“Rendezvous” – Aired on November 4, 2022
Writers: MW Cartozian Wilson & Sumerah Srivastav
Director: Cheryl Dunye
Grade: 4 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
Note: This review was published little over two years after the episode aired, but written without any knowledge of the events taking place in future episodes.
Ben and a very ill-looking Cal are visiting Alex’s office and the news are dire: Saanvi’s month-long immuno-therapy treatment has not worked and Cal’s cancer has progressed. According to Alex, he has “days rather than weeks” left. She and Saanvi advise him to spend the rest of his time with his family, so that they can support each other. Cal nonetheless tells his dad to keep it between them because Michaela and Zeke are celebrating their third-year anniversary that evening. Ben, for his part, remains in total denial, insisting that Cal will not die.
This opening scene sets the tone for the most emotional outing of the season, without foraying into schmaltzy territory. “Rendezvous” succeeds on several fronts. Dialogues are lively, game changers occur in a meaningful way, past characters and events are integrated cleverly into the present, and the editing is stellar. It isn’t a perfect episode by any means, there is some hand-waving required at a couple of moments and callings continue to be arbitrary, but none of that significantly hinders the progress of lucid story telling.
The celebration part of the dinner scene is a wonderful, aptly directed by Cheryl Dunye, giving a glimpse into a rare moment of happiness shared by the show’s main characters, in which every attendee is praised by another about what they mean to each other and to the celebrated couple. Jared’s praise of Zeke and Michaela is especially noteworthy.
Nevertheless, this is Manifest, so these moments cannot last long and often portend some type of calamity. Sure enough, a calling invades the room, shaking the tables and glasses. Ben, Michaela, Saanvi, and Cal find themselves back inside the 828 plane, with turbulence causing lights to flicker out of control. Seats are empty, except for Jared, Olive, and Zeke sitting asleep next to each other. When the calling ends, those three are of course surprised to hear from the others that they were in the calling. For some unexplained reason, Ben, Michaela and Saanvi claim that it “felt foreboding,” as if they were “running out of time.” Why not add a line or two in the dialogue to add meaning to their claims instead of relying on the tiresome “simply use a calling to advance the plot” instrument, I don’t know.
They immediately brainstorm to foreground the important details of the calling. Saanvi remembers seeing Thomas trying to open a hatch in the back of the plane. For those who may not recall, Thomas is a recurring character who first appeared as a stowaway passenger on Flight 828 back in season 1’s “Unclaimed Baggage.” In fact, I would recommend a re-watch of that episode before viewing this one. In “Unclaimed Baggage,” we learned that Thomas (Sheldon Best reprises his role) was the fugitive boyfriend of Bethany’s cousin named Leo. Bethany, a flight attendant on the 828, helped Thomas escape from Jamaica where he and Leo had faced death threats as gay activists.
Basically, our heroes need to find Thomas to make sense out of the calling, but Michaela notes that Bethany has lost contact with him a year ago. As they are discussing this, Saanvi notices the needle of Logan Strickland’s compass (see season 2’s “Black Box”) hanging on Ben’s wall of Flight 828 memorabilia spinning out of control before it stops, pointing north. Michaela and Saanvi take the magic compass with them and leave in search of Thomas. Acting like a navigation app on a phone (except the voice), the compass directs them this’n’that way until they reach a building with the boiler room where they hid Thomas back in “Unclaimed Baggage.”
I have a question: is the needle behaving like google maps also a calling? Or is this a mere sci-fi sequence? I have regarded callings as brief moments of epiphany, lasting anywhere from roughly a few seconds to about a minute at the most. But if this magic-navigation compass is a calling, it goes on for a very long time, if not an hour, since Michaela and Saanvi walk with it to the ultimate destination. In that case, add one more check mark to the conveniences of the callings being used as plot devices.
