“Call Sign” – Aired on March 30, 2020
Writer: Simran Baidwan & Ezra W. Nachman
Director: Joe Chappelle
Grade: 2,5 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
Hang on a sec! Zeke has only two more days left to live? What? How? Did I miss something? I thought he still had a couple of months at least, give or take a couple of weeks, maybe? Or something like that? But… two days?!?
Let me get this straight. Zeke had less than three days to live when he proposed to Michaela on his knees in last week’s stellar “Unaccompanied Minors” and nobody mentioned it? Michaela had time to stake out Jace and co. for who-knows-how-long in a car, bust the house, and arrest them, knowing during all that time that Zeke had less than three days to live, and yet in this episode, she suddenly cannot continue the interrogation because he has two days left and she MUST spend them with him? Ah yes, the wedding! How dare I forget?
The way this news gets dropped on viewers in the first few minutes of the outing, with zero hint of Zeke’s death date having drawn so near in anything seen previously – no, him saying, “I don’t want to spend my last days hooked up to tubes […] I want to spend it with you,” to Michaela at the hospital doesn’t count, especially when he then takes a day-long trip to Jones Beach while he only had (apparently) little over 48 hours left to live –, represents a microcosm of the larger issue tainting this hardly profound penultimate episode.
It’s flagrantly lop-sided plot-over-character balance, stemming from a series of narrative shortcuts, rushed occurrences, and inconsistent behavior by familiar faces, barely allows space for substantial drama to shine through and gives the impression that the writing room vowed to get from point A to B, at any cost.
Is this yet another outcome of ‘penultimatepisode-itis,’ the disease that has been crippling the TV entertainment arena for as many decades as I have been a viewer? The one causing penultimate episodes to be treated like fleeting after-thoughts, with little tender-loving care, because they solely exist to arrive at some variation of the announcement, “next week in the season finale…”? — Side note: Both the term and the diagnosis are my own, no credible source cited (read: Love it or leave it). In case you wondered how season 1’s penultimate episode fared, see for yourself.
Consider Jared, for example. Here is an hour that could have centered on him and finally served as the key stretch of his redemption arc by putting the emphasis on his respect toward Michaela, and his mature acceptance of her decision to move on. Instead, the episode spotlights his whaaat reaction to learning about the death date during a stake out for a meth ring and his inability to handle seeing Michaela in a wedding dress later. It could have also put aside a minute or longer to give Jared and Zeke a meaningful one-on-one scene about understanding each other, one that foregrounds how far Jared has come in terms of emotional magnanimity. Instead, we get a 20-second-long hey-we’re-buddies-now chit-chat + a handshake and a pat on the arm (and to think that the first season ended on the cliffhanger that had these two come to blows and shoot Michaela by accident).
Daniel Woodrell, one of the most respected novelists of the last few decades (his Tomato Red and Winter’s Bone have both been adapted for the screen) once said, “I’m always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.” As with Jared’s example, it appears as if “Call Sign” did the opposite, dealing the deck of cards from the bottom and even quitting on that halfway through. His is not the only example either. The episode’s main concern is to tick the predetermined boxes to advance the plot to point B in preparation for the finale. It seems to show zero interest in fleshing out human stories.
The shadow-trio’s hammy bus-escape scene (the mediocre version of an eerily similar one in The Fugitive) followed by their wondrous appearance outside the Stone household several hours later while the three detectives smack in charge of investigating them are present inside, but somehow have not heard a word of their escape, is another product of this disjointed narrative race to get to point B. Never mind how the trio even knew where the location of the wedding or what Michaela’s cell-phone number were.
Then, there is also Saanvi’s odd behavioral shifts. She frantically runs around having conniption fits throughout the episode in an effort to reach Vance or to regain access to her research, only to suddenly turn giddy and jolly at the wedding, eat cake while chit-chatting with others, watch people dance, and cheer the newlyweds on. Oh-kay!
That being said, all is not lost. There are a few bright spots.
Cal and Zeke, for instance, share genuine moments of heartwarming connection. In their first scene together, Cal expresses his innocent confusion about weddings, in the adorable way that children often do at that age. Weddings are “supposed to be fun,” or so he thought, but “what’s fun about…,” his voice trails before Zeke finishes the sentence for him, “… me dying?” Zeke has plans for Cal though. He wants his younger buddy to throw him a “killer bachelor party.”
Cal’s idea of such party consists of sugary foods, soda, and a game of monopoly! At one point, in an effort to cheer Zeke up, he reminds Zeke that nobody believed he could beat cancer before Flight 828. “But here I am,” he adds before giving Zeke a delightful hug. Zeke reciprocates as tears form in his eyes: “You threw me the best bachelor party I could ask for.” Now, there is a dialogue with bona-fide sentiments and insight.
The opposite case is the conversation between Michaela and Zeke the night before, when she attempts to convince Zeke one last time to go for a quick round of treatments.
In glaring contrast to the profound dialogues the two had in “Unaccompanied Minors” on this topic, this one comes across unnecessary and theatrically sentimental, with its conspicuous intention being to pull on the viewers’ heartstrings. It had the opposite effect on me, frankly. I cringed in the same way I do when I hear similar lines in soap operas when Zeke said, “No more meds. No more needles. Just an epic wedding, a honeymoon, and a last night in your arms.”
A second bright spot laboring hard to shine through in this otherwise mishmash of an hour is the interaction between TJ and Olive. TJ’s application for a grant to do research in Egypt has gone through and he will be leaving soon to dig deeper into his research on the Al-Zuras journal.
Olive is devastated to hear the news at first and takes it as a sign of a break-up. TJ makes it clear to her, thankfully, that he has zero intention to lose her forever. The reason why he is so adamantly pursuing the journal’s trail is precisely because he wishes to solve the death-date puzzle and secure their future together. He even asks her to join him in Egypt, but Olive refuses, citing her desire to spend time with her family. They are not giving up on each other and you simply have to love how these two – who could give summer clinics to adult couples on decision-making – handle these moments.
As for Saanvi, putting aside her wild behavioral shifts, her dilemma boils down how far the Major has gotten with her research. After seeing how the switchboard at the D.O.D. “lit up like a Christmas tree,” Vance believes that the Major must have cracked the code on the DNA anomaly research. She is therefore “cutting loose ends” now and Saanvi happens to be one of those. He advises her to go into hiding, but Saanvi wants to hear nothing of the sort: “I am not hiding from her! I am coming after her!” It’s a feel-good, hell-yeah moment for Saanvi fans that, in reality, makes little strategic sense, and that’s coming from a Saanvi fan.
Among the multitudinous narratives advancing simultaneously at thunderous speeds, the one with Ben having a vision of Flight 828 exploding is probably the most nuanced. Michaela, desperate for any sign to help Zeke, believes that Ben’s vision may have something to do with Zeke who was not even on the flight, to which Ben gently replies, “I think you’re grasping.” It’s a reasonable statement, considering that Michaela did not even have the same vision, but let’s not dwell on that here – On that note, the question of why the callings appear to all passengers at once, or only to some, or only to one, depending on the circumstances, has only one answer as far as I am concerned, until proven otherwise: Plot device.
Ben goes to the explosion site for the sake of following up on the calling and pleasing his sister, where he recognizes a man named Ward Attwood (played by Elliot Villar whose splendid performance as Vera was one of the standout stories of Mr. Robot’s final season) as one of the Flight 828 passengers from the pictures that he keeps on the wall of his Agent-Mulder basement office. Ward is admittedly guilt-ridden because he feels responsible for the flight’s disastrous outcome. He confesses to Ben that he was so “ready to hop in the jump seat and get home” that he rushed his pre-flight inspection in Jamaica to get the flight approved for take-off. He happened to come to the site because of the visions that are haunting him.
Ben, of course, understands exactly what Ward is going through. The seasoned expert of the callings that he is, Professor Stone conducts a Callings 101 crash-course to Ward, and he does so in such an efficient manner that before we even reach halfway point of the episode, Ward is convinced that he is indeed innocent and we never see him again. The post-flight inspection report that Ben provided matches Ward’s own pre-flight one, meaning he did nothing wrong.
As it turns out, Ward only happens to be a small link in the larger chain to uncover the purpose behind Ben’s calling because as he leaves Ward’s apartment, he is struck by the vision again, proving that its purpose has yet to be fulfilled. Ben notices a consignment store in front of him at that moment and stares into its window where, most likely (the scene cuts away), he sees a gift box belonging to his mother in which she kept her wedding veil for Michaela to wear on her own special day in the future.
This becomes quite significant later because doubts had begun to creep into Michaela’s mind about the wedding, making her question if she made the right decision to marry Zeke. Did she perhaps pull the plug on him by not insisting that he continue the treatments? She carries this train of thought so far that at one point she sounds as if she only said yes to Zeke in desperation, not because she necessarily wanted to, just to see if the callings would signal something about how he can be saved. Hours passed and nothing happened, so she is now getting cold feet. She finally reaches panic mode at some point and asks Grace to call off the wedding.
