“Carry On” – Aired on March 2, 2020
Writer: Jeff Rake & Simran Baidwan
Director: Nicole Rubio
Grade: 5 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
Here is an hour of highly entertaining character-drama mixture that lays its foundation on an A story loyal to the larger “it’s all connected” ethos of Manifest, surrounds it with nuanced B and C stories, good balance between self-contained episodic stories and the overall arc, characters with initiatives, action with a purpose, and puts it all in motion through a script clicking as efficiently as a Swiss watch. Add to that robust combination Nicole Rubio’s dexterity with the camera (her directorial résumé is burgeoning over the last few years, Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago P.D), and you end up with Manifest’s best outing so far this season.
A minor surprise, Manifest breaks its season-long tradition of beginning an episode with a flashback. Instead, the hour kicks off with Ben having a nightmare about searching for TJ in the burning nightclub and waking up in a sweat before he can locate him (or did he? He was looking at something in horror before the nightmare ended).
At the site of the fire, Olive’s bracelet is found in the hand of one of the six dead bodies recovered, leading Michaela to conclude that it’s TJ, although the burnt corpse is unidentifiable at that moment.
Back at the precinct, our flinty Captain Bowers points to the “rogue” Xer Isaiah as the prime suspect during her briefing to the officers among which are Drea and Jared. As the two whisper back and forth, Drea is startled by how firmly Jared defends the Xers, claiming that the incident could not have been their doing. She is even further surprised by Michaela’s odd reaction when she tells her about it because Michaela, for her part, does not seem taken aback by the news. She confesses that she has lately been suspecting her ex-fiancé of leaking information to the Xers, especially since she found out about him surreptitiously copying her case files in “Emergency Exit.” Drea has heard enough, she is ready to tail Jared’s ass, and has zero interest in hearing Michaela’s ‘reluctant ex-fiancé/ex-partner’ rhetoric. She better follow her lead or else (gotta love Drea’s character growth in just a few episodes, despite the secondary nature of her role!).
Simon visits the Stone household in a gesture of goodwill – wink, smile, chuckle. On his way to the bathroom, he secretly takes pictures of a set of photos on the wall next to the bathroom. They show images of the peacock, tarot card, Zeke’s “missing” sign, the image of the man carrying a woman in the Al-Zuras journal, even some photos from Ben’s Agent-Mulder wall of investigation where he had people and names connected through strings. Correct me if I am wrong, or consider it nit-picking, but most of these photos were not on the wall next to the bathroom. Did Simon walk all around the house, including Ben’s investigative office in the basement?
Anyhoo, Michaela arrives at the house after Simon leaves and delivers the bad news about TJ to Olive in a heartbreaking scene that ends with the Stone family group hug (minus Cal).
Next, a large group of Xers (this many hotheads remaining anonymous is a hefty but tolerable stretch), including Jared and Billy, are listening to Simon’s speech that contains all the tropes of an underground-conspiracy group’s rhetoric with quotes such as “185 walking time bombs” to portray the Flight 828 survivors, and scare-tactic questions like “which one of them will be next to detonate?” Once the meeting adjourned, Simon privately asks Jared to keep sleazy Billy in check (no shit Sherlock, someone needs to!).
In what constitutes the C story of the hour, I presume, Zeke visits Saanvi at the hospital. His condition is worsening, fingers suffering from frostbite. Saanvi informs him of her experience with the retroviral serum, how it eliminated the DNA anomaly in her body, and how she no longer experiences callings. Zeke is ready to try it himself despite Saanvi’s warning about her lack of data with regard to its possible side effects (stay tuned on this detail).
At the Stone household, Ben is staring at the image of the man carrying the woman away from the fire in the Al-Zuras journal, reminiscent of him carrying Olive to safety at the club. When he touches the image, an ancient-sounding chant begins to ring in his ears. Apparently, he is the only one experiencing this particular calling and he takes it as an indication that he and Olive are supposed to do something together, except that his guilt-ridden daughter is not interested. She blames herself for TJ’s death because she asked him to accompany her to the night club. She even refuses to go with Ben to the memorial site set up outside the club to pay their last respects to the deceased.
