“Destination Unknown” – Aired on May 6, 2021
Writer: Eric Haywood & Marta Gené Camps
Director: Claudia Yarmy
Grade: 4 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
We have passed the midway point of the season and Manifest seems to justifiably focus more on its long-arc story with the high-concept mystery surrounding Flight 828 and its passengers. While this particular mystery exists since the series opener, it is now more nuanced with its stakes raised exponentially. Showrunner Jeff Rake and his writing crew have done a legitimate job of world-building and crafted multiple new layers to the mystery while expanding its parameters in terms of space and time. The show is far from being perfect, and this season has lacked the groundbreaking occasional episode the way the first two had them, but Manifest continues to be highly entertaining, if not addictive.
And perhaps those are the reasons why I have a bit of trouble understanding the obsession with running almost a half dozen storylines in a 42-minute episode, more than halfway into a 13-episode season. Last episode suffered from the same virus, except that the two A-stories in this one are much better paced and genuinely detailed, thus somewhat covering for the flaws dispersed all throughout the minor storylines. I would even argue that “Destination Unknown” would have been better off if a couple of those minor storylines were avoided all together, thus allowing time to give even more substance to the narrative surrounding the sapphire-related DNA anomaly found at Eureka via fleshed-out, additional dialogues between Vance, Saanvi, Dr. Gupta, Troy and other scientists (see my note below about the scene involving Dr. Cooper).
“Destination Unknown” opens with shots of Ben getting “poked and prodded” as the guinea pig of the Eureka project, to the beat of instrumental techno music in the background, under the supervision of Dr. Gupta and Saanvi. There is a crystallized form of sapphire found in his system, the same one that is also found in the systems of Jace, Pete, and Kory, all three kept in water tanks at the facility.
While Saanvi and Gupta are explaining all this to Ben and Vance at the lab, Ben gets a vision of a bunch of passengers’ photos on the screen at the lab bursting into flames. As he is leaving to investigate the calling, Saanvi informs him that they received a parcel from Vatican containing a piece of driftwood (the cliffhanger from “Precious Cargo”). They agree to give each other updates on their respective searches as Ben leaves the facility.
Cal’s getting ready to attend a book fair and Michaela and Zeke are helping him get a box of books together. Michaela finds a card from the Al-Zuras deck with a volcano on it. As soon as she picks it up, the volcano erupts, and the card burns her hand. She decides to stay behind to investigate the calling. Zeke wants to help, but noticing Cal’s disappointment about having to go alone, he agrees to go with him.
We find out later that Cal had ulterior motives in wanting Zeke to accompany him. He has a crush on a girl named Stella (Winter Donnelly) and he can use Zeke’s help in reading minds to get the scoop on how she feels about him. That little rascal! Zeke gives Cal a little life lesson on why it would be “shaky grounds” to use their abilities for personal gain. Chalk up another one in the plus column for Uncle Zeke. And yet, he is faced with a similar dilemma himself when Michaela arrives home later and tells him about Jared and Sarah flirting and how she is happy for Jared, and Zeke senses Michaela’s feelings of jealousy. So, will he follow his own advice and not use his ability to read Michaela’s mind in the future? Oh, the irony!
Angelina, in the meantime, is scrolling through Olive’s social media photos with great envy, almost as if she is obsessed with her. This bizarre development soon turns eerie when Angelina becomes obsessed with imitating Olive. By the end of the hour, we see her in Olive’s room, wearing Olive’s sexy dress, using her make up, accompanied by an ominous background music as if to echo the beginnings of Hedy’s destructive obsession with Allie in Single White Female (1992). Dear showrunners, I beg you, please don’t turn Angelina into that! And what is this sudden trend of inserting scenes of how Eden stops crying whenever she is picked up by Angelina, first from Olive’s arms in “Precious Cargo,” and now from Grace’s arms in this episode? Is there some supernatural force at work here or is it an unescapable component of this ham-fisted narrative?
Ben meets Michaela in his Agent-Moulder basement home office. They are trying to solve the connection between their two visions. Ben cannot remember every passenger that he saw bursting into flames, nor can the two of them find a connection between that and the tarot card, until Michaela notices the roman numeral XXI on top of it. Ben checks who was sitting in row 21 of the 828 flight and recalls specifically seeing the photo of a Rachel Hall (Sarah Hunt), the passenger assigned to seat 21A, bursting into flames in his vision.
Michaela and Ben drive to Rachel’s address but find instead her sister Hannah (Erin Fritch) living there with her husband Jonas (Robert Eli) who used to be married to Rachel before she disappeared on Flight 828 — quasi-replica of what Michaela went through in the beginning of the series when she came back five and a half years later to find Jared married to Lourdes, her best friend.
Jonas and Hannah do not know Rachel’s whereabouts because, according to them, things turned sour when Rachel’s behavior became so erratic that they had to get a restraining order against her. Michaela and Ben eventually locate Rachel who is now working for a cleaning company.
At Eureka, there is a bit of tension in the research team of scientists and Dr.Gupta’s disagreeable disposition toward her team members doesn’t help. During a general meeting, Dr. Bustamante questions her directive about everyone having to report their findings to Saanvi. Gupta bluntly informs him and the others sitting around the table that Saanvi is the reason why they all still have jobs because she made the discovery that the so-called “best and brightest scientific minds ever assembled under one roof” could not collectively make. Ouch!
And you can still feel the ripple effects of that “ouch” when, in a later scene, Saanvi and Troy request an update from Dr. Bustamante on his progress and he turns dismissive, mockingly noting that he will give his full report in due time since radiology is not Saanvi and Troy’s strong suit. Troy replies immediately that he read one of Dr. Bustamante’s papers and delivers the funniest line of the hour with the widest grin on his face: “Your writing is not that hard to understand.” Hahaha… Troy, please don’t change!
Saanvi and Troy run a DNA test on a sample of the biological matter found between the shards of the driftwood and find them to be roughly 6000 years old, originating in a type of peacock that had gone extinct, which makes it astonishing that they have the same DNA anomaly as Ben and the meth heads. Troy speculates that the peacock may have disappeared 6000 years ago and recently reappeared, which would not be that far off considering the peacock sightings at key moments in past episodes.
Jared and Michaela delve into the police report of Rachel’s car accident about a month prior to her trip to Jamaica. In fact, it was the injuries resulting from the accident that caused her migraines in Jamaica, ultimately forcing her to cut her trip short and return to New York on Flight 828. Jonas remained in Jamaica because he did not want the prepaid money for the hotel room go to waste. Lovely husband, ain’t he?
But, there is more…
It turns out that Jonas was driving the car that crushed straight into Rachel’s to cause the accident. Michaela notes that he literally “T-Boned” her car. Furthermore, in the only report of the violation of the restraining order, called in by a neighbor, Hannah did not press charges against her sister. Something is not adding up, and Michaela and Ben are determined to dig deeper. They first speak to the housekeeper (Susan Varon) working for the neighbor who reported the violation, and boy, is she a fountain of information! According to her, Jonas is never home at nights, and when he happens to be there, he is either “shouting” or “throwing things.” She doesn’t understand why Hannah stays with him and adds that Rachel stops by to help Hannah, not to cause trouble.
A more realistic picture is beginning to form in the eyes of Michaela and Ben, one that depicts Jonas as the abusive husband who first controlled Rachel, and now Hannah. Rachel is only trying to protect her sister. Hannah later opens up to Michaela about how Rachel had everything, whereas she was always left in the background, basically admitting that she wanted what Rachel once had, and turned a blind eye at first to the signs of Jonas’s true nature because he made her feel good, like the center of his world.
