“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 4^th 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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“Mayday: Part 1” – Aired on June 10, 2021
Writer: Simran Baidwan & Marta Gené Camps
Director: Dean White
Grade: 3 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

Allow me to begin with the best part of this episode. The frustrating Angelina storyline seems to be gone and that already makes it a slight improvement from the couple of dismal entries preceding it. Having said that, “Mayday: Part 1” nonetheless suffers from “Penultimatepisode-itis” containing a number of shortcuts that are too inconspicuous to ignore.

I am willing to suspend my disbelief during an episode of a sci-fi show. However, when it frequently requires me to lower my non-sci-fi common-sense barometer to rudimentary levels, and the primeval details required to frame a plausible narrative are neglected, it gets too demanding on the viewer to constantly excuse or handwave what turns into a clunky viewing experience. The machinations of logistical details are so messy here that “Mayday: Part 1” often pushes too far the boundaries of my presupposed suspension of disbelief. It’s a shame, because many of the lapses to which I will refer below could have been avoided with a bit more attention to the granular. On a larger scale, this episode now makes it three below-average entries in a row, and that doesn’t bode well for the season, considering there is only the finale left to swing the pendulum.

The hour begins with a calling that brings Michaela back to the moment of turbulence during Flight 828. The plane violently shakes, bags fly around, yet she appears to be the only one aware of the havoc. Cal, Ben, Saanvi, and other passengers act as if she doesn’t exist, neither hearing nor acknowledging her, except Bethany (Mugga’s seventh appearance in her recurring role as a flight attendant on 828) who notices Michaela calling for her. They both see blood dripping profusely from the plane’s ceiling. This horrid calling lasts a minute and a half, before Michaela finally wakes up.

Olive makes her comeback to the house, everyone apologizes to each other, and a family hug (minus Cal) ensues. Vance calls from Eureka to inform them that Cal has shown up at the door of the facility, as seen in “Duty Free.” This is enough to send Ben into frenzy – he and Grace thought Cal was upstairs in his room – as he grabs anything within his view to unlock the ankle bracelet. Olive, with a cooler head on her shoulders, does a quick search on her phone to figure out how to unlock an ankle bracelet, removes it with a screwdriver, and puts it on herself – she does all this in less than 15 seconds, I kid you not.

Jared barges into Zeke and Michaela’s house, still fuming about Michaela quitting her job. Zeke senses that the detective still harbors feelings for Michaela, which means that his “us against the world” handhold from last episode was not for nothing. I must admit I rolled my eyes again at the writers’ attempt to pick the Jared-Michaela romance back up in some form or fashion. It seems so redundant at this point to reinject this drama into the final two episodes of the season when there are so many stories that need payoffs. Plus, did we not watch for almost a whole season how each has moved on comfortably to other relationships, effectively closing the chapter on theirs? This goes back to character inconsistencies and flip-flops in Manifest that I discussed in detail in my last review, Jared being the victim this time, and not his first either. Anyhow, Zeke has had enough of his wife getting scolded by Jared in the late hours of the evening and opens the door for him to leave.

Grace and Ben arrive at Eureka to bring Cal home, but Cal refuses, which is a repetitive sequence throughout the hour. He made a drawing of the tailfin with dark waves around it and insists that the tailfin is dangerous, and that the testing needs to cease. The burns on his body shock everyone, and Grace will only allow him to remain at Eureka if Saanvi is brought back into the fold to treat her son, much to Vance and Gupta’s dismay.

Ben, Cal, Grace, and Saanvi, who should at this point never be allowed into the most important high-security facility known to earth for various reasons, now find themselves not only back at Eureka, but they are also free to walk around without any guards supervising them! I mean… Wasn’t Saanvi fired by Vance for stealing the most important artifact in the world, a property of the US government? Wasn’t Ben expelled for going into unauthorized areas and going rogue with the information he acquired from Vance? Cal is a child suffering from burns, making an outrageous claim on the tailfin, at least from the perspective of people at Eureka. And yet, they all walk around the tailfin and the equipment with no guards nearby, in the same way my cat walks around the house. There is even a scene in which Troy explains to Ben how to decimate the tailfin while they are standing a few meters from it before Ben walks unguarded to the simulator to proceed. Eureka is easily the most loosely guarded high-security facility ever seen on TV, or in any other reality.

It turns out that the sapphire compound found on the tailfin also resides in the tissue sample taken from Cal’s burns. At the urging of Ben and Grace, Vance reluctantly agrees to have the testing temporarily put on hold, which does not please Dr. Gupta one bit – this is the first episode where I constantly found myself rooting for Dr. Gupta who is otherwise quite unpleasant to be around. Cal appropriately refers to her as “the lady who doesn’t smile.”

Michaela and Zeke stop by Bethany’s house, but she is in no mood to talk, at first. She has been placed in a no-fly list which left her jobless, and she complains about everyone having developed a fear of the 828 passengers. Michaela uses her savvy communication skills to convince Bethany to tell her what she saw on the calling, since she and Michaela were the only other ones aware of the turbulence. Bethany says that she saw Eagan opening the emergency exit door and thought he was going to kill them all.

Knowing now that Eagan was in the calling, Micheala heads to the NYPD where a still-huffin-n-puffin Jared apathetically allows her access to the jail area. She jumps through hoops to convince Eagan to finally spit out that he also saw blood everywhere in the plane and panicked, wanting to get out via the emergency exit door. That is when he saw a black bird flying close by the plane. He advises Michaela to talk to people who were out of their seats at that moment. Thanks to his nonpareil photographic memory – kudos to writers here for the meaningful use of a previous character development -, he is able to count all 17 empty seat numbers! Knowing that there were only 14 unreserved seats, Michaela must figure out the people out of their seats. With help from Zeke, Adrian turns out to be one of them.

Speaking of Adrian, he is Eagan’s jail neighbor at the NYPD, along with Randall (Christopher Piccione) who appeared briefly in the season 2 opener “Fasten Your Seatbelts.” While Michaela was pursuing clues that led her to Adrian, Eagan was busy persuading them of the existence of a conspiracy against the Flight 828 passengers, supposedly headed by Ben Stone who is in cahoots with the NSA. His theories, as wacky as they sound, fit right into Adrian’s belief that Ben is the agent of the Apocalypse.

After their release later in the day, Eagan, Adrian, and Randall meet other passengers in some building where Adrian delivers a sermon-like speech, pointing to Ben Stone as their nemesis. He draws a parallel between Ben’s disposition and the version of Noah in the epic of Gilgamesh (neatly described by Olive earlier in the episode) in which Noah is not the savior like most people believe, but rather the executioner. After failing to convince people to do good by others, according to Adrian, Noah got angry with all the evil surrounding him and turned vengeful, calling on God “to bring about the destruction of all the wicked.” He only planned to save himself and his family. He thus caused the flood rather than having saved people from it. Ben fancies being the modern-day Noah, according to Adrian, and when he could not get enough of the other passengers to follow him, he got vengeful himself and started collaborating with the evil NSA to punish others… or something like that.

There is a much more intriguing C story that consists of Jared learning bits and pieces of information here and there to possibly tie Saanvi to the death of the Major. First, he is startled to hear from loudmouth Eagan that Saanvi was at Eureka assisting the NSA on some experiments. Later, alarm bells start ringing in his head when Sarah opens her mother’s safety deposit box and discovers memory cards in a small envelope with “S. Bahl” written on it. He tells Sarah that Saanvi was one of the passengers that the Major was investigating. Sarah carefully observes Jared putting two and two together in his mind and asks if Saanvi had anything to do with her mother’s death. Jared certainly plans to find the answer to that question.

Back at Eureka, with the help of Saanvi and Troy, Ben gets his hands on the simulator to destroy the tailfin, but at the last moment, a potent calling puts him under water with the tailfin and a sinking Cal. He quickly grabs his son and swims to the surface but wakes up before getting there, and his hand glowing. The previously non-existent (!) security teams suddenly appear and begin to chase him, but he makes it to Cal’s room where the boy’s burn marks have also began to glow following the calling. That is apparently all Ben needed to understand that, in order to save Cal, the tailfin must be placed back in the water where it was initially found, rather than destroyed. Never mind the security teams catching up with him, because he is next seen walking behind Gupta and Vance in the facility, unguarded again (seriously?!?), as he nags them to stop the testing.

Gupta has no patience left and wants this “certifiable” nutcase to be kicked out. Vance is not on board, simply telling her that he “can handle this.” Vance is obviously incapable of saying “no” to Ben because when Ben grabs his arm and beseeches him to help return the tailfin to “where it belongs” and save Cal, Vance privately agrees to help him. Would anyone blame Gupta at this point for going over Vance’s head and getting approval from Director Zimmer to resume the testing? I sure would not, and that is exactly what she does. She proceeds to inform Vance of this in front of Ben, Saanvi, Cal, and Grace as they are all standing next to the tailfin container – don’t even ask if there are guards around. She flatly states that Vance has lost his ability to think objectively and accuses him of “abandoning his duty” to his country, while Ben and Grace are berating her for endangering their son’s life.

Seeing that the shouting match is going nowhere, Cal decides to enter the chamber where the tailfin is kept. Hey, why not? It’s not like what is possibly the most treasured artifact in the history of humanity is guarded or anything. A boy whose parents are in an intense verbal scuffle with the people running the place can casually walk into the chamber. It’s almost like the show is aware of what mockery this particular flaw has turned into because it designates Grace, out of all people, as the only one to make an attempt at stopping Cal! He runs, enters the chamber, touches the tailfin, and disappears!

Michaela has one last calling at her place in the evening that takes her back to the moment of turbulence in the plane. She notices Adrian walking to the back of the plane and when she catches up with him, and he turns around, she sees blood running down his eyes à-la-Saanvi in “Bogey.” Zeke felt Adrian’s presence during her calling and affirms that that Adrian is filled with guilt and shame. Michaela concludes that the calling is about a passenger committing a murder, and not about one dying.  

Last-minute thoughts:

— The episode is directed by Dean White who helmed two outstanding episodes from Manifest’s first season, “Reentry” and “Estimated Time of Departure.” Although this episode pales in comparison to the thrilling ride of those two entries, White’s dexterity with the camera enhances several scenes here, including the calling sequences in the plane, Ben and Cal’s underwater calling, and the flashbacks of Jared about the Major and Saanvi.

— Why is Troy risking everything to help Ben? Because, he’ll “do anything for Saanvi.” Oh, dear Troy…

— Unlocking Ben’s bracelet, even for two seconds, should have triggered the alarm with the authorities, correct? Or, should I have handwaved that too?

— Questions to chew on: Should Grace have read Cal’s intention to run into the glass chamber containing the tailfin once he hugged her and said, “I love you”? And if she had, would she have been able to stop him?

Until the next episode…

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“Duty Free” – Aired on June 3, 2021
Writer: Bobak Esfarjani & Darika Fuhrmann
DIrector: Ruba Nadda
Grade: 2.5 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

If you demote the mythologico-scifi arc (read: the most fascinating and cogent arc) to B-story status and establish your A story around the inconsistent behavior of the main characters, you get “Duty Free,” an entry that will hopefully will be no more than a blip on the radar once the season ends, assuming of course that the show sticks the landing in the remaining two episodes. There is hardly anything meaningful that takes place in the episode, other than potentially signaling the near-end of the unsavory collaboration – I blame the writing room for this – between Angelina and Cal.

The lackluster hour begins with Grace visiting Ben in his cell at the NYPD. The first words out of his mouth are, “I’m so sorry,” followed by a heartfelt moment between the two with Grace wanting reassurance that Ben will start putting her and the family ahead of the “lifeboat.” Ben admits to having gone “too far” and claims to regret his action. But does he, really? If his behavior in the past is any indication of what is to expect in the future, it’s basically academic that when push comes to shove with regard to the callings, he will act on his instincts and prioritize “saving the lifeboat” at any cost. Out of all people, Grace should be the first to know by now that Ben’s apologies or reassurances do not translate into action when it comes to the callings, but you see, the always sensible and mature Grace is not the version of her we have in this episode. This version is a counterfeit, a clone, so to speak. She is credulous enough to believe anything she wants to hear in the name of love.

Unfortunately for Grace, Ben is solely — excessively — preoccupied with “saving the lifeboat.” He is throwing a fit to Michaela a bit later over how he must urgently get out of jail to “solve” this’n’that, to which Michaela fittingly replies: “Settle down, Ben! Have you not learned anything?” Um, nope. He has not.

Cal, Michaela, and Ben get the same calling in which they see and feel their bodies burning. So does Angelina while she is hiding in Cal’s room upstairs. This hideous storyline (I’ve harped on this plenty in my recent previous reviews) even forces Cal to turn into a liar toward his whole family, keeping them in the dark about Angelina – remember that Grace kicked her out of the house in the previous episode. Cal seems to have somehow bought Angelina’s zany biblical story. She manipulates him with sentences such as, “God hasn’t blessed me like he’s blessed you” or “You’ve been the only one who’s been good to me this whole time.” She also believes that Cal has been “touched by the Almighty.” She draws parallels with passages from the Bible and considers him to be marked, meaning that God wants Cal to fulfill his calling. She has been chosen to guide him, and in order for the two of them to proceed, Cal must not tell his parents about her, naturally! And Grace, who knocks on Cal’s locked door to ask for permission to come in, ‘gracefully’ accepts his explanation on why he cannot let her in. Oh Grace…

Saanvi is on her way back with Troy after having extinguished the lava and closed the fissure by dropping the driftwood in it (as seen at the end of “Compass Calibration”). She informs Michaela that she will turn herself in when she arrives.   

The arraignment for Ben goes terribly wrong, courtesy of the most ridiculously biased judge of the century played by Melissa Maxwell who has plenty of experience in the robe from previously playing judges in Madam Secretary and Law & Order. She explicitly accuses Ben and Flight 828 passengers of using “the 828 caveat” to “justify all sorts of things.” She wants “heightened judicial scrutiny” for them. She refuses to recuse herself when Ben’s lawyer Sandra Rayhall (Shannon DeVido) requests her to do so, nor will she allow her to approach the bench. She wants Ben to get on with it and plead, period. Under these circumstances, Ben pleads not guilty, the only choice left to delay the ruling of this blatantly partial judge. She sets bail at half a million dollars.

Thus ends the atrocious day at court for Mr. Stone, but the misery just began for Mrs. Stone. The bail amount forces Grace to take a second mortgage on the house and pull her deposit back on the restaurant. Does Ben care?

Not really…

Seconds later, he is arguing with Michaela from behind bars that he needs to get out and “do something” (and Michaela informing him about Saanvi killing the Major only aggravates his conniption). Later in the episode, after returning home thanks to Grace bailing him out, he gets busy brainstorming with Cal on how to solve the calling, in front of Grace who exclaims, “really?!?” Yes, Grace. Really! What did you expect?

She despondently says, “I don’t wanna do this anymore,” as she walks away. She must have been the only one who hadn’t seen this coming. Add the knocking on the door scene with Cal and you could almost convince me that this episode’s title is “Grace the gullible.”

Michaela later attempts to lift Grace’s spirits by telling her to hang on, and that the man – Ben – who is putting her “through hell” right now will be on the other side waiting for her when the death date passes in the same way that Zeke is now on the other side waiting for Michaela. In short, Grace must accept that her husband could possibly behave like this three more years, but it’s okay, because she’ll get rewarded at the end. Um, yay!!!

At Eureka, Dr. Gupta is disappointed about the driftwood having turned to ash (or, so she believes) just when they were so close to reaching their objective. She follows Vance’s advice to “shift the focus” to the tailfin to continue the testing.

Captain Bowers has further bad news for Michaela. A series of bad news! The mayor’s office issued a directive ordering the NYPD to report all 828-related cases directly to the FBI, including what the department has already collected on those cases. It’s part of a global crackdown on 828’ers that includes a passenger who is currently on trial in a military tribunal in Singapore. To add salt to the wound, Michaela may be pulled off her cases. Bowers wants all 828 reports to be filtered through Jared who later tries to calm Michaela down, to no avail.

Vance visits Ben at the precinct to inform him of the crackdown and the rumor of an “official registry coming into play,” basically chucking civil rights out the window, and underlines that things are now beyond his control. On his way out of jail, Ben runs into Eagan who suddenly throws a violent fit after noticing Vance with Ben. He takes that as confirmation that Ben is working with the NSA as a pawn to strengthen the conspiracy against the passengers. “I should have never trusted you Ben, none of us should have,” he screams as he is being hustled away by officers, menacingly adding, “and believe me, we never will again.” He later throws a similar threat Michaela’s way. According to him, he is the leader that the passengers need, and the Stone siblings are among their enemies.

Vance caught on to Saanvi’s scheme with the driftwood, at least the stealing part, and is absolutely furious. Saanvi is enraged herself because he just told her about Dr. Gupta resuming the testing with the tailfin. She argues that the driftwood caused the earthquakes, imagine what the larger-sized tailfin would do. The problem is not her argument, but her timing. Vance is already fuming at her, and when she reveals that she dropped the driftwood into the fissure, he draws the line. He fires her on the spot and adds, “you’re lucky that’s all I’m doing.” Although the scene consists of nothing more than a dialogue, it is the most intense of the hour, largely thanks to Darryl Edwards’s terrific acting – not surprising, considering that he has also played the recurring roles of an agent and a detective, with the same dexterity, in The Americans and Daredevil, respectively.

Saanvi next heads to the precinct to be arrested at about the same time Michaela receives news from Captain Bowers that the passenger in Singapore, noted above, just got executed. The powers above want Michaela “on desk duty for the near future.” She has heard enough. She drops her badge and gun on the Captain’s desk, grabs Saanvi, and leaves the precinct.

Next, we see Ben seemingly offering a sincere apology to Grace and promising her to never risk anything again to which… this off-kilter version of Grace replies, “No, risk everything.”

And therein lies one of Manifest’s series-long central problems, the uneven writing of the characters.

The version of Grace in this episode, as noted earlier, is not just unrealistically gullible. She is virtually non compos mentis! It took one vague speech by Michaela of around 25 seconds to not only make Grace forget all the misery that Ben’s actions have just put her through, but also to take a 180-degree turn and encourage him in fact to stick to his train-wrecking path, with little concern for the feelings of his closed ones. This episode’s Grace does not fit the profile of the one that Manifest’s writing room has painted for almost 3 seasons. The same goes for the vast shift in Angelina’s profile over this season, for Ben’s irresponsible behavior as of late compared to the caring one in the first season, for Michaela suddenly asking Grace to accept Ben’s actions for three more years when she just had multiple arguments herself with him on how reckless he was toward everyone surrounding him, and for Jared’s flimsy to-and-fro disposition on the balance between his professional and personal life in the first two seasons compared his otherwise magnanimous character. These turbulent character swings function a bit like the callings. They simply appear without any rhyme or reason (or an explanation) as plot devices for the mere purpose of spiking the drama barometer and/or advance the plot.

Speaking of plot devices, Cal decides just like that to draw “the answer to the burns” in his notebook. Soon, they are in a cab going somewhere when Angelina informs him out of the blues that once they get to their destination (the cliffhanger of the episode shows that it’s Eureka), he must continue alone. Isn’t that grand of her? Never mind that she had promised to protect him. She justifies this last-second addendum with some passages from the Bible, of course, and sends Cal out the cab onto the dark streets of New York as she says, “Hey Moses, you got this!” Pffffff…!!

Ben, Saanvi, and Michaela meet at the Stone household to brainstorm. They must infiltrate Eureka and destroy the tailfin, but lacking resources and allies, they are at a loss as to how. Cal is a step ahead of them, already at Eureka, stating his purpose to a bewildered Dr. Gupta at the security gate, “My name is Cal Stone. I’m here to see the tailfin.”

Last-minute thoughts:

— Adrian is back! He is Eagan’s neighbor behind bars at the NYPD.

— What is this non-sense with the camera focusing on Jared’s hand holding Michaela’s as he utters, “It’s us against the world”? I hope the writers do not plan on re-flaming the long-gone Jared-Michaela drama. Thankfully, Michaela does her best to swiftly cut off that possibility.

— I missed Zeke in this episode. It appears that Michaela cannot hold alone the flag for those representing the voice of reason, with so many loonies surrounding her.

Until the next episode…

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“Compass Calibration” – Aired on May 20, 2021
Writer: Laura Putney & Margaret Easley
Director: Ramaa Mosley
Grade: 2.5 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

The hour begins with Cal watching with concern the agitated volcano inside his snow globe à-la the ending of last outing “Bogey,” followed by Michaela pondering whether or not to arrest Saanvi before informing Zeke that she killed the Major. Zeke encourages her to proceed with the arrest, claiming that it will play a positive role in Saanvi’s path to redemption in the same way that it did for him when he confessed to pulling the trigger and accidentally injuring Michaela back in the season-1 finale, “Estimated Time of Departure.”

There is a lot taking place in “Compass Calibration,” without offering anything of substance. It suffers more or less from the same plague that invades several other episodes of Manifest, which is the unrestrained multiplicity of storylines running simultaneously. It is also bogged down by one particular extended storyline that has frankly become too stuffy to watch (more to come below), to the point where I find myself fast-forwarding through the related scenes in my re-watches. It doesn’t help either that the episode features a humdrum bottle story that is generated by a previously employed trope (burning photo on Ben’s wall) and brings back one of the most unpleasant and dull characters from season 1. Luckily, there is the mythologico-scifi plotline that somewhat saves the outing with its inquisitive revelations, not that it doesn’t rely on some handwaving itself.

But first, let me get this dreadful Angelina plotline out of the way…

In what I would label the most forcibly fabricated story in the first three seasons of Manifest – and I have belabored on this plenty in my last two reviews –, Angelina’s obsessive behavior reaches new heights, to the point of remaining in the room upstairs with her and baby Eden inside where a fire is spreading, instead of running out, because… she believes that Eden is her guardian angel and will hocus-pocus away the fire!

As if this were not outré enough, we have to watch Grace brush aside the fact that Olive has now been staying with Levi in order to avoid the house and Angelina, offer a flimsy “Maybe we just keep it status quo until Olive’s ready to talk” justification for her staying away while expressing concern about Angelina having “been through so much.” And of course, Ben agrees with Grace! Helloooooo Mr. and Mrs. Stone! We are talking about your daughter Olive here. Are you not concerned that she may actually be right about Angelina? – Also note that as my head is screaming all this, Grace tells Ben that she is on her way to try out recipes for her new restaurant with Zeke, and that Angelina is coming along to help with Eden… Oh dear…

Even after observing Angelina’s red-flag behavior and comments throughout the episode, Grace is still not alarmed enough to put her foot down. It is only after she rushes upstairs (at Zeke’s prompt) and finds Eden in the burning room with Angelina doing nothing but standing in front of her with her hands opened toward the air and hoping for Eden to intervene, that Grace decides it’s time to kick Angelina out of the house. And then, there is Cal’s pissed-off mood toward her mom, even after Angelina put his baby sister’s life in danger and caught an attitude toward his mother Grace, stating that Grace cannot separate her from Cal, Eden! I watch the way Grace responds to both Angelina and Cal, and then the way she softly knocks on Cal’s door for permission to enter later, and I begin wondering, when on earth did the strong-willed mother named Grace Stone of the last two and a half seasons turn into such a push-over?

The bottom line is, I reiterate, this plotline is awful. It should have never existed. It forces characters to behave oddly, outside of their existing traits, and it’s progressively getting worse by the episode. Please end it!

The story of the week centers on panic-attack-ridden Astrid (Arianna Esquerre), noticed first by Cal who spots her photo in flames on Ben’s Agent-Moulder-basement wall. Ben pays a visit to Astrid who gets terrifying visions of a skull and a checkerboard. When she draws a painting of her calling, Ben associates it with the logo on the auto-repair shop once owned by Flight-828-hating, conspiracy theorist Cody the jerkwad (Patrick Murnay) who first appeared in “Cleared for Approach” as a menace to Ben and his family. He is also the father of Robin (Derrick Delgado) whom he kidnapped from school without the consent of the mother and his ex-wife Val (Denise Pillott), who also happens to be Astrid’s friend and co-worker.

The connection is first made by Astrid when she spots a tattoo on Cody’s wrist that matches one on Val’s body. The scenes at the repair shop with Ben, Astrid, and Cody are neatly interjected with the ones from the precinct where Jared, Michaela, and Val are also looking into Cody’s connection to Robin’s kidnapping.

Jared and Michaela arrive at the shop after Ben had badly injured Cody while interrogating him on Robin’s whereabouts. Since Cody has had a restraining order in place against Ben since the debacle in “Cleared for Approach,” Ben is legally in trouble. At least Robin is saved, after a contrived sequence that helps Michaela and Jared to bully Cody into revealing his kid’s location (inside a bunker built by the jerkwad in case all hell breaks loose on earth because, according to him, there is a “war coming”). Ben is handcuffed and scolded yet again by Michaela – a.k.a. Manifest’s voice of reason – on how he cannot be everyone’s savior. Naturally, Ben does not (and will not) listen. This dialogue between the Stone siblings comes across pat, as if we have been here before many times (yes, we have).

Speaking of arrests, poor Michaela’s task list for the day also includes bringing Saanvi in for killing the Major, something to which Saanvi willfully consented as part of her penance. At the last second, she asks Michaela for an extension until the end of the day, so that she can finish her research on the significant discovery that they just made at Eureka (the driftwood disappearing for 37 milliseconds). Michaela, distracted by a page sent by the precinct, reluctantly agrees.

Saanvi and Troy, as revealed later, have been scheming for a way to sneak the driftwood out of the facility. This is easily the best plot to follow in “Compass Calibration.” It includes a well-written dialogue between Vance and Saanvi that ends in a surprising way, though it makes sense later when Saanvi’s real intention is revealed.

Dr. Cooper uses the metaphoric ‘Mt. Ararat seeking revenge on Eureka because we took something from Ararat’ explanation to Saanvi to justify the earthquake that shakes New York with supposedly no existing volcano at its epicenter. This triggers Saanvi to conclude that the two successive earthquakes in two days, because of their locations, somehow portend some apocalyptic event to come – or something like that – unless they stop the testing on the driftwood. Saanvi’s explanation to Vance doesn’t entirely clarify how she came to that conclusion (I nodded my head in approval when Vance said, “this is grasping at straws”), but hey, let’s not nit-pick, right?

In any case, Vance refuses to stop testing. That puts into motion Saanvi and Troy’s scheme to sneak the driftwood out of the facility and drop it into the fissure caused by the second earthquake. A middling amount of suspension of disbelief is required while watching Saanvi and Troy accomplish all this because, it involves the most stunning discovery in centuries being sneaked out of a top-secret facility by two science nerds and Saanvi reaching the border of the fissure without anyone interrupting her. When she finally drops it, the hot lava inside solidifies and the fissure closes on itself. The outing ends with a shot of the volcano slowly ceasing to erupt inside Cal’s snow globe.

With three episodes left in the season, I can only hope that the show brings any and all of trivial storylines to a conclusion prior to the finale and offers considerable payoffs to the various plots surrounding its central mystery.

Last-minute thoughts:

— If this were Twitter and not a blog page for episodic reviews, here is what I would write: “‘Compass Calibration’ is the 10th entry into Manifest’s third-season. That’s it. That’s the tweet.” There would not be much else to say, maybe one follow-up tweet about the advancement of the mythologico-scifi plot.

— Ben’s rush to save Robin is paired at an emotional level with his desire to save Cal eight years ago on that same day. I guess the flashback scenes of Cal on the verge of dying are supposed to somehow make the viewers sympathize with how unhinged Ben became in his disposition in order to save Robin. I am wondering how people felt about that. They had no impact on me because I thought his behavior was justified in this episode, and this is coming from someone who had no trouble criticizing Ben’s hasty actions in the past.

— I have no idea how arresting Saanvi has become a part of Michaela’s “path to redemption.” As loyal to logical reasoning as Michaela is, she would have to possess clear evidence of her future being bleak in the case of not arresting Saanvi. I don’t remember any such past moments, do you?

— Nit-pick time:
So, Zeke can sense the love of person for another, just not to which degree, even if it’s at dangerously obsessive levels. That slightly negates his stamp of approval on the relationship between Jared and Sarah in “Bogey.” All we know in this case, technically, is that Sarah’s feelings for Jared are genuine in the same way that Angelina’s feelings for Eden are, and it does not necessarily mean that the relationship is 100% healthy.

— Otiose side note: According to Michaela’s pager, Tate & Turner Department Store is the location of the bomb scare. No such store exists. But I am wondering if this gets noted anywhere. What if five years from now, someone totally unaware of this show decides to name its store Tate & Turner?

Until the next episode…

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“Bogey” – Aired on May 13, 2021
Writer: Simran Baidwan & MW Cartozian Wilson
Director: Laura Belsey
Grade: 4 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

I am starting to think that Manifest showrunners are deliberately – or inadvertently – blurring the lines between “chaos” and “quality.” Spitting out shocking revelations and mind-numbing twists at will does not negate the need for some plausible explanation as to why they came to exist in the first place. After almost 3 seasons, callings are increasingly beginning to feel like they exist as plot devices to carry the narrative from A to B, rather than as intricate, persuasive story elements, and some character developments — such as Zeke’s out-of-nowhere mind-reading dexterity – seem to serve nothing more than as “wow” effects with no rhyme or reason behind it. Add to these, choppy behavioral shifts like the sweet, magnanimous Angelina suddenly metamorphosing into Hedy from Single White Female in a matter of 2 episodes, and I don’t believe I am too unreasonable in getting the impression that the writing room acts at times as if “insane storytelling” and “quality storytelling” are interchangeable.

At the same time, Manifest is undoubtedly a successful show, renewed for a fourth season, which is a rarity in today’s cut-throat TV-show milieu. Perhaps, the show is delivering precisely what today’s audience demands and there is no need to be nit-picky or expect full dedication to cogent storytelling. Manifest puts forth a highly entertaining serialized TV adventure – I can confirm, from my first-hand experience – and that entertainment value, in and out of itself, may simply be enough.

As for a single episode, “Bogey” works well. There are still too many storylines being carried over from the previous two episodes, but the one covering the overall arc, with the Flight 828 mystery at its center, is tackled with audacity and the payoff is quite handsome.

At the Eureka facility, Dr. Gupta, Saanvi, and the scientists are experimenting on the effects of dark lightning on the piece of driftwood from the Vatican, with no substantial results in terms of altering the fragment. Saanvi is discouraged but wants to give it one last shot with her being the one delivering the dark-lightning bursts, before they ship the piece back to the Vatican.

Meanwhile, the B-story takes us to Zeke and Michaela’s house. They are preparing to host Jared and Sarah for dinner. Michaela asks Zeke to use his recently acquired mind-reading powers (still no explanation how) in order to get a feel on Sarah because she refuses to believe that the Major’s daughter hooking up with Jared is a mere coincidence. Zeke replies, “I’ll do my best,” which makes me erase in a hurry the positive check mark that I chalked up for him in my review of “Destination Unknown” when he told Cal that their powers were not to be used for personal gain shortly after Cal asked him for a similar favor. As a matter of fact, Zeke contradicts his advice to Cal more than once in this episode. I am not sure if this should be chalked up to inconsistent character writing or to Zeke having been disingenuous in his brotherly talk to Cal in the last episode. I don’t like either choice, frankly.

During the above conversation, Michaela has a vision of the ominous dark cloud hovering inside the house. She thinks it’s related to Eureka because the last time she saw it, in “Precious Cargo,” it led her there with Ben walking out of the building. Ben gets the same vision moments later in his X-Files basement office in the garage, except that his includes water falling on him. Finally, Eagan joins the calling party by arriving to the house, soaked in water, frantically claiming that same dark clouds hovered over him and dumped rain, and that there was a lion roaring at him.

Grace wants a private talk with Ben because she is not amused by the presence of a man in their house who recently had her husband kidnapped. Ben believes Eagan can be useful because “he is excellent at deciphering the callings.” Plus, he has influence over the passengers and Ben believes he must “keep his enemies close.” Eagan is close, all right! So close that the next time Ben catches up with him, the con man has the gullible Angelina giving him a tour of the house, including Ben’s Agent-Moulder office where he keeps all the information gathered on Flight 828 and its passengers. So close that he pockets the USB key on Ben’s computer. Grace is right, this dude should not have stayed in the house one second longer.

Ben asks Olive to go to campus and look into mythology about lions and floods. Michaela gets another calling with dark clouds, except that this time it includes a reflection of her face with blood streaming down her eyes. She, Ben, and Eagan try to make sense out of their common visions. Things are equally escalating at Eureka where Saanvi is spotted by Troy with blood streaming down her eyes while administering the dark-cloud energy bursts to the driftwood. It’s all connected, naturally!

I will avoid going step by step through every turn of event here (and I’d recommend a rewatch of the scenes solely involving this storyline for a better experience), but the crux of the matter boils down to Michaela eventually gaining access to the facility to demand answers from Vance and Saanvi, while Olive discovers, with the help of her new inamorato Levy, a Buddhist myth about a lion statue crying tears of blood at a village, with a neat story attached to it about punishing liars (hint: it’s related to what is happening to Saanvi).

The granular details of how this particular puzzle gets resolved are neatly woven into the dialogues featuring Ben, Eagan, Michaela, Olive, Saanvi, and Vance  – plus some bonus nerd talk with Troy and Patrick –, all culminating in a fascinating reversal of fortune for Saanvi who goes from almost dying to not only getting cured, but also learning moments later that her experiment did work after all. The Eureka crew overcame a big hurdle on the way to figuring out how to “create a miracle,” as Dr. Gupta would say. The driftwood did indeed disappear for 37 milliseconds at precisely 7:44 PM, at the exact same time as the nerdy Dr. Cooper’s computers recorded a barely detectable earthquake with Eureka sitting at the epicenter of it, despite the lack of fault lines anywhere near the vicinity of the building!

Wait…. Whaaaat !?!

The C-story is one with which I simply cannot get on board, and yes, I already harped on this in my previous review. Angelina has now transformed out of nowhere into a creepy girl obsessed with replacing or impersonating Olive. She wears Olive’s clothes, changes her hair style and color to match Olive’s, and refers to Olive taking care of Eden as “babysitting” (Olive swiftly replies that Eden is her baby sister). Are you kidding me? I am not saying that teenagers are not capable of such devious behavior, but I do find the character portrait that has been painted for Angelina for the first part of the season completely out-of-touch with what we are seeing here in the last 2 episodes.

Luckily, Olive is not as blind as her mother (I mean, come on Grace). She is aware of what Angelina is trying to pull off here. Angelina’s outré behavior reaches its pinnacle when she goes to campus and tries to sensually work her way into a kiss with Levi. Thank heavens Levi backs off and Olive catches her in the act. I was afraid of the writing room falling into the trap of using the cliché of terrible timing coincidence where the girlfriend spots her boyfriend kissing another girl when he really had no intention of doing so but was caught by surprise for a second (which of course happens to be the second that the girlfriend walks in). I am pleasantly surprised that they did not take that route. Nonetheless, please make this storyline go away! I insist that the season would be better off if this plotline focusing on the maniacal obsessive behavior of one of the otherwise most affable characters in the show never existed.

Back to the “most awkward dinner ever” (Jared’s words) at the house. Michaela must leave after a little while because she must join the A-story since she is getting the same calling as Eagan and Ben. Her vision also features blood coming out of her eyes, à-la-Saanvi who is literally bleeding out of her eyes at Eureka. Zeke remains with Beverly, Sarah, and Jared.

Couple of interesting developments occur in this B-story. Firstly, Zeke gets nothing but good vibes from Sarah who helps Beverly with a spill, even though Beverly initially startles as her by believing that she is Michaela. Zeke also gets good vibes from Jared and Sarah as a couple in a three-way conversation a bit later. There is no need, it seems, for people to freak out about Sarah being the Major’s daughter. It seems that Jared’s instincts were right. She is nothing like her mother.

Secondly, Beverly has a rare moment of clarity during which she tells Zeke, holding his hand, that his one day with Michaela where she thought he only had that day left to live, “doesn’t hold a candle to twelve years together,” obviously referring to Jared and Michaela’s past romance. This is obviously a sensitive topic for Zeke who asks Beverly if she can feel what he’s feeling, except that Beverly’s fleeting moment of clarity is already over. She is back to asking for ice cream. Hey Zeke, I feel for you man!

Last-minute thoughts:

–The 11^th-hour cliffhanger from the last episode, with Cal seeing the volcano erupt in his snow globe, mixed with visions of Ben, Michaela, Cal and others holding their heads in their hands and screaming their lungs off, is totally ignored here.

— Good on Saanvi to unload the burden of keeping her accidental killing of the Major a secret. And what better person to confess it to then Michaela! Now, what will happen when Sarah eventually learns of it? That may be an earthquake worthy of registering on on Dr. Cooper’s device.

— I laughed at Michaela’s mock-snark “thank you, goodbyeeee” to Ben when he got sarcastic about her cooking.

— I am not one to believe in the chances long-distance relationships surviving among young people, so it does not surprise me to see Olive and Levi connecting, at least for now, with no mention of TJ.

— According to Eagan, Ben is “Dorothy,” Angelina is “Little House on the Prairie,” and Saanvi is the “inside man.” He also refers to his lies as “-ish.” This guy’s a scuzzball, but he can be hilarious. I am willing to bet my house that Ali Lopez-Sohaili is having a ball playing this character.

— Jared: “Good on you, man, hosting the most awkward dinner party ever” – followed by – Zeke: “Ha!” Watch their faces in slow motion during this brief exchange and tell me if you can make it through without laughing.

— The Al-Zuras book is back, still emanating a bright light for effect, with references to the ship and people who jumped off. Ben wonders how he had missed the face of Saanvi drawn in one of the pages along with others who have gone insane on the boat, but unless my memory has gone grossly haywire, he did notice it back in “Airplane Bottles,” the ninth episode of season 2.

— I am going to recommend Grace not to give Olive advice on how to be nice to Angelina anymore. Dear mommy, Olive is mature enough to accurately read the room!

Until the next episode…

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“Destination Unknown” – Aired on May 6, 2021
Writer: Eric Haywood & Marta Gené Camps
Director: Claudia Yarmy
Grade: 4 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

We have passed the midway point of the season and Manifest seems to justifiably focus more on its long-arc story with the high-concept mystery surrounding Flight 828 and its passengers. While this particular mystery exists since the series opener, it is now more nuanced with its stakes raised exponentially. Showrunner Jeff Rake and his writing crew have done a legitimate job of world-building and crafted multiple new layers to the mystery while expanding its parameters in terms of space and time. The show is far from being perfect, and this season has lacked the groundbreaking occasional episode the way the first two had them, but Manifest continues to be highly entertaining, if not addictive.

And perhaps those are the reasons why I have a bit of trouble understanding the obsession with running almost a half dozen storylines in a 42-minute episode, more than halfway into a 13-episode season. Last episode suffered from the same virus, except that the two A-stories in this one are much better paced and genuinely detailed, thus somewhat covering for the flaws dispersed all throughout the minor storylines. I would even argue that “Destination Unknown” would have been better off if a couple of those minor storylines were avoided all together, thus allowing time to give even more substance to the narrative surrounding the sapphire-related DNA anomaly found at Eureka via fleshed-out, additional dialogues between Vance, Saanvi, Dr. Gupta, Troy and other scientists (see my note below about the scene involving Dr. Cooper).

“Destination Unknown” opens with shots of Ben getting “poked and prodded” as the guinea pig of the Eureka project, to the beat of instrumental techno music in the background, under the supervision of Dr. Gupta and Saanvi. There is a crystallized form of sapphire found in his system, the same one that is also found in the systems of Jace, Pete, and Kory, all three kept in water tanks at the facility.

While Saanvi and Gupta are explaining all this to Ben and Vance at the lab, Ben gets a vision of a bunch of passengers’ photos on the screen at the lab bursting into flames. As he is leaving to investigate the calling, Saanvi informs him that they received a parcel from Vatican containing a piece of driftwood (the cliffhanger from “Precious Cargo”). They agree to give each other updates on their respective searches as Ben leaves the facility.

Cal’s getting ready to attend a book fair and Michaela and Zeke are helping him get a box of books together. Michaela finds a card from the Al-Zuras deck with a volcano on it. As soon as she picks it up, the volcano erupts, and the card burns her hand. She decides to stay behind to investigate the calling. Zeke wants to help, but noticing Cal’s disappointment about having to go alone, he agrees to go with him.

We find out later that Cal had ulterior motives in wanting Zeke to accompany him. He has a crush on a girl named Stella (Winter Donnelly) and he can use Zeke’s help in reading minds to get the scoop on how she feels about him. That little rascal! Zeke gives Cal a little life lesson on why it would be “shaky grounds” to use their abilities for personal gain. Chalk up another one in the plus column for Uncle Zeke. And yet, he is faced with a similar dilemma himself when Michaela arrives home later and tells him about Jared and Sarah flirting and how she is happy for Jared, and Zeke senses Michaela’s feelings of jealousy. So, will he follow his own advice and not use his ability to read Michaela’s mind in the future? Oh, the irony!

Angelina, in the meantime, is scrolling through Olive’s social media photos with great envy, almost as if she is obsessed with her. This bizarre development soon turns eerie when Angelina becomes obsessed with imitating Olive. By the end of the hour, we see her in Olive’s room, wearing Olive’s sexy dress, using her make up, accompanied by an ominous background music as if to echo the beginnings of Hedy’s destructive obsession with Allie in Single White Female (1992). Dear showrunners, I beg you, please don’t turn Angelina into that! And what is this sudden trend of inserting scenes of how Eden stops crying whenever she is picked up by Angelina, first from Olive’s arms in “Precious Cargo,” and now from Grace’s arms in this episode? Is there some supernatural force at work here or is it an unescapable component of this ham-fisted narrative?

Ben meets Michaela in his Agent-Moulder basement home office. They are trying to solve the connection between their two visions. Ben cannot remember every passenger that he saw bursting into flames, nor can the two of them find a connection between that and the tarot card, until Michaela notices the roman numeral XXI on top of it. Ben checks who was sitting in row 21 of the 828 flight and recalls specifically seeing the photo of a Rachel Hall (Sarah Hunt), the passenger assigned to seat 21A, bursting into flames in his vision.

Michaela and Ben drive to Rachel’s address but find instead her sister Hannah (Erin Fritch) living there with her husband Jonas (Robert Eli) who used to be married to Rachel before she disappeared on Flight 828 — quasi-replica of what Michaela went through in the beginning of the series when she came back five and a half years later to find Jared married to Lourdes, her best friend.

Jonas and Hannah do not know Rachel’s whereabouts because, according to them, things turned sour when Rachel’s behavior became so erratic that they had to get a restraining order against her. Michaela and Ben eventually locate Rachel who is now working for a cleaning company.

At Eureka, there is a bit of tension in the research team of scientists and Dr.Gupta’s disagreeable disposition toward her team members doesn’t help. During a general meeting, Dr. Bustamante questions her directive about everyone having to report their findings to Saanvi. Gupta bluntly informs him and the others sitting around the table that Saanvi is the reason why they all still have jobs because she made the discovery that the so-called “best and brightest scientific minds ever assembled under one roof” could not collectively make. Ouch!