Back at the household, Cal remembers seeing the bright light coming into the plane from a specific window, which helps Ben locate the occupant of that window seat. It’s Marko, the recurring Bulgarian character, last seen in “Romeo,” who had a special connection with Cal and was one of the test subjects for the Major’s experiments back in seasons 1 and 2. Cal is anxious see Marko at the care facility but can barely get up from the couch. Zeke and Jared volunteer to bring Marko to the house.
The B story involves Eagan the scuzzball who, picking up from the previous episode, is now working at the soup kitchen inside the historic Masonic Temple of the Omega Order building. Another worker (Carl Hendrick Louis) in the kitchen notices him venturing into a restricted basement area of the building and follows him. He scolds Eagan after seeing him stash a couple of tiles around some doors leading into passageways. He threatens to report him, but his interest is piqued upon learning that Eagan is a Flight-828 passenger and that a calling told him about a powerful rock on the other side of the door. In what could be deemed as one of the most ingenious convergences of A and B story lines in Manifest, he and Eagan force the door open and fall into the boiler room of the adjacent building where Michaela and Saanvi had just arrived in search of Thomas.
After a few words, the man notices a heart mark on the wall with “Leo” written in it. His voice shakes as he asks who wrote it. Saanvi tells him the story of Thomas, and lo and behold, he is Leo, Thomas’s long-lost boyfriend. With teary eyes, he says that he never got to reunite with Thomas due to the 828’s disappearance, but he never once stopped thinking about him. The magic compass does its trick again and points to the heart on the wall. Eagan hammers that part of the wall and discovers a tile behind with an image on it. He is convinced that the compass is pointing them to the Omega Sapphire because Logan’s grandfather (the original owner of the compass) was a freemason and one of the lodges that he worked on was the Masonic Temple with the soup kitchen. The boiler room, he concludes, must have been a part of that building at some point.
Meanwhile, Zeke and Jared are refused access to Marko because the Registry will not allow anyone to visit an 828 patient at the care facility. Jared pulls the cop-bullying tactics about his right to arrest anyone who tries to obstruct law-enforcement officers and the front-desk person named Zein (Remy Margron), who is merely trying to do her job, has no choice but to agree to letting them take Marko for the day. I am not particularly fond of this brief scene. Scare tactics by cops don’t sit well with me, even when they’re used by the charming Jared Vasquez.
Back at the Stone household, TJ and a frustrated Olive are trying to locate the rare Omega Sapphire. According to Olive’s research, the legend says that it bestowed “untold powers” on the Oracle of Delphi. TJ understands the source of his girlfriend’s anxiety. She is contemplating on how the sapphire could save Cal, if only they could find it quick enough. Luna Blaise is fantastic in this scene, and her synergy with Garrett Wareing pays off dearly in this emotional dialogue (and in a second one, later in the outing).
In the boiler room, Michaela and company have found more tiles with images and Michaela sends them via phone to Olive and TJ at home. Holy crap, they match those from the Al-Zuras tarot cards (read all about them in my review of season 2’s “Return Trip”). I have repeatedly admired Jeff Rake and the writing room’s ability to reference events from previous episodes, but “Rendezvous” exceeds all expectations even by their standards.
Olive sends back the image of the deck to Michaela and they start placing the tiles on the wall matching the numbers on the deck. Olive and TJ head downstairs to meet up with Ben, Cal, Jared and Zeke, the last two having just returned home with the catatonic Marko. At this point, we start oscillating between the scene at home, and the one in the boiler room, for a good reason (hats off again to the editing team). Once Marko is in Cal’s presence, he seems calmer and begins to move his hand. Cal understands that he needs colored crayons to draw something. Marko ends up drawing a volcano, one recognized by Olive as the image on the world card from Al-Zuras’s deck. At the same time, our friends at the boiler room complete their task of putting the corresponding tiles above the images on the wall, except that the Al-Zuras’s deck still has one more: the world card with the image of the volcano.