While Michaela was talking with Hannah, Ben was stalking Jonas who went into his office at night. The problem is, Ben notices that Rachel is also in the building, with a gun, ready to kill him in order to protect her sister. Luckily, Ben stops her just in time from committing murder before the authorities arrive in time to arrest everyone. Michaela’s and Ben’s scenes are interposed over one another, switching back and forth, in such beautiful way that both events appear, justifiably, to be the essential pieces of a single story. This is first-rate editing work by Mark Conte and it’s the accumulation of quality elements like this, along with some great performances by the three guest actors Hunt, Fritch, and Eli, that turn this bottle story into one of the best A-stories of Manifest in a single episode. The inner conflict of each character is conveyed across the screen with great accuracy. The last scene of the two sisters talking to each other through bars at the precinct under the watchful eye of Michaela, is bittersweet, touching, and redeeming at the same time, because the episode succeeds in making us care about them.
Back at Eureka, Troy introduces Saanvi to a nerdy gamer friend of his named Patrick Cooper (J.D. Martin) because he believes Dr. Cooper can explain how a 6000-year-old driftwood can resurface after so much time. There is a lot of seismic babble-talk here that I found interesting, but the key moment takes place when Saanvi learns that the driftwood was found near a dormant volcano that possibly coughed it up (a theory by the nerd Patrick). This three-way conversation is, by the way, an emblematic illustration of the additional, fleshed-out dialogue of which I speak in my introductory paragraphs above.
She rushes over to Dr. Gupta who earlier told her that it was discovered in “south of Armenia.” Next, we see Saanvi put two and two together to realize that the dormant volcano is Mount Ararat in Turkey,** which is believed to be the final resting place of Noah’s Ark which, in turn, makes the piece of driftwood part of the vessel! If so, this is not only a stunning discovery but one that changes everything previously known about the link — or the non-existing link, depending on your perspective — between science and the divine.
** What is the point of referring to the location of Mount Ararat, located in Turkey, as “south of Armenia”? Would anyone refer to Chicago, USA, as “1 hour south of Canada”? Is Zurich, Switzerland, “just south of Germany”? Technically, sure. But would one refer to Zurich that way? Never. Why not just say “the piece of driftwood was discovered in eastern Turkey” instead of “it was discovered in south of Armenia”? Because of this, the sequence during which Saanvi began putting two and two together came across forced and artificial, not to mention that anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge about Noah’s Ark would have known where she was going with it once Mount Ararat was mentioned.
What if Noah’s Ark experienced the same phenomenon as Flight 828? This is the reason why Vance throws a fit to Saanvi when she mentions the passengers learning about this. He exclaims, “you have to stop thinking of yourself as a private citizen. You are now a government operative with top secret security clearance working on this country’s most highly classified secrets. We can’t risk this falling into the wrong hands!” From now on, Saanvi’s loyalty is the facility and no one else, not even Ben, and Vance ain’t joking here! He makes Saanvi promise out loud that she will keep everything mentioned in that room a secret. It doesn’t take long for Saanvi to suffer the consequences of her promise either, as she is forced to lie to Ben when he texts her for an update on the research.
“Destination Unknown” ends with Cal seeing a volcano erupt in his snow globe, mixed in with visions of Ben, Michaela, Cal, and Angelina holding their heads in their hands and screaming, reminiscent of the same terrifying calling as in “Tailfin,” the season-3 opener.
Last-minute thoughts:
— Grace is checking out prospective locations for a new café to honor her brother.
— There is no way the previous owner of the café left Prince’s guitar hanging on the wall! Come on…
— Jared and Sarah have their first kiss together in the presence of red tulips that Jared brought to her doorstep. I am rooting for them. I know it’s a lot to ask from Manifest writers, but please, dear Jeff Rake and co., don’t rock the boat too much for these two!
— Holy crap! Everyone’s using the term “lifeboat” now… Sigh!
— Michaela continues the be the voice of reason, calling Ben “Inspector Gadget” when he comments on Jared flirting with Sarah, and senses quickly during the Jonas-Hannah-Rachel investigation that everybody is either lying to them or to themselves.
— When Ben arrives to the entrance of the building, the outside door is locked. But, hey, no worries for our citizen-agent-detective-locksmith Ben Stone. All he needs is his Swiss pocketknife and… voilà!!
Until the next episode…
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