“Mayday: Part 2” – Aired on June 10, 2021
Writers: Jeff Rake & Matthew Lau
Director: Romeo Tirone
Grade: 4 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
Note: This review was published more than two years after the episode aired, but written without any knowledge of the events taking place in future episodes.
I found out within the first 15 seconds of third-season finale “Mayday: Part 2,” much to my chagrin, that I spoke too soon in the beginning of my review of “Mayday: Part 1,” when I wishfully predicted that Angelina’s story line seemed to have run its course. The opening scene is a flashback that takes us back to the boarding of Flight 828 where Adrian and Angelina first meet. She shows him a religious booklet and says, “we could talk.” Adrian has zero interest in doing so, he just wants to get back to his seat.
We zoom back to the present day where Adrian’s sermon-like speech to other Flight-828 passengers that began in the last episode in some warehouse continues. As he points to Angelina among the group, he underlines that he should have listened to her back in the plane: “This blessed angel tried to show me The Light, but I wasn’t ready.” In a corner of the warehouse, Eagan is busy convincing Randall and Erika (Nurit Monacelli) that “it’s time to take action” against those conspiring against them, starting with Vance, Ben, and Michaela. Later, police gets an alert of Randall and Erika robbing a gun store. Tthe latter gets arrested while Randall escapes back to the warehouse to inform Adrian and Eagan who realize that it’s only a matter time before Erika spills out their location.
“Mayday: Part 2” makes a valiant attempt to tidy up in 43 minutes the messy second-half of the season. Surprisingly, it succeeds to a certain point, especially considering that it had to follow three mediocre episodes in succession. It does so by striking the right balance between suitable action scenes and meaningful dialogues, as well as between pay-offs and eleventh-hour shockers.
Back at Eureka, we pick up right where the previous episode ended. Cal has disappeared, Grace and Ben are naturally freaking out. They insist that the tailfin must go back into the ocean to bring back their son, while Dr. Gupta and Vance are trying to calm them down.
Gupta and the Stones engage in a brief faith-vs-science argument during which Gupta, tearing up, mentions the memory of her grandmother on her deathbed telling a much younger version of Gupta that “she was going to live among the stars,” and how that motivated Gupta to build a telescope to see if she could spot her grandmom. “But I couldn’t, because that’s not how it works,” she concludes, to emphasize that science, not faith, will bring Cal back. This is a good example of what I noted above as meaningful dialogue, because that heartfelt memory briefly mentioned by Gupta, while meaningless to Ben and Grace at that monent, plays an important role later in the episode.
Another example takes place, earlier during their argument, when Gupta affirms Cal’s disappearance as proof that “temporal effect can be accessed by Dark Lightning,” and that the process is repeatable since the same happened with the fragment from Vatican (see “Bogey” and “Compass Calibration”). Ben and Grace are angry and couldn’t care less about Dr. Gupta’s scientific enthusiasm, but her observation will also come into play later in the hour.
Vance appears to side with Gupta in keeping the tailfin at Eureka and continuing the experiments, only to later tell Ben privately that they are on the same team. No surprise there, since he has bent over backwards to appease Ben at every turn since time immemorial. He just did not want Gupta to know that he will ignore an order from the Pentagon because if she did, Eureka “would be wall-to-wall with federal troops.” Um, shouldn’t Eureka already be wall-to-wall with federal troops? Okay, okay, I will not go on yet another rant about how loosely the most important high-security facility in the world (and possibly, in history) has been guarded throughout Season 3.
Ben is relieved to learn that Vance made some calls to his connections within the Coast Guard to sneak the tailfin out of the facility. They merely need to figure out where to drop it into the ocean. Ben will stay at Eureka to work with Vance and Saanvi, while Grace will head home to see if any of Cal’s drawings can provide a clue.
The other main story line of the hour (multiple A story lines in a single episode is a staple of Manifest) follows Michaela pursuing Adrian and Eagan because her callings have convinced her that they are going to get someone killed. Zeke and Jared tag alone because… Michaela, of course!
Eagan is indeed gung-ho about taking action while Adrian is reluctant to go ahead with any plan until “the smoke clears.” As expected, Erika gives the location of the warehouse, and also as expected, Michaela, Drea and Zeke are too late. The group has left the warehouse. Eagan and Randall are headed to Vance’s house to take care of business, so to speak, while Adrian and Angelina wait things out by some river for some reason. Michaela and the team learn from evidence left behind in the warehouse that Eagan and Adrian must have targeted Vance’s house where the Director’s son Warren is currently by himself, busy playing video games.
Back at Eureka, Dr. Cooper (who first appeared as the nerdy gamer friend and colleague of Troy in “Destination Unknown”) implores Vance to stop Gupta’s experiments because each test causes another earthquake. He will nonetheless collect data from the latest tests to see where a fault line may lie on the ocean floor to help find an appropriate location. The techno-geographico-babble of how they ultimately determine the location lands quickly into hand-waving territory.
In short, Grace sends Vance, Ben, and Saanvi several photos of Cal’s drawings and when they are put together, they shape into the star constellation that Gupta, in a big twist, recognizes as the one that she used to look at with the telescope in search of her grandmother! “Perhaps faith has a seat at the table after all,” she confirms, much to the relief of Ben, Vance, and Saanvi. She has just joined their team. Literally seconds later, they figure out where the one particularly relevant electrical storm will take place, and the tailfin is transported and loaded to a US Coast Guard boat at the dock within the hour.
The episode kicks into a higher gear in terms of action in the last 20 minutes with Eagan and Randall breaking into Vance’s house and taking Warren hostage, as well as with Ben and Saanvi heading into the electrical storm on the horizon in the boat helmed by reluctant captain (Paul Hickert).
Vance soon joins Michaela, Jared, and Zeke outside his home. Jared goes into the house to negotiate with Eagan and Randall while Zeke, who can magically sense what everyone around can feel, updates Michaela and Jared (through the ear piece) in realt time on what takes place inside Eagan’s head although he cannot see him fro the outside. Oh Please… Have I already mentioned that I don’t care one bit for this out-of-the-blues power of Zeke that seems to have come into existance for the sole purpose of plot advancement at will? Pretty sure, I have.
Jared pits Eagan against Randall to distract them while Vance infiltrates the house. Together, they neutralize the two rogue men in a run-of-the-mill action scene. The more intriguing tidbit in this sequence is Jared noticing a photo of Vance with his all-purpose friend Emmett that we have seen several times in previous episodes. Jared recognizes Emmett from when he picked him up back in “Water Landing” (neat use of a quick flashback here) to take him to Agent Powell who fed Jared the false story of the Major’s body being dumped in a bog in New Orleans. He flatly asks Vance to come clean with the true story of the Major’s murder, to no avail. As we know, Jared made it his mission to resolve the Major’s murder to help his girlfriend Sarah, the Major’s daughter, find peace of mind. When he confronts Michaela later, she can still not admit the truth to him about Saanvi’s murder of the Major. More on Jared and Sarah at the end.
As for Ben and Saanvi, they get closer to the electrical storm to drop the tailfin, but the reluctant captain gets a call from Director Zimmer, ordering him to abandon the mission. Ben and Saanvi are obviously not on board with this and Saanvi runs out to the deck in the storm to release the crane and drop the tailfin. In the process, she falls into the water herself. Ben jumps in after her – don’t ask how they get away with any of this within on an unstable boat in close proximity to an electrical storm – and saves her at the last minute. As he swims to the surface with her, he sees the tailfin disappear in a flash as it’s sinking deeper below him!
This apparently leads to Saanvi being “redeemed,” because she learns that she can get the callings again when she and Ben find themselves in one after getting back on the boat. There are other callings in the episode, but this one is the most relevant. They are back on Flight 828 and Cal is the only one in the plane. Cal tells Ben that “it’s not over.” He says that he has to go, and that is the only information Ben will get. Michaela is also in the calling, and she follows a trail of blood in the walkway that leads her to Angelina’s seat number. The brainiac that she is, it’s enough for her to understand that Angelina represents great danger.
And she is right…
A guilt-ridden Adrian is not on board with Eagan’s plan, worried that “blood will be shed” because of him. He adamantly tells Angelina to leave him behind and go to her guardian angel. Angelina, for her part, now profoundly convinced that Eden is that angel, arrives at the Stone household to kidnap her. Grace tries to stop Angelina in a nicely filmed, brief slow-motion sequence before the scene cuts to an Angelina with fire wings (seen from Eden’s perspective) baptizing Eden in the bathroom before she kidnaps her out of the house, with Olive trapped in her room and unable to save her little sister.
Worse, we next see Grace upstairs on the floor, barely alive, with a knife stuck in her stomache and blood on the floor. In perhaps the biggest shocker of the hour, an older version of Cal shows up and hugs her, telling her that he knows what needs to be done and that “it’s okay,” as Grace closes her eyes. Side note: there is some great camera work throughout this whole sequence of Eden’s kidnapping that elevates the tension. Hats off to director Romeo Tirone!
But wait! We are not done with cliffhangers! Before the curtain shuts down on the season, we see Gupta leaving Eureka to close up shop for the day. She stops dead on her tracks by the elevator when she sees a panicked Captain Daly (hah, one of my favorite recurring characters) in his pilot seat in the cockpit before the whole plane disappears in the blink of an eye!
Well done Jeff Rake!
And what a shame would it have been for the showrunner and the viewers had Netflix not picked up Manifest for a 4th season and it all ended right here following NBC’s announcement of its cancellation! Kudos to whoever made that decision at Netflix.
Back to the underused and underrated Jared and Sarah saga…
You probably remember me saying this before but Sarah and Jared’s relationship has been one of the bright spots of Season 3, especially Jared’s slow-burning discovery of Saanvi’s involvement in the Major’s murder. Unfortunately, it has been used as a B or C story throughout the season and “Mayday: Part 2” is no exception. In fact, Sarah is kindly brushed aside and Jared’s realization that Saanvi killed the Major serves solely to crescendo the tension between him and Michaela. He feels betrayed by her for having kept Saanvi’s murder a secret. His last conversation with Michaela even hints at a break-up with Sarah because he cannot stay in a relationship with her based on a lie, pretending not to know who killed her mother. Will we even see Sarah again? It would be a shame if her role ends up being nothing other than ‘the girl in Jared’s tragically ending love affair.’
Last-second thoughts:
— The older Cal is played by Ty Doran whom you might recognize if you watched the Hulu-based shows American Crime and All Night.
— I love how as soon as Jared enters the house, he asks a scared-shitless, sweating-bullets, mouth-taped Warren if he is all right. No, Jared. The kid’s not all right, not that he can tell you so anyway.
— I choose to ignore that the writing room rehashed the Jared-Michaela romance late in the season. I ranted enough about it in my previous review. Please don’t bring it back again.
— After the less-than-15-second-long ankle-bracelet releasing sequence from the last episode, Olive pulls another astonishing feat by somehow scraping the top-layer drawing on a paper to make the below-the-top-layer drawing pigment appear almost crystal clear. She should be in the next installment of Mission Impossible as part of Ethan Hunt’s team. At the same time, that very scene foregrounds the acting skills of Luna Blaise and Athena Karkanis with a lovely mother-daughter exchange that will make any viewer feel warm and fuzzy.
— There is a whole sequence that takes place involving Director Zimmer who made her first appearance in “Deadhead” that I did not care to elaborate on, although Patricia Mauceri always delivers fine performances in that recurring role. I presume her appearance is designed to add to the ongoing tension between Gupta and Vance, but it didn’t do anything for me other than getting a chance to enjoy Mauceri’s acting skills.
Until the next season…
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