The only difference is that Marko’s drawing of the volcano has fire on it. Michaela points to the triangle-shaped grate at the bottom of the wall and uses Leo’s lighter to unintentionally start a fire beyond it. The wall literally gets grilled from behind, or something like that, and crumbles down, uncovering a large engraving of Ma’at the Goddess (discussed in season 3’s “Wingman”). In a small hole on it, Eagan finds the Omega Sapphire and takes it out as parts of the boiler room begin collapsing. Thomas’s leg gets trapped under a large piece of rubble and Eagan the scuzzball strikes again, running out in a hurry with the sapphire and locking the door behind him. Luckily (or should I say, miraculously?), they are saved by Leo who unlocks some other door to discover them inside. The unexpected reunion of the two lovers is beautifully performed by both actors.
But wait! How did Leo know to come there? Well, of course, it’s a calling! Why do I keep forgetting that in Manifest, injecting a calling into a scene at any moment as a plot device erases the need for a plausible explanation?
Eden gives Marko Cal’s snow globe with the volcano in it as a gift before Jared takes him back to the facility. According to Zeke and his Betazoid-ish mind-reading powers, Marko was happy to help them. As the evening progresses, Cal’s health deteriorates further. Ben stays by his side, giving him a shot of morphine, and Olive joins them a bit later. She realizes the gravity of the situation as the three collapse in each other’s arms in a lachrymose scene before Zeke and Michaela join them.
Next, we have a sequence of simultaneous callings with ash falling from above, seen in more than one occasion throughout season 4. Saanvi sees ashes coming down in Alex’s office. At Marko’s care facility, the snow globe on his lap explodes from extreme heat before ashes rain down on him. Next, we see a frantic Eagan in his hotel room terrified by the ashes coming down on him as someone outside approaches his room. Lastly, everyone at the Stone household notice ashes coming down from the ceiling. They are all drawn to the same calling and find themselves back on the plane.
The plane is shaking and we see once again Jared, Olive, and Zeke sitting together, along with Alex a few rows back. They should not be there but Michaela, Cal, Saanvi, and Ben have no time to ponder on that as they notice a fire spreading in the back of the plane. Somehow this means, according to Cal, that the death date is not just for the passengers, but for everyone! Michaela goes a step further: “It’s the whole world. We’re all gonna die.”
I am going to assume that the fire building in the back of the plane, along with the volcano in the snow-globe having erupted in flames, the references to the world card with the volcano from the Al-Zuras deck, and the ashes falling down, somehow cumulatively led the Stones to conclude that a globe-wide apocalypse is upon them, as flimsy and overly dramatic as it may rightfully sound to some viewers. For my part, I can accept increasing the stakes in a TV series, but I admit to not expecting them to skyrocket at this scale in a matter of minutes.
In the closing moments, Michaela sees Eagan holding the Omega Sapphire at the other end of the plane and approaches him. She urgently tells him to give her the sapphire. As he is about to hand it to her, he disappears! As Michaela screams in desperation, Ben sees a volcano erupting down below from the window of the plane. Why did Eagan disappear by the way? Because an intruder got into his hotel room, knocked him out, and stole the sapphire!
Wow! Just simply, wow! Manifest is not short on cliffhangers, some good some bad, but this has to be the most electrifying one in season 4, or maybe even in the series so far.
Last-minute thoughts:
— In one scene with Eden, the camera curiously focuses on her phone on the ground. It appears that someone “unknown” is on the other end, listening to the conversations taking place in the Stone household.
— When Jared wheels Marko back into the care facility, Officer Wicks (played by Charlie Kevin, first seen in “Relative Bearing” before Jared punched him in the face for his rough handling of an 828er) is waiting to arrest him for taking a patient without the Registry’s knowledge. Except that Wicks is not aware of Jared’s upcoming promotion to detective ranks and joining of the Registry. Jared gladly provides him that information with a wry smile on his face. I sense however that this isn’t the last we hear of Wicks.
— Eagan the scuzzball calling Leo “Kenroy” and “Kenster” before even asking for his name is annoying, but fits his personality well.
— For those into Egyptian mythology, here is more on Ma’at the Goddess.
Until the next episode…
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