Luckily, this is when Ben walks in (what timing by our hero) with the box containing her mom’s veil that he recovered at the consignment store. Earlier in the episode, Ben showed some old taped footage of Michaela trying on her mom’s wedding dress when they were children. The dress was lost, because dad had gotten rid of mom’s stuff after her death. Michaela takes the fact that the calling (vision) ultimately led Ben to recover their mom’s veil as a positive sign and decides to move forward with the wedding. During the ceremony, she briefly has a vision of her mother sitting in the audience and smiling back at her, which solidifies her belief that she made the right decision after all.
There is nonetheless more gloom on the horizon for Michaela.
At the start of the episode, Michaela, Drea, and Jared are separately interrogating Jace, his brother Pete (Devon Harjes), and Kory, the skeevy meth-ring dudes with shadows caught at the end of “Unaccompanied Minors.” A million-dollar worth of meth is recovered at their operation site, but none of the three capitulate under questioning.
Truth be told, Michaela is only interested in them because she remembers hearing the calling “let him go” as she was arresting Jace in the last episode, and hopes that it may somehow have a connection to Zeke, thus help her save him. This is a stretch to say the least on Michaela’s part (similar to the situation with Ben’s vision) but let’s roll with it, right? Do we still roll with it though when Jared asks what he can do to help and she solemnly replies, “Get me conviction”? In what way does a conviction of the skeevy shadow-trio help Zeke, and how on earth can that conviction happen in less than 48 hours even if that were the case?
This leads to Jared’s bizarre accosting of Jace by the bus, a scene serving no apparent purpose, unless I missed something, other than to underline Jace’s horrid nature, in the same way that his extra four punches to the guard’s face are intended to do in the ham-fisted bus-escape scene later. Jace is on pace (rhyme unintended) to become the next hate-target of Manifest viewers, joining an elite group of flagitious one-dimensional characters such as Cody the jerkwad, Jansen, Griffin, and sleazy Billy.
The skeevy shadow-trio have the last word in this hour when they kidnap Cal in the evening who was hanging out (alone, mind you?) in the front yard after everyone left the wedding party. Reminiscent of the three shadows that haunted Cal in his room at night, their shadows first envelop him from behind before he is snatched away.
Jace calls Michaela, who is on her way with Zeke to their ultra-short honeymoon, and gives her the ultimatum that ends the episode in the most cliché’d way in the land of cliffhanger endings: “Now, you listen, bitch! You have two choices. You get us back our stash or you bury your nephew. […] I warned you. Now you’re gonna pay” [ominously humming sound getting louder, culminating in three drum thumps before the screen goes dark].
Last-minute thoughts:
– Cal gives a small toy car to Zeke to remember him by. Noted, just in case. Manifest has a track record of making good use of neat moments like this in later episodes.
– Toward the end, Ben has yet another vision of the plane exploding while checking on Eden at night, meaning that his discovery of mom’s veil was not the final chapter for that calling either.
– Zeke looked horrifying in the mirror scene. His skin color was metallic gray and… ice dropped from his body when he slapped his chest! He looked a bit improved in the later scenes, thankfully. More lighting, surely (!)
– Hello Dr. Cardoso (Joel de la Fuente)! His first appearance since “Pilot,” which aired 28 episodes and a year and a half ago! Talk about a nod to the past. Wow!
– I only touched on the bus escape a couple of times in passing. No need to belabor a scene filled with contrivances, showcasing two of the dumbest guards in existence.
– Vance better get “the ticket to Havana” ready quicker next time someone urgently needs one/him.
– In another obligatory plot advancement brought on by the heavy-handed insertion of the ‘two-day-left’ addendum, Zeke had to reveal his death date to his mom Priscilla before the wedding. It undermines the brilliant dialogue the two had in the previous episode at the hospital, one day earlier I presume, during which Zeke visibly intended to hide his fatal condition from mom. We now learn that, at the same time, he wanted her to come to his wedding to be held the next day. He is forced to tell her the truth only after she tells him that she will not attend the wedding because she refuses (good for her, by the way) to be in the same room with Zeke’s dad. Soooooo, Zeke was somehow expecting to keep her mom in the dark about this although he wanted her to attend his wedding, two days before his death, with most of the attendees aware of his death date? Come on…
– Remind me again… Why did Mr. Stone get rid of their mom’s “stuff” after her death?
– Can you tell me from the top of your head, dear reader, if you remember the Major’s name? Yeah, I couldn’t either. Does it even matter? Probably not, considering that it was revealed ten weeks ago and hardly ever mentioned again.
– The shop where Ben found their mom’s box is named Sam’s Knitwear. Chalk one up for the category of “otiose details.”
– So, does Ward also continue, like Ben, to get the vision of the plane explosion after Ben leaves his apartment?
– The rector marrying Michaela and Zeke is played by Jim True-Frost, who also played “Prez,” one of the main characters in The Wire.
Until the next episode…
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