At the memorial site, Ben hears the chant again and follows it to a Zen meditation center located not so far away. Once inside, the chant rings louder in his ears. When Ben returns home and describes his experience, Olive’s curiosity is piqued because TJ’s mother was a Buddhist, and her bracelet that TJ offered to Olive as a gift at the club carries a Buddhist symbol. Furthermore, he apparently performed some type of Buddhist ceremony to bring spiritual closure to the loss of his mother. It’s music to Ben’s ears when Olive agrees this time to accompany her father back to the Zen center (one of the episode’s substrates centers on Ben’s anguish about his failure to connect with his daughter).
In the precinct-related B story, Drea and Michaela follow Jared to the bar where he met his new girlfriend Tamara and began rubbing shoulders with Billy and the Xers. Once he leaves (not without kissing Tamara first, under Michaela’s watchful eye), Drea decides to visit the bar to get the scoop, so to speak. She meets Tamara and challenges sleazy Billy to a pool game. She obviously trounces him because we next see Michaela taking pictures of her pool-table-queen partner collecting money from Billy outside the bar. Mission accomplished, and we like Drea all the more for it.
They run sleazy Billy’s picture through the NYPD data base and discover a long list of arrest reports for him and one of his Xer bruvs. Michaela calls Judge Trilling who presided over Zeke’s case back in “Grounded” and “False Horizon” and obtains a wiretap warrant. The goal is to record conversations at the bar for evidence and Michaela’s plan is to simply enter the bar and have a tête-à-tête with Tamara while placing the micro under the bar. It’s hostile confrontation, as expected, that ends with Michaela warning Tamara that the NYPD is onto Jared and her brother, and that she can either get busted with them or help Jared get out of this mess. Micro under the bar, Tamara rendered anxious, mission accomplished.
Side note: nice touch by the writers to keep the viewers in the dark about the subject of Michaela’s call to Judge Trilling at first and reveal it only at the end of the scene between her and Tamara by focusing the camera on the microphone under the bar. Had we known Michaela’s plan to wiretap before she even entered the bar, her warning to Tamara may have come across to some viewers as practiced police work and cast doubt on her show of genuine concern for Jared.
In the meantime, Saanvi catches up with Alex by the river downtown and kisses her passionately. What appears to be an out-of-nowhere scene at that moment gains a deeper meaning at the end of the episode when Alex visits Saanvi’s lab to tell her, “we can never do that again.” A confused Saanvi asks her ex-lover what she is talking about. The big revelation here – and it is a significant one – is that Saanvi has no recollection of not only that kiss, but of anything else that took place in the morning.
Back to the A story, where Ben and Olive arrive at the Zen center. This time, Ben hears no chanting and the two of them take the opportunity to pay respects to TJ through a ritual of some sort. The wonderful sequence begins with Olive first paying tribute to her boyfriend. As tears flow down her cheeks (Luna Blaise does more five-star acting here than many stars do in a full episode), she talks about her memories of TJ, including the first time they met at the airport in Jamaica, as shown in “Black Box.” Ben, for his part, mentions the support TJ provided to him when he was in dire need of some during his talk to the students while going through the hiring process at the university – seen in “False Horizon.” Brief flashbacks with TJ, pertaining to those memories and others, appear on screen as Ben and Olive let their emotions out in this beautiful scene. The score adequately serves to amplify the mood and the apt camera work of Rubio’s apt camera work foregrounds the visceral aspects of the father-duo’s emotional make-up.
As they are getting ready to leave the Zen center, Ben hears the chant again. It directs them to a stairway down to the underground level. After forcing a large door open, they discover an underground passage that was used, Ben speculates, as an old coal transport tunnel. The more they advance, the louder the chant gets in Ben’s head. They notice ashes in the tunnel, leading them to believe that they must be situated under the club.
