“Vanishing Point” – Aired on January 21, 2019
Written by: Jeff Rake & Gregory Nelson
Directed by: Millicent Shelton
Grade: 4,5 out of 5
Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers
After last week’s stellar “Contrails,” showrunners delight the viewers again with the second game-changing episode of the season, first one being “Connecting Flights.” It’s another solid outing of Manifest that expands the parameters of Flight 828’s mystery. In fact, it appears that the mystery’s modus operandi has just grown bigger and transcended the flight itself. It has evolved into multiple time dimensions across more people than just the passengers.
We pick up right where “Contrails” ended, with Cal’s disappearance from the house. We dive into what is, in my opinion, the best first 10 minutes of any Manifest episode thus far. Hats off to Jeff Rake and Gregory Nelson, the co-writers of the episode, and to director Millicent Shelton. The narrative advances at a brisk pace yet, thanks to coherent dialogues performed passionately by the actors, and timely transitions between scenes, the sequence flat out works. Let’s unpack these first ten minutes because it aptly sets up the search for Cal that occupies the rest of the episode.
Police have arrived at the Stone household to investigate Cal’s disappearance. A detective named Chris Jackson (Lisa Ferreira) is questioning Grace. From Grace’s half-assed answers, she suspects something is not right. Grace vaguely implies that someone wants to harm her son. When Ben arrives, Det. Jackson pursues the avenue of “someone wanting to harm Cal” with him and asks his whereabouts the night before at which moment Grace immediately interjects, saying that this has nothing to do with Ben. Guest actor Lisa Ferreira depicts the portrait of the suspicious detective with dexterity while Athena Karkanis and Josh Dallas successfully convey to the viewers the precarious position of Ben and Grace who struggle to provide answers of substance to her questions because they have secrets to keep. Olive is in the background listening and she senses that Jackson’s pointed questions are targeting Ben as a suspect. She calls Michaela and asks her to come to the rescue.
The lovely sister that Michaela is, of course she will come, even though she is in the middle of jerking Autumn around and handcuffing her. Autumn’s cover as the mole for the Major is blown and Michaela is furious to say the least. She is harassing Autumn, demanding that she reveals Cal’s location, as well as the Major’s identity, but Autumn ain’t talking. When Olive calls, she heads to the house, bringing the handcuffed Autumn along in the car.
At the house, she joins Ben and Grace who are talking privately in the bedroom. Ben and Michaela reveal to Grace that Cal experiences callings and has visions stronger than that of any other passenger. Ben shows her Cal’s drawing book. At that moment, they realize that there is a page missing, reminding us of the moment Autumn stole the page when she was snooping around Cal’s room in “Contrails.” This leads to a powerful moment when the three of them notice another one of Cal’s drawings and realize that he drew the three of them in the present and now as they stand and stare at his drawing book. They explore the drawings further and come to the realization that Cal drew them a map of where he could be found. He drew images of a town that Grace recognizes as Tannersville, in upstate New York.
Mixed in all of the above, there is a brief scene with Jansen (Brandon Schraml), the dubious black-suited all-purpose assistant of the Major, who enters a high-tech surveillance facility. Apparently, the Major and his agents have not located Cal either. Jansen is alarmed that Autumn has been taken into custody (because the high-sci-fi-tech cameras told him so) and calls the Major to alert her.
In the meantime, Ben, Michaela, and Grace need to get rid of the police at the house. Michaela cannot intervene directly, but knows who to call, and boy can we guess who that is. The faithful Jared puts once again his career on the line and shows up at the house in his NYPD uniform. He has a neat story concocted about Cal being located his grandpa’s house. Heck, he even produces a photo of the two of them together to assure Det. Jackson that it is a false alarm. Jackson appears unconvinced, but hey, who is she to doubt the all-magnanimous Det. Jared’s word, right? Never mind that he is pulling a false false alarm of the highest order. Jackson and her crew leave the house.
Ben and Grace decide to leave for Tannersville in search of Cal, in Danny’s truck no less (!) to avoid detection by authorities. Michaela stays behind to work the Autumn angle. And thus, we get past the first 10 minutes of the show, a suitable mix of scenes and dialogues that concretely set in motion the events that will occupy the rest of the episode while giving a purpose to each of the main or recurring characters. There is not one second of irrelevant action or pointless chit-chat. The sequence requires full attention, but the effort yields its rewards. Thanks to it, there are no fill-the-gap-in-the-narrative-with-your-imagination requirements on the viewer during the next 30-plus minutes. It’s a smooth and entertaining ride.
In order to convince the stubborn Autumn to turn over the missing page from Cal’s drawings, Michaela first needs to learn the nature of the Major’s stronghold on her. Apparently, she promised Autumn that she could reunite her with her long-lost daughter. To negate that leverage, Michaela tracks the daughter’s location and tells Autumn that she no longer needs the Major to reunite with her. In exchange, she gets Autumn to first call Jansen and steer him in the wrong direction to capture Cal, and then, to hand the drawing over to her. Autumn complies. Apparently, Cal foresaw their reunion because he drew Autumn and her daughter together, even though he was not aware of the daughter’s existence. On the backside of the page, Cal drew a cabin in the woods. It is where he is currently hiding? Michaela heads to Tannersville alone, much to Jared’s dismay, to join Ben and Grace in their search.
There is a scene that shows Jansen and his team locating Cal thanks to their high-tech surveillance equipment. But they lose time tracking down his exact location due to Autumn steering them in the wrong direction.
In the meantime, Olive, who performs the ultimate passive-aggressive form of teen angst in every scene that she appears, finds a note from Cal in a secret place in their room back home that only the two knew about. Cal obviously meant for Olive to find the note and it says, “I left,” with an odd-shaped “I.” She texts the photo to her parents in Tannersville.
Ben and Grace figure out that Cal had the whole thing planned out. He was not kidnapped. He departed the house on his own and left clues behind for them on the location of the cabin in the woods by Tannersville where he is in hiding. Even the shape of the “I” had a purpose. It’s a quasi-map that, when coupled with the word “left,” instructs Ben and Grace to take a left at a certain intersection. They realize this at the tail end of a sequence filled with contrivances, consisting of a car chase sequence and a show of Superman-like perception and memory on Grace’s part, that puts them at the exact spot where the “I” map would actually be relevant.
They find Cal and have a happy parent-child reunion moment. Michaela joins them in the cabin shortly after. But “Vanishing Point” is a lot more than an episode focusing on the simple task of finding Cal. The kid is apparently expecting someone else to show up. That individual, named Zeke (Matt Long), is suffering from frostbite as he arrives. Ben, who knows by heart the names of the 191 souls aboard Flight 828 (and probably their favorite brand of toothpaste and shampoo) confirms that he is not on the flight manifest.
The first revelation is that he is the person in Michaela’s callings – “Find her” – in the last two episodes. He also appeared in Cal’s visions, holding Michaela’s picture in his hand as he was walking in the snow. Michaela joins them in the cabin shortly before Zeke wakes up. The next revelation arrives when he remembers falling into a cave while hiking two weeks ago, according to him, during a blizzard. He was stuck in the cave, but eventually got out and began walking in desperation. He claims to have found inspiration in seeing Michaela’s face on a picture in a magazine that he randomly found in the cave. Seeing her face kept him alive, he says, although he can’t explain why. He cannot believe that Michaela is alive though, which makes it clear that he is not aware of the reappearance of Flight 828. It turns out that Zeke fell in the cave in 2017 and somehow lost a year during that blizzard while he thinks it was two weeks ago.
This extraordinary turn of event is presented in five-star fashion, through a conversation taking place in the dim-lighted cabin during which the camera work by Shelton and the low-toned (yet malaise-filled) music by composer Danny Lux blend together to amplify the crescendo effect of the final revelation.
“Vanishing Point” begins and ends strongly. Despite couple of minor hick-ups, it is another stout addition to Manifest and, as noted above, the second game-changing one. It shifts the nature Manifest’s central mystery around Flight 828’s disappearance. With the new revelations, the nucleus of the mystery can no longer be confined to the flight. Zeke’s appearance suggests the possibility that there are other people experiencing a loss of time and that they are potentially connected to the passengers on the flight, or at least, to Cal.
Did I even mention that other revelation, the one through which we finally get to see the Major’s face? Well, I just did. Whatever her name is, she is played by Elizabeth Marvel, a ‘marvel-ous’ choice for the role!
Bring on next week!
Last-minute thoughts:
– Once Jackson and her crew leave the Stone household, Michaela thanks Jared for finding a way to get rid of them. Jared sarcastically replies, “Yeah, no biggie. Just my career.” It’s almost like he is aware of how absurdly implausible it is becoming that he still has not gotten caught abusing the privileges of his rank, and lost his job in disgrace, considering the numerous schemes that he has been pulling off, all in the name of helping Michaela. To top things off, Michaela says one second later that she wants to bring Autumn to the precinct for questioning. Jared asks the most relevant question du moment to Michaela: “You want to take a kidnapping suspect into the precinct after I just told half the NYPD there is no missing kid?” Watch J.R. Ramirez’s sarcastic smile as he delivers the question. It’s almost like he is asking, “What on earth are the writers doing to my character?” It is hilarious.
– His hectic life of late will not allow it, but when things calm down, I want to be Ben’s sponsor in scheduling some much-needed sessions with a therapist who can help him with interpersonal communication skills. For all the qualities he possesses, he is dismal when it comes to providing clear answers to questions. I’ve already touched on his communicative skills in my review of “Dead Reckoning,” and it shows up again here. Take for instance, the scene at the house when Grace, Ben, and Michaela are talking in the room with the police present in the house. Grace, obviously exasperated at the flood of half-baked information flowing her way, asks one logical question after another. Ben replies by either stuttering, murmuring, or uttering a few general sentences, if he finishes them at all. Michaela intervenes more than once, thankfully, and duly provides concise answers to Grace, or at least complements Ben’s utterances with the necessary information. It happens again later in Tannersville when Ben has an opportunity to tell Grace something more than the generic “Everything I’ve done has been for you and the kids” line. Alas, he stares at Grace after her next question (a legitimate one from her point of view) for a couple of seconds before the phone rings. Ben, we all love you man, but come on, stop being stingy with your word count!
– On the plus side, the intimate conversation at the table in the cabin is a beautiful moment for the Stone couple.
– Lourdes seems to have disappeared. I can barely remember the last time that she played a significant role in a scene. Danny does not appear in this episode either, his name getting mentioned only thanks to his truck. These two continue to serve no significant purpose other than the emblematic “third-wheel” character, confined to the role of complicating the love story between two others who are meant to be together.
– For that matter, Saanvi’s role in the show, as well as her presence on screen, continue to diminish for better or worse.
– After Jared goes out of his way to help Michaela, again, he is firmly “dismissed” by her, again. She tells him to stay behind when she leaves for the cabin. I don’t know whether to feel bad for him, or to believe that he is better off this way.
– I am glad that the Major is a new character and not someone already mentioned for shock effect in a show that already possesses its fair share of shocks and twists. Plus, ladies and gentlemen, Elizabeth Marvel…
Until the next episode…