“Icing Conditions” – Aired on April 6, 2020
Writer: Jeff Rake & Matthew Lau
Director: Romeo Tirone
Grade: 4 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

Manifest wraps up its second season with a respectable episode that provides a resolution to one of the long arcs of the season while still leaving questions unanswered, saving one main character while killing off a recurring one. More importantly, “Icing Conditions” opens the door for an expanded exploration of the show’s paranormal ingredient in season 3 thanks to a compelling discovery made by a Cuban boat out in the ocean at the eleventh hour. Exciting indeed!

We pick up straight from where “Call Sign” ended, with the skeevy trio, headed by Jace, asking for their stash of meth collected by the NYPD in return for the safe delivery of Cal back to his family. Grace and Ben are angry at Michaela for arresting Jace and co. back at the meth house instead of listening to the calling, “let him go.” Their basic argument, and it’s a flimsy one, is that had Michaela listened to the calling and not arrested them, they would have died in the explosion later and never abducted Cal.

Grace is especially animated (and Karkanis carries the role of the desperate and angry mom extremely well throughout the outing) as Michaela tries to explain that she will try to make things right by accessing the evidence locker room back at the precinct and recovering the stash for the exchange to take place. How she will manage to do so, without jeopardizing her career yet again, is another question.

Next, we see Zeke telling Olive that he is “okay” when he looks anything but okay! He has one day left to live, and frankly, he looks terrible. At that moment, he gets a vision of him walking away from a car somewhere in the woods, followed by one of him laying down on his back, almost frozen, and looking up.

Vance and Saanvi, for their part, are staking out the Major as she is about to board a ferry. Vance has apparently been keeping tabs on the Major for the last two weeks and knows her daily routine. His plan involves identifying one of her scientists and approaching that person to learn about her discovery. Unfortunately, that requires time, a luxury Saanvi does not have if she is to save Zeke.

The above few minutes launch the main storylines of the finale. They advance at a balanced rate and none of them come across rushed, although the outing is by no means devoid of contrivances and narrative shortcuts that mainly serve to bring structure to the events leading up to the climactic denouement tying Cal and Zeke’s storylines together. There is nothing groundbreaking here, but do season finales need to be groundbreaking anyway?

It’s a matter of opinion, I suppose.

In my dream world, groundbreaking material is first introduced somewhere along the early-to-mid-season episodes, then developed into thrilling narratives during the rest of the season, whereas season finales are reserved for providing just the right amount of resolutions to feed an empty stomach (to use a metaphor), but not enough to satiate the hunger, while hinting at sumptuous feasts to come in the near future. Taken from such angle, “Icing Conditions” manages to complete its task without coming across trite or unambitious.  

Back to the storylines…

As expected, Michaela’s far-fetched story on why she needs the meth stash checked out from the evidence locker room does not wash with the officer (Carla Brandberg) in charge of the unit. The system shows Michaela on leave, leading the officer to contact Jared whose name appears on the evidence box as the lead detective. Det. Vasquez – otherwise known to viewers as the good ol’ caretaker of Michaela and the Stone family at the detriment of his career – comes to the rescue yet again by signing the evidence out for his ex-fiancé and partner. Never mind that Michaela was trying to illegally check out evidence. Never mind that the officer in charge caught her lying. We won’t tell if she won’t. And we know that Jared won’t!

That doesn’t mean that he is happy about it though (is he ever, when he does this?) and he wants an explanation. Michaela, in a move that would get on any friend’s nerves, grabs the box from Jared and says, “No, don’t worry about it. Just go back to your desk. Don’t get involved.” This brings forth one of the funniest lines (despite the bitter tone) of the episode, in the way that only Jared (read: J.R. Ramirez) can deliver them: “Mick, I just signed out an industrial-size box of methamphetamine. I’d say I’m involved.” In other words, dear Michaela, dump the concerned-friend act! Of course he will help you. Side note: I felt the need to underline this exchange because I believe that the lines dripping with sarcasm or snark that Jared has occasionally been delivering so far throughout the two seasons have been an underappreciated aspect of Manifest.

As for Saanvi, she is in dire need of a more direct and less time-consuming approach with the Major. She takes matters in her own hands and confronts the Major on the ferry as I say to myself, hang on just a second! Didn’t Vance just say that it was extremely difficult to get close to the Major? Hasn’t the Major been portrayed as one of the most secretive agents with the highest security clearance, and one tough cookie to track down and contact? So, how on earth can Saanvi, out of all people, simply walk up to the Major (twice in this episