“Relative Bearing” – Aired on November 4, 2022
Writers: Laura Putney & Ryan Martinez
Director: Harvey Waldman
Grade: 4.5 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
Note: This review was published little less than two years after the episode aired, but written without any knowledge of the events taking place in future episodes.
We are in the aftermath of the bombing and fire that marked the climax of “Squawk.” Remember the ‘X’ers from season 2, the group of people who hated the 828ers and believed them to be freaks of nature? They were featured in a season-long story arc that had Jared infiltrate them as a spy to help law enforcement ultimately take them down. Well, it turns out that Vance arranged to make it look like Xers were behind the chaos at the compound. Captain Colvin wants the shell cases found at the scene taken to ballistics to match it to a gun. Later, Jared meets with Vance and Emmett in a car. He thinks this situation is “not fixable,” and he will turn the shell casings to ballistics. His gun has never been test-fired so it should not appear in the records. Vance advises strongly against it and tells him to “lose the casings” in order to not leave things to luck. Jared questions Vance’s moral compass before getting out of the vehicle.
Well, Vance was right. Jared should not have left things up to luck! Later in the hour, at the precinct, Captain Colvin orders Jared to turn his weapon in for analysis, because the evidence found on Erika’s bullet wounds point toward a standard NYPD issue gun, and Jared was present at the compound when she was shot. Colvin advises Jared to contact his union representative!
Angelina takes shelter in her mother Noelle’s house (Heidi Armbruster, first seen in season 3 opener “Tailfin,” reprises her role as Angelina’s nervy, religious mother).
Cal, whose chronic coughing should worry anyone and everyone by now, is convinced that they are not doing enough to save the lifeboat. Olive tries to encourage him not to give up. Ben, for his part, is agonizing over not only Eden’s refusal to see him as her dad, but also over her belief that he is the “bad man.” To make matters worse, he finds out later in the episode that Angelina is still alive because she directly calls him for instructions on how to feed Eden, as if to add salt to his wound on purpose!
Zeke is feeling guilty about taking a life and worried about his inability to control his rage. He runs into the coughing Cal. Weirdest conversation takes place during which each expresses his concern for the other – “you know you can talk to me right?” they tell each other. Yet, they both respond that they are doing just fine and dandy, although they are clearly and getting worse by the minute.
Most of the above events take place within the first 9 minutes and build the background of the plot lines, pointing toward some reckoning moments to come for the main characters. Once again, these are too many plotlines to run simultaneously, a recurring issue with Manifest, but in this case, a few extra minutes of running time (48 minutes) help a bit and dialogues don’t feel as rushed as they did in many other such episodes with running times between 40 and 45 minutes. Another success of “Relative Bearing” is its insistence on adding nuances to previous storylines and fleshing them out further, instead of adding new ones or creating new mega question marks, which comes a pleasant surprise considering that the multiple-episode, space and time-consuming search-for-Eden story line had concluded in the previous episode. Nothing feels rushed in this outing and there are hardly any contrivances.
Michaela gets a calling where she sees water beneath her feet under a glass with colorful fishes, plants, and blood flowing in from either side – for some unknown reason, when Michaela describes the calling later to Ben, she leaves out the incoming blood and simply says the water was “filled with colorful fish, plant, bubbles.” Strange!
The description reminds Ben of a passenger named Sam Wile (Josh Sauerman) who owns an aquarium supply company with his wife. Michaela pays him a visit, only to find him murdered in blood and the house trashed. She calls Jared who drops the funniest line of the hour when he arrives, “828 crime scenes seem to be my thing.” Hahaha, yes indeed, Jared. It has been four seasons of just that, brother!
When Jared sees Sam’s body, he recognizes him from a protest in the street from a while back pitting 828ers against the Xers. We see Sam in a flashback being unnecessarily roughed up by a police officer (Charlie Kevin) who also saw 828ers as “freaks,” before Jared comes to Sam’s help and ends up knocking the officer down with a punch – only then did I realize that it was the same officer who had an attitude toward Jared earlier in the episode (I had wondered why) during the compound-area-investigation scene in the aftermath of the explosions.
Jared also remembered that Sam had a strange looking wedding ring, which is missing from his dead corpse. They decide to “waylay” (Micheala says, I learned a new verb) Sam’s wife for some answers.
Back at the Stone household, Olive, once again proving that she is the smartest of the bunch, tells Cal that there must be another way to get information from the divine consciousness because Eden was never in the glow (the supposed location of the divine consciousness), and yet she still possesses the ability to get callings, thus also putting into question Saanvi’s theory that callings are memories from the passengers’ time in the glow.
Oh, how I fantasize about Olive showing everyone with irrefutable evidence that this divine consciousness theory is codswallop, so that it can be dropped in the trash bin, never to be picked up again! But alas, it appears that it is here to stay.
Ben, after another failed attempt at bonding with Eden (she runs out of the room yelling for ‘Mommy’), realizes that it’s time for him to lose the beard since Eden associates his bearded face with the “bad man.” This leads to an emotional father-daughter bonding scene (tears allowed for fans of these two) during which Olive shaves her dad’s beard the way Grace used to when she was alive.
Meanwhile, Eagan the scuzzball is out of prison and running his own agenda once again. Adrian catches up with him and roughs him up in a bathroom (“I was midstream!!” Eagan yells), blaming him for ratting out the location of the compound. Eagan blames Angelina for torching Adrian’s “private Idaho.” This is when we learn that Adrian dropped her off in West Chester after picking her up on the road in the closing scene of “Squawk.” He also informs Eagan that she is on the FBI’s wanted list and there is a $20K reward for information on her whereabouts. Wheels are already turning in Eagan’s head. His next stop is the house of Angelina’s mom and his plan is to blackmail her into buying his silence about Angelina staying with her. He settles for her valuable golden watch, for now.
Jared and Micheala ‘waylay’ Sam’s wife Lana (Lauren Hooper) as planned. She tells them that they divorced six months ago because he became obsessed with helping everyone, taking people in off the streets and cashing out funds out of their family business account. He never got over their divorce, according to her, and kept wearing his wedding ring (which was missing from his dead corpse, as noted above). Jared contacts Drea to pull up the Wiles’ bank records to see where the family-business money was being channeled.
It turns out that, for the last six months, he was withdrawing $2K every month before going to his required check-in at the Registry. Furthermore, Drea learns that after each visit to the Registry, he was personally pulled in for questioning by Captain Colvin himself! She pokes around in his office and finds Sam’s wedding band in the Captain’s coat pocket. She takes the ring, calls Michaela and Jared, and informs them that she is heading straight to Internal Affairs.
Except that Colvin spots Drea coming out of his office from a distance. After realizing that the ring is missing from his coat pocket in the office, he chases Drea to the rooftop. Jared and Michaela soon arrive to assist Drea. Colvin admits to “skimming the collection plate” by taking Sam’s money but not to killing him: “Why would I do that? You don’t kill the golden goose,” he says. He then suggests that they act as if nothing happened, so that he can retire in peace and Jared can get his gun back, and he and Drea can avoid jail time. Jared, who has been reevaluating his moral compass throughout the episode wants none of it, and they apprehend Colvin.
Later, Jared gets another piece of good news. Vance has once again pulled some strings and had the ballistics report altered on the casings and the bullet. They now match some gun that hasn’t even been manufactured, meaning that Erika’s case will file under cold cases, probably never to be solved. Another chapter of ‘Vance to the rescue’ reaches its end.
Ben has invited Anna Ross to the house in hopes of surrounding Eden with a familiar face so that she can feel safer in the house. Anna was the woman with whom Angelina and Eden stayed for a while as we saw back in the season opener “Touch-and-Go.” She had also initially hidden from Ben the fact that they were staying with her, explaining later to him in “All-Call” that she had only meant to protect Eden because she had been misled by Angelina who described him as a terrible person. In any case, Ben hopes that Anna can help Eden understand who is part of her family and who is not.
Angelina, for her part, gets in touch with Cal and manages to persuade him to let her talk to Eden. In return, Cal wants her to tell Eden that Ben is her father and that she is not her mother. Really, Cal? You really believed she would do that? After all that she dragged you through back in season 3, even though your parents welcomed her into their house back in season 3, and topped it all by killing your mother? Oh dear Cal…
Needless to say, Cal’s plan goes awry. Ben happens to walk in on Angelina singing a song to Eden over the phone’s speaker. He turns it off and goes berserk on Cal who had already spent two years trying to win the affection of his dad back after the events that led to his mother’s death at the hands of Angelina. Cal does not have the emotional wherewithal to handle another such period. He leaves the house later with his backpack, leaving a note behind that says, “Dad, you were right. It’s best if I am not here right now.”
Olive, the high-IQ representative of the show, realizes that sapphire has been at the center of every unexplainable phenomena they faced so far (Ben’s glowing hand, the ark piece, the tailfin). It has also been referenced multiple times in history through mythical, religious, and legendary stories. She concludes that sapphire played a role throughout history whenever humans have been in communication with the divine. Her theory is that passengers can use sapphire to get unlimited callings.
Four short scenes in succession show Noelle asking Angelina about Eagan, Michaela getting an evaluation under the supervision of the officer in charge of the compound incident, Eagan walking into a precinct with Angelina’s “wanted by the FBI” post (so much for his promise to Noelle to keep his lips sealed after collecting her watch), and Eden watching the volcano erupt in the snow globe in her bedroom (like Cal did back in “Destination Unknown”).
Remember Colvin denying killing Sam on the rooftop? That meant that the killer is still on the loose. This is confirmed when we see Anna opening the front door of her house after hearing footsteps and getting assaulted with a knife, filmed from the point-of-view of the killer. Why would someone kill Sam Wile and Anna Ross? Is it an Xer or someone we know? To be pursued in later episodes…
Back to Zeke, who is on the cusp of a mental and emotional breakdown, or something like that. He stops by a liquor store and starts drinking a bottle. After he dumps the half empty bottle in the garbage bin on the way home, he trips over Cal’s body lying down on the sidewalk. He is holding Cal and desperately trying to get him to wake up as the episode ends, and credits begin rolling.
Last-minute thoughts:
– Earlier in the episode, when another patient session goes terribly wrong for Zeke, he is dismissed by the social worker in charge.
– The scene with Olive shaving Ben’s beard was sentimental, as noted above, but the shaving itself did not have any impact on Ben gaining Eden’s sympathy.
– Olive tells her sapphire theory over a phone message to TJ. Remember her boyfriend TJ who left for Egypt on a scholarship (“Call Sign”) back in season 2?
– To reinforce the “Jared’s moral compass” narrative, writers included a back story with flashbacks of his conversations with his dad (Carlos Gomez), and a birthday-party dialogue scene between the two in the present, showing how proud his father has been of Jared being an honorable police officer.
Until the next episode…
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