Eventually, they have to crawl through a small tunnel where the chanting sound abruptly stops and they hear TJ’s feeble call for help. Olive and Ben are ecstatic to find TJ alive, albeit heavily injured. After he is brought to the hospital, Dr. Soltani (Sejal Shah) confirms that the young man would not have survived another few hours due to his broken ribs, punctured lung, internal bleeding, and extreme dehydration (that is a boatload of serious injuries, I am wondering how long his recovery will take). The burnt corpse found earlier, holding Olive’s bracelet, was apparently Isaiah because according to TJ, the nutcase ripped it away from him during their scuffle. The more intriguing part of TJ’s story is the fact after he got away from Isaiah, a chant led him to that underground spot where they found him. The calling essentially saved his life. Twice! “Carry On” gets my vote for the episode most deserving of the hashtag #ItsAllConnected.
The B story with Michaela and Drea also concludes with the two of them bringing their gathered evidence to Captain Bowers – recordings, pictures, Billy and others’ connections to Xers, evidence of Jared leaking information to them. Bowers cannot write any of this off as inadmissible because it was obtained via the warrant issued by Judge Trilling. She will simply “take it from here.” Later, she makes Jared listen to the recordings and says, “We’ve got a problem,” as both of them look deeply stressed.
This hints at the possibility that Jared may be working as an infiltrator with the Captain’s knowledge, but unknown to all others in the NYPD. If this is the route in which the writers are engaged, they have a very high bar to clear in order for it to feel justified. For starters, why would Jared defend the Xers to Drea and raise suspicion if he wanted to keep it a secret? I am speculating of course, but the writing room may have painted itself into a corner to make that revelation narratively satisfying, considering that it would ask viewers to excuse (read: ignore) Jared’s loutish behavior for several episodes now, a period of time that includes Xers avoiding capture by the NYPD operation led by Michaela on their hangout place back in “Coordinated Flight,” thanks to Jared alerting Billy. Imagine how much reckoning Bowers and Jared would have to do if, for example, the Xers went on to cause harm to – or kill – someone since then.
The final scene of the hour shows Zeke opening up to Michaela about his worsening condition, and reassuring her that he will fight his death date tooth and nail. The two lovers lean their heads against one another in a true display of love and unity as the curtain closes down on the outing. It’s a touching scene, and astonishingly (insert sarcasm), not a cliffhanger. Yes, an episode can indeed end perfectly without feeling the need to jar viewers with the cliché of an 11th-hour shocker (yes, I’m looking at you, dear modern-day TV show writers and viewers with nerve endings addicted to the whaaat effect instead of substance).
Last-minute thoughts:
– When Zeke first visits to Saanvi at the hospital in the beginning of the episode, he finds her in a daze, with an empty stare. He calls her name a few times before she is startled and ready to respond. This makes sense later in the episode when we find out about Saanvi missing-memory problem. Side effects of the serum are about to take center stage, it seems.
– The episode is sprinkled with a number of meaningful dialogues related to the characters’ future and their feelings toward one another. Zeke and Saanvi at the hospital about losing their loved ones, Grace and Ben about his approach to Olive, Tamara and Michaela at the bar, Olive recapturing her love for her father at the Zen center, are all conversations consisting of gimmick-free substance and driven by genuine incentives.
– Sleazy Billy is so far written as one-dimensional as sleazy characters get. The actor Carl Lundstedt is doing his best with what the script gives him, but even a speck of character layer would come in handy here.
– So, did Saanvi just kiss Alex by the river and leave without saying anything? The later conversation between the two seems to imply that they did not talk after the kiss.
– Ben probably breaks some type of record for the number of otiose (albeit, well-intentioned) quotes said by a father to a daughter in a single episode. Seconds after Olive learns of TJ’s death and breaks down crying, he says “it’s ok” twice (yeah, I cannot stand hearing someone say “it’s ok” when absolutely nothing is okay at that moment, battle me if you will). When he and Olive find the staircase to the underground at the Zen center, he tells her to “stay here” (good luck with that). When they are crawling in the tunnel and the chant gets louder, he asks her, “do you want to go back?” Olive’s response is very fitting: “Hell no!”
Until the next episode…
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