test much more frequently than it fails because, in my opinion, planning and preparation appear to be notable priorities for showrunner Jeff Rake and others in the writing room.
“Coordinated Flight,” taken from this angle, is an episode that perfectly fits the Manifest lore, assuming it is acceptable to talk of a “lore” for a show that has yet to reach the middle portion of its second season.
It starts with yet another flashback – speaking of Manifest lore – with Grace and Olive at an amusement park, two years after Flight 828’s disappearance. Grace attempts to convince Olive that they need to move on with their lives, but Olive insists that Ben and Cal are not dead. They stop by a tarot reader (Johnnie Mae) at Olive’s insistence. The reader intuits that Olive lost someone who completed her and advises her to look to the future with hope as tears form in Olive’s eyes – Jenna Kurmemaj reprises her role as young Olive.
Flashback over, back to the present day where the Church of the Believers is being ransacked by Xers. Olive witnesses them beating churchgoers including Isaiah who first appeared in “Turbulence” as a suspect in the murder of Kelly.
We then cut to Agent-Investigator-Professor Stone’s office at the university where he informs TJ on the results of his research into the compass with the peacock engraving in the back – given to Michaela by Logan in last week’s “Black Box.” It turns out that the engraving was not part of its original design, meaning that someone added it later. The news of the attack on the Believers appears on TV as Ben hears the calling “Save her.”
Meanwhile, at the official Jared-Tamara (the bartender from “Black Box”) flirting headquarters (read: the bar), Tam’s brother Billy (Carl Lundstedt) and Jared are having an unfriendly exchange of words. Jared tells Tamara, “kids who fall into the wrong crowd tend to become bad kids,” in what is perhaps the most ironic sentence delivered by Jared this season so far, considering where he ends up by the end of the hour. Thankfully, these one-dimensional bar scenes in both last week’s and this week’s episodes remain extremely brief.
Grace is seen next, driving with Cal in the backseat and talking to Ben on the phone. A blue vehicle runs her off the road, causing an accident. The casual approach of the police officer taking Grace’s statement irks Ben who astonishingly arrived at the scene almost as fast as the first responder. Grace feels pain in her stomach, which stops Ben from unleashing any further on the officer, and they head to the hospital to have Grace and the baby checked.
The doctor first says “she” is doing fine, giving away the gender of the baby, unknown to Ben and Grace until then. No time to rejoice though, because upon a closer look at the ultrasound’s monitor, the doctor suddenly wants more tests done on the baby, leaving Ben and Grace worried. Now knowing that the baby is a girl, they deduce that the calling “Save her” must have referred to her. The doctor later informs them that the tests turned out nothing and that they can go home. Correct me if I am wrong here but it appears that the doctor’s ‘doubt’ period was merely a plot device to keep Ben and Grace preoccupied a bit longer, and thus, oblivious to Olive’s growing attachment to Adrian’s church.
At the precinct, much to the dismay of Michaela and Drea, Isaiah remains tight-lipped about the attack, claiming that he did not get a good look at the perpetrators’ faces. Michaela does not gain any ground when she confronts Adrian either. He is on board with the members’ desire to remain quiet in order to avoid further retribution.
Drea finds footage of a man appearing to be in a hurry to get in his car as three guys with baseball bats run by him near the Church. At first, she and Michaela believe him to be a passerby who may prove useful in identifying the attackers. His name is Walter (JD Williams) and he is brought in for questioning, except that his fidgety answers give away his active participation in the attack as an Xer himself, which he denies at first.
Seeing how emotionally distraught her mother is at the hospital following the accident, and hearing her father and TJ conclude that there is a coordinated set of assaults on 828 passengers orchestrated by the Xers, Olive decides to come clean to Michaela about witnessing the attack and being a member of the Believers. She identifies Walter from a line-up of suspects to confirm his participation, which gives Michaela and Drea leverage to pressure Walter into giving up the others in return for a deal.