And you can still feel the ripple effects of that “ouch” when, in a later scene, Saanvi and Troy request an update from Dr. Bustamante on his progress and he turns dismissive, mockingly noting that he will give his full report in due time since radiology is not Saanvi and Troy’s strong suit. Troy replies immediately that he read one of Dr. Bustamante’s papers and delivers the funniest line of the hour with the widest grin on his face: “Your writing is not that hard to understand.” Hahaha… Troy, please don’t change!

Saanvi and Troy run a DNA test on a sample of the biological matter found between the shards of the driftwood and find them to be roughly 6000 years old, originating in a type of peacock that had gone extinct, which makes it astonishing that they have the same DNA anomaly as Ben and the meth heads. Troy speculates that the peacock may have disappeared 6000 years ago and recently reappeared, which would not be that far off considering the peacock sightings at key moments in past episodes.

Jared and Michaela delve into the police report of Rachel’s car accident about a month prior to her trip to Jamaica. In fact, it was the injuries resulting from the accident that caused her migraines in Jamaica, ultimately forcing her to cut her trip short and return to New York on Flight 828. Jonas remained in Jamaica because he did not want the prepaid money for the hotel room go to waste. Lovely husband, ain’t he?

But, there is more…

It turns out that Jonas was driving the car that crushed straight into Rachel’s to cause the accident. Michaela notes that he literally “T-Boned” her car. Furthermore, in the only report of the violation of the restraining order, called in by a neighbor, Hannah did not press charges against her sister. Something is not adding up, and Michaela and Ben are determined to dig deeper. They first speak to the housekeeper (Susan Varon) working for the neighbor who reported the violation, and boy, is she a fountain of information! According to her, Jonas is never home at nights, and when he happens to be there, he is either “shouting” or “throwing things.” She doesn’t understand why Hannah stays with him and adds that Rachel stops by to help Hannah, not to cause trouble.

A more realistic picture is beginning to form in the eyes of Michaela and Ben, one that depicts Jonas as the abusive husband who first controlled Rachel, and now Hannah. Rachel is only trying to protect her sister. Hannah later opens up to Michaela about how Rachel had everything, whereas she was always left in the background, basically admitting that she wanted what Rachel once had, and turned a blind eye at first to the signs of Jonas’s true nature because he made her feel good, like the center of his world.

While Michaela was talking with Hannah, Ben was stalking Jonas who went into his office at night. The problem is, Ben notices that Rachel is also in the building, with a gun, ready to kill him in order to protect her sister. Luckily, Ben stops her just in time from committing murder before the authorities arrive in time to arrest everyone. Michaela’s and Ben’s scenes are interposed over one another, switching back and forth, in such beautiful way that both events appear, justifiably, to be the essential pieces of a single story. This is first-rate editing work by Mark Conte and it’s the accumulation of quality elements like this, along with some great performances by the three guest actors Hunt, Fritch, and Eli, that turn this bottle story into one of the best A-stories of Manifest in a single episode. The inner conflict of each character is conveyed across the screen with great accuracy. The last scene of the two sisters talking to each other through bars at the precinct under the watchful eye of Michaela, is bittersweet, touching, and redeeming at the same time, because the episode succeeds in making us care about them.

Back at Eureka, Troy introduces Saanvi to a nerdy gamer friend of his named Patrick Cooper (J.D. Martin) because he believes Dr. Cooper can explain how a 6000-year-old driftwood can resurface after so much time. There is a lot of seismic babble-talk here that I found interesting, but the key moment takes place when Saanvi learns that the driftwood was found near a dormant volcano that possibly coughed it up (a theory by the nerd Patrick). This three-way conversation is, by the way, an emblematic illustration of the additional, fleshed-out dialogue of which I speak in my introductory paragraphs above.

She rushes over to Dr. Gupta who earlier told her that it was discovered in “south of Armenia.” Next, we see Saanvi put two and two together to realize that the dormant volcano is Mount Ararat in Turkey,** which is believed to be the final resting place of Noah’s Ark which, in turn, makes the piece of driftwood part of the vessel! If so, this is not only a stunning discovery but one that changes everything previously known about the link — or the non-existing link, depending on your perspective — between science and the divine.

** What is the point of referring to the location of Mount Ararat, located in Turkey, as “south of Armenia”? Would anyone refer to Chicago, USA, as “1 hour south of Canada”? Is Zurich, Switzerland, “just south of Germany”? Technically, sure. But would one refer to Zurich that way? Never. Why not just say “the piece of driftwood was discovered in eastern Turkey” instead of “it was discovered in south of Armenia”? Because of this, the sequence during which Saanvi began putting two and two together came across forced and artificial, not to mention that anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge about Noah’s Ark would have known where she was going with it once Mount Ararat was mentioned.

What if Noah’s Ark experienced the same phenomenon as Flight 828? This is the reason why Vance throws a fit to Saanvi when she mentions the passengers learning about this. He exclaims, “you have to stop thinking of yourself as a private citizen. You are now a government operative with top secret security clearance working on this country’s most highly classified secrets. We can’t risk this falling into the wrong hands!” From now on, Saanvi’s loyalty is the facility and no one else, not even Ben, and Vance ain’t joking here! He makes Saanvi promise out loud that she will keep everything mentioned in that room a secret. It doesn’t take long for Saanvi to suffer the consequences of her promise either, as she is forced to lie to Ben when he texts her for an update on the research.

“Destination Unknown” ends with Cal seeing a volcano erupt in his snow globe, mixed in with visions of Ben, Michaela, Cal, and Angelina holding their heads in their hands and screaming, reminiscent of the same terrifying calling as in “Tailfin,” the season-3 opener.

Last-minute thoughts:

— Grace is checking out prospective locations for a new café to honor her brother.

— There is no way the previous owner of the café left Prince’s guitar hanging on the wall! Come on…

— Jared and Sarah have their first kiss together in the presence of red tulips that Jared brought to her doorstep. I am rooting for them. I know it’s a lot to ask from Manifest writers, but please, dear Jeff Rake and co., don’t rock the boat too much for these two!

— Holy crap! Everyone’s using the term “lifeboat” now… Sigh!

— Michaela continues the be the voice of reason, calling Ben “Inspector Gadget” when he comments on Jared flirting with Sarah, and senses quickly during the Jonas-Hannah-Rachel investigation that everybody is either lying to them or to themselves.

— When Ben arrives to the entrance of the building, the outside door is locked. But, hey, no worries for our citizen-agent-detective-locksmith Ben Stone. All he needs is his Swiss pocketknife and… voilà!!

Until the next episode…

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