“Unaccompanied Minors” – Aired on March 23, 2020
Writer: Jeannine Renshaw & Marta Gené Camps
Director: Andy Wolk
Grade: 5 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
The best scenes of “Unaccompanied Minors” are three one-on-one dialogues, each loaded with emotional consequences, each written with care, each carried out with purpose by passionate performances. These scenes have another common denominator: they showcase Zeke as one of the interlocutors. In fact, Zeke is under the spotlight in this outing more than he had ever been in any of the previous ones. Everyone and everything seem to pivot around him, and as a result, the contribution made by the episode to his character development is nothing less than impressive. Naturally, for such an episode to click on all cylinders, a potent performance by its star would help.
And boy, does Matt Long deliver…
Let me rephrase: Long knocks it out of the ballpark.
This is patently Zeke’s hour!
If I am marketing Long’s talents, this is the episode I am placing on top of my vault, so to speak, to show as exhibit A if I need to champion his talents. And to think that he pulls it off while sporting dirty-purple ears!
The hour begins a few weeks ahead of where we ended “Course Correction,” with the prematurely born Eden now at home and the family aware of the shadows haunting Cal in his room’s walls. Ben’s position also seems to have shifted with regard to Adrian’s views of the 828 passengers being agents of the apocalypse. In a subdued dialogue with Michaela that kicks off the hour, he is no longer categorically rejecting Adrian’s gloom-and-doom interpretation. He is even quoting scripture, à-la Adrian, to advance that they could indeed be false prophets without realizing it, and that perhaps the callings are there to “lull [them] into obedience for some end-of-the-world scenario,” also à-la Adrian.
Michaela, for her part, is moving her own goalposts the opposite direction, questioning God as she pleads with him to save Zeke. “How am I supposed to believe that this is for some greater good if you just let him die?” she asks looking at the skies from a swing set, before adding, “I need to understand. I don’t want to lose faith. Don’t make me.”
Michaela is desperate for good reasons. Zeke is running out of time and Saanvi’s efforts have not stopped the spread of his frostbite.
In a session with the addiction-recovery group led by the moderator (Allan Walker) seen previously in “Coordinated Flight,” Zeke confesses to having a hard time focusing on improving himself while knowing that his life will soon draw to close – which begs the question, do the people in the recovery group know the full story about his death date? The wise (and still nameless) moderator advises Zeke to make peace with himself and others to reach closure.
Next, we have three calling sequences in succession.
While Michaela is walking down some street, a teenager (Oliver Paris Gifford) runs out of a store with the clerk chasing him, yelling at him to stop. Michaela runs the thief down but stops short of arresting him when she suddenly hears the calling, “let him go.” Michaela does just that and lets the kid board a bus after he explains that all he stole was a candy bar. Except that it wasn’t, because the store’s clerk (Ricky Garcia) tells her that the kid actually stole cold medicine. Michaela’s curiosity is piqued because cold medicine is used to make meth, and when Jared informs her later that several other stores in the area have lately been robbed for cold medicine, the two suspect the involvement of a large ring of meth dealers.
They track down the driver of the bus (Dazmann Still) that the teenager thief boarded after Michaela let him loose. His name is Kory and he cannot remember the kid. He points them toward the person who can provide them with camera footage from inside the buses.
In the meantime, Ben is unable to stop Eden from crying at home, but Grace comes to the rescue by singing a lullaby that Cal has used before to put her to sleep. It also triggers a brief-but-horrifying vision for Ben, one of a subway train with three lights moving fast toward him, a vision that, by his own admission, made him feel like he was “going to die.”
Another calling comes TJ’s way when, walking with Cal in the city, he gets a vision of a series of murals, with the last one being a red phoenix, making him feel “sad and hopeless. Hearing TJ’s experience later at home, Grace reminds everyone that there are several murals in subway stations with phoenixes. A quick search on the web leads TJ to recognize the red phoenix on a mural in Bowery Station. Wait for it, this all makes sense in a compelling way by the end of the episode. But before we continue with Ben and TJ heading to Bowery Station, let’s visit Saanvi and Zeke at the hospital.
Following the debacle with the retroviral serum back in “Airplane Bottles,” Saanvi claims to move forward more cautiously with her research into reversing the DNA anomaly, while still making it clear as a sunny day that she will continue with her efforts to “fine-tune” the serum’s formula in order to bring them back to being “ordinary,” and ultimately leaving death dates and callings behind.
Surprised (and worried) that self-experimentation is still on the table for Saanvi as an option, Zeke reminds her of the passage in the Al-Zuras journal about people suffering from not accepting the callings. Saanvi dismisses the theory that the only way around the death date is to accept the callings and that all else is a “path to disaster.” And she should dismiss it, frankly, if she is indeed the unyielding woman of science that Manifest depicts her to be. “Medicine has come a long way since bleeding and leeches. There’s so many illnesses that were a death sentence and now have a cure. Why is this any different?” Yep, that answer screams Saanvi and totally fits the portrait of the nerdy, research-driven, scientifically awesome doctor that the show has so far painted for her.
She also has to deliver some bad news to Zeke whose MRI results show new damage to his muscles. He is still freezing to death and cracks are beginning to show in the poor guy’s resolve despite Saanvi’s visible determination to find a cure. Little does she know at that moment that she will soon find herself in a dire situation of her own in a much later scene, when her key card does not work while trying to enter her lab. According to two security guards who abruptly appear behind her – and spit out classic phrases such as, “I’m afraid we have to ask you to leave” and “Please, if you’ll come with us,” that would induce rage in anyone in Saanvi’s position at that moment – her hospital privileges have been revoked. We last see her frantically asking who authorized this decision, while being escorted out by the guards.
Zeke, for his part, is visited by his mom at the hospital (the first of the three dialogues I noted at the start). Mom is heartbroken to see her son’s physical condition, hooked up to machines, patchy skin, ears turning purplish-dark-blue, bloodshot eyes, etc. It’s nice to see that Zeke and her mother are finally on good terms, cherishing each other’s presence. At the same time, it’s hard to watch him hold back in some of his reactions to what she says because he has not told her about his terminal condition. She believes that he is recovering from burns and smoke inhalation at the nightclub. He must therefore moderate his emotional responses when she expresses her love for him with sentences like, “you’re all I’ve got” and “I just feel so lucky to have my son back.” The strain felt by Zeke is delicately conveyed here by Long, and Maryann Plunkett holds her own just fine as the happy, yet concerned mother.
Back to Ben and TJ at Bowery Station…
On the way down the stairs, TJ picks up a box of matches that an old man in front of him dropped and returns it to him in an act of kindness. Once they locate the wall with the red phoenix downstairs, they recognize the same man standing near it, looking despondent with teary eyes. They realize that he is about to commit suicide and tackle him to the ground before he can jump in front of the approaching train. They notice the matchbox again in a plastic bag of his belongings while he is asleep later in the hospital bed. It is actually a music box and when Ben turns its handle, it begins playing the same lullaby that he heard Grace sing earlier to Eden at the house!
We are still in the early stages here of a quite fascinating chain of coincidences, that amazingly manages to avoid coming across as pat or contrived, leading all the way to Zeke’s reunion with his long-lost dad! The intriguing way in which these randomly scattered coincidences tie into a series of meaningful connections, only proves that there exists no far-fetched sequences that a creative writing team and a dexterous director cannot render plausible.
Cal and Grace (and Eden) are also at the hospital, visiting Zeke. Ben tells them about the match box and the lullaby. As Grace begins to murmur it to remember the lyrics, Zeke recognizes it, quite shocked that anyone else even knows the song. It was his ‘long-gone’ dad (he had abandoned Zeke after his sister’s death) who wrote that lullaby and used to sing it to them at night. Zeke mentions that he even had a little music box for the songs he used to make up. Ben has heard enough. The man whose life he and TJ saved at the station must be Zeke’s father!
This gives way to the second of the three dialogues I mentioned in the beginning. Zeke refuses to see his father at first. He is bitter and angry with his dad for not only having abandoned his son after Chloe’s death, but also for blaming him for the tragedy! It takes a solemn and heartfelt effort by Ben to help Zeke come to the realization that he should nonetheless see his dad one more time, if for no other reason than for emotional closure, reminding Zeke of the moderator’s words of wisdom at the recovery meeting. Long is once again stellar here portraying the conflicted Zeke while Josh Dallas reciprocates the effort by playing a genuinely concerned Ben, doing his best to maintain the fragile balance between sounding caring and being pushy.
Back at the precinct, Drea found the footage of the kid in the bus and identified him. Jared and Michaela catch up with him at school and engage in a technobabble-oriented talk that only computer geeks can fully decipher. Apparently, some online individual with the handle name “Try3” was telling him to drop off the stolen cold medicine bottles at the bus itself. Drea tracks his online payments and they match the bodega thefts. “Try3” is likely associated with a meth ring and he has a name: Jace Baylor (James McMenamin, “Donuts” from Orange is the new Black). He is a bad dude with a history of violence, previously jailed for possession and sale of meth, etc. His release of four months ago, as noted by Jared, coincides with the start of the robberies in the area.
Back at the hospital, Zeke’s meeting with dad must have apparently been productive because when Michaela stops by to check on him, Zeke fills her in about his dad’s unexpected resurfacing and informs her that the two are going on a drive to Jones Beach.
He also drops a vital piece of news on her lap. He is stopping the treatments!
This launches the third of the the three dialogues noted above. Michaela is initially devastated to hear Zeke give up on treatments but she respects (and reluctantly accepts) his decision when he explains later that he would rather spend his little time left on earth with the woman he loves instead of being trapped in a hospital room. He simply wants to go out on his own terms. The profound bond between the two, as individuals and lovers, are on full display in this exquisite scene, played elegantly by Long and Melissa Roxburgh. If tears don’t form in your eyes, check your heartbeat.
Michaela holds another important conversation with Jared later in a car while the two are staking out Jace Baylor’s address. It is an honest, definitive talk about where their relationship stands, or rather, where it must stand. Jared seems to have made peace with the fact that Michaela’s heart now belongs to Zeke. Above all else, neither of them wants their friendship to end. The scene ends up being the copybook dialogue on how two mature adults should handle a conclusive break up.
Back to the task at hand, they witness Kory showing up at the location. Unwilling to wait for back-up, Jared and Michaela bust in the house and catch Kory and Jace at the basement in what seems to be a meth lab. As Michaela is about to handcuff Jace, she hears again the calling, “let him go.” It repeats a few times, but not enough apparently, because Michaela is just not willing to let these criminals loose!
Zeke is back at Michaela’s apartment following his day trip with his father and ready to share more of his plans with her. He wants no regrets left behind, so first things first. He gets on his knees and proposes to her. Her answer: “Yes. Yes, I will,” as she bursts with joy, puts on the ring, and kisses him.
But… but… this is Manifest and we shan’t possibly end on a serene note!
Hence, we find ourselves back in Cal’s room where he sees the three shadows on the wall again as the scene switches, accompanied by a terrifying score, to the police station where three identical shadows appear on the wall of a cell, belonging to Jace, Kory, and their yet-to-be-named third partner. We have evidently not seen the last of this skeevy trio.
Last-minute thoughts:
– No flashbacks or dreams to begin the episode? Stop the press!
– Ben tells Grace that he is locking up his Agent-Mulder office at the basement for a while, in order to spend more quality time with the family. Grace appears happily surprised. Dear Grace, I would not count on that pattern holding. Just a hunch!
– I would like to know Ben and Grace’s thought process about letting Cal sleep alone in his room while knowing that three creepy shadows have visited him more than once.
– Drea teases Michaela twice in this episode about Jared possibly trying to “get back in [her] pants.” Michaela blows both pedestrian attempts off saying that he is just a friend. The conversation in the stake-out car seems to confirm that.
– Jared’s brief-yet-snarky “yeah” followed by a low-key chuckle (when Drea jokingly reminded him that Michaela is just a “loaner”) drew a loud laughter from me!
– Is Drea settling into the cliché’d role of the computer-geek at the precinct? I hope not.
– Jared is at a loss for words when Michaela tells him about Zeke’s condition. He is also not about to accept that Zeke, Michaela, and others are walking around with death dates stamped on them.
– The camera work in the meth-lab bust scene is terrific. Credit to director Andy Wolk for making the episode’s only action sequence as exciting as possible. Note: I am not counting Micheala chasing the kid or Ben and TJ tackling Zeke’s dad as action scenes. Battle me if you will.
– The phoenix is a symbol of rebirth, renewal, and strength (source: TJ). Add that to your separate file of useful Manifest anecdotes.
– Michaela’s malaise about disobeying the calling by arresting Jace confirms the obvious: the writing room plans to continue exploring Al-Zuras’s prophecy about how fighting the callings will result in calamitous consequences.
Until the next time…
PS1: Click on All Reviews at the top to find a comprehensive list of my episodic reviews.
PS2: Follow Durg on Twitter and Facebook