Walter tells them about some “club” where they hang out and an NYPD team is rapidly assembled by Michaela to lead an operation on the establishment. Jared and Captain Bowers are present during Michaela’s briefing to the team at the precinct. Bowers is not on board with the plan at all, but lets it move forward nevertheless because she fears that it would look like retribution against Michaela “the whistleblower,” if she did not.
The Captain still gets her chance to scold Micheala when the operation bears no fruits because the Xers had abandoned the club before her team got there. Michaela is certain that somebody must have leaked the news of the operation to the Xers, but Bowers is not interested in entertaining yet another hunch from Michaela. Even the presence of a blue car, likely to be the one that ran Grace off the road, does not convince Bowers.
Episode writers seem to deliberately paint the Captain’s portrait as the mulish authority figure and it works frustratingly well here, because her injudicious opposition to Michaela blinds her to the possibility of a mole, portending sinister consequences for the precinct. Jared being that mole serves to further amplify the malaise originating from her lack of judgment on people surrounding her.
Jared’s reveal achieves its intended shock value because not only is he the mole, but the same scene also reveals that Tamara and Billy are Xers. Wait, there is more! Billy accompanies Jared to a plush limousine waiting outside the bar and opens the door. Sitting inside with a smile on his face, ready to chat with our (no longer) good detective is Simon, Ben’s so-called colleague at the university who played a major role in him getting hired back in “False Horizon.”
Is Jared’s spiral to oblivion complete now? It depends on your interpretation! Frankly speaking, his good-guy image had already begun to fade away back in Season 1. This episode brings it to a decisive end, and does so even before the Simon revelation as far as I am concerned. I am referring to the moment when he utters to Billy, “Any friend of yours is a friend of mine,” and toasts glasses with the dimwit!
“Coordinated Flight” is confined for the most part to moving the pieces forward within the Stone family’s (including Michaela) immediate surroundings. It has almost no sci-fi content and it is devoid of Vance and Saanvi. Even the B storylines such as Jared’s downfall and Zeke’s efforts to make amends carry significant connections to Olive and Michaela.
Speaking of Zeke, following a beneficial session of soul-searching with the addiction-recovery group, he decides to set things right with people from his past . Except that it does not work out as well as he hoped. Far from it!
He meets with a blonde named Courtney (Danielle Burgess) at a café to apologize for having disappeared over a year ago. We learn quickly that they were lovers whose main past time comprised of getting high on drugs. Courtney is still using (she pops a pill in her mouth) and harbors ill-will toward Zeke. There is no indication at all that they are married during this meeting that ends with Courtney leaving even angrier than when she arrived, which adds to the bizarre nature of the twist coming later when she shows up at Michaela’s apartment.
She appears at the door as Michaela and Zeke were preparing to have dinner and introduces herself as “his wife” to Michaela. Zeke’s whaaat expression creates further ambiguity, as if he did not know himself that they were married. It comes across very strange at this point, I must say, that Zeke would make no mention of their married status during their talk at the café, let alone hide that fact from Michaela, especially considering that Courtney is alive and living in the same city. I am going to exercise my right to reserve judgment on this development until future episodes.
The most emotionally charged scene of “Coordinated Flight” takes place at the Stone household, led by a five-star performance by Luna Blaise as Olive. She decides to follow Michaela’s advice and bring her parents up to date on her ties to Adrian’s church. Needless to say, Ben and Grace do not react well, which in turn ignites fireworks because not only does Olive firmly stand her ground against the barrage of parental rebuke coming her way, but also dishes out some potent scolding of her own!
She rigorously defends Adrian and his teachings despite Ben and Grace explaining that Adrian is exploiting people finding themselves in difficult situations. She pushes back by saying that it is not Adrian’s fault if people are too narrow-minded to accept Flight 828 as a miracle. Ben and Grace insist that Adrian’s actions are reinforcing the public’s fear about the passengers being different than human beings, to which Olive exclaims “You ARE different!”
It is a powerful scene to watch and one on which it is extremely difficult to pass judgment. While it is clear that Ben and Grace make valid points, it is also their fault that this shouting match is taking place in the first place because they ignored Olive for so long, failing to notice how far under Adrian’s influence she had slipped. Although I did not agree with Olive as a viewer, I cannot deny that, once I put myself in her shoes, I found it hard to dismiss her arguments off-hand.
The resulting impasse of this family quarrel also functions as a prelude to Ben’s desperate attempt to stop Adrian in the closing seconds of the outing. “Coordinated Flight” depicts, with great efficiency I might add, Ben’s growing perception of Adrian as a bona fide threat. Once the said threat forms a direct connection to a member of his family, Ben’s doctrine of personal ethics goes haywire and short-circuits into the parameters of vigilantism, which is consistent with how he handled the Cody-the-jerkwad problem back in “Cleared for Approach.” Hence, while the curtain-closing scene of Ben accosting Adrian at the Church is supposed to come across as a ‘wow’ moment (and it does), it is a well-earned one to the astute viewer, thanks to the terrific build-up.
There are three Ben-Grace scenes in the hour and the most significant one takes place when Grace notices the peacock engraving on the compass in Ben’s Mulder-like investigation room in the basement. It triggers her memory back to that day with Olive at the amusement park, a nod to the flashback scene at the beginning. The tarot reader apparently gave Olive a card with the exact same image, stating that the star on it represented hope for her future. “We should look to the future with the possibility that everything will turn out well,” she added, the last part of which Olive repeats to her mother at the hospital, reminiscent of the “Tout est pour le mieux” quote that Pangloss incessantly repeats in Candide. I can only hope that Olive turns out right, unlike Pangloss did at every turn in Voltaire’s masterpiece.
Last-minute thoughts:
– The rhetoric of Channel 12 anchor on Ben’s TV is cringe-inducing. He sounds more like a conspiracy theorist than a news anchor, spewing one-liner after another such as “two of these so-called passengers hi-jacked a plane” or “another one robbed a bank.” He is played by the real-life TV newscaster Kent Shocknek who is obviously skilled at doing drama. His acting résumé is impressive considering it’s strictly confined to playing the role of a TV personality.
– Oddly little screen time for Cal. We do not even know what kind of injury he sustained from the accident, if any at all. Where was he anyway during the family quarrel?
– A genuine conversation takes place between Zeke and the moderator of the addiction-recovery group. He is the one who advises Zeke to make amends with people that he hurt in the past. He adds that it is not about making them feel better, but rather about “taking stock of how far you’ve come and seeing yourself someone worthy of being loved.”
– Jared is still employed at the precinct, which I found surprising. It is true that he is no longer getting high-profile cases, but is that all? I thought after the deeply damaging testimony of Michaela during Zeke’s trial, he should at least get suspended.
– “You did us a solid today” line by Billy is a good example of how a twist can effectively (and suddenly) be introduced by a brief statement from one of the on-screen characters.
– How on earth is the hang-out location of the Xers called a “club” is beyond me. A dump? Basement pigsty? Contaminated warehouse?
– I am curious to see where the increasingly miasmic tension between the Captain and Michaela is headed. I promise to be here for the drama!
– We see TJ holding Olive’s hand at the church. What is his endgame? Is he also buying into Adrian’s fairy tales or is he suffering through it just to please Olive? Or is he simply looking out for her? The jury is still out on whether the writing room can create a gripping storyline out of this particular duo’s synergy or not.
– Am I supposed to read something into the camera briefly zooming in on Isaiah’s face at the church toward the end, when he looks at Adrian leading the chant, “Blessed are the Believers”?
– Am I the only one who finds the score of the ending credits hauntingly beautiful? I watch the ending credits every week just to get my weekly fix of that music!
– Drea is to report on fingerprints to be collected from the blue car. I hope there will be a follow-up on this. I know, I worry about too many minor details, don’t remind me.
Until the next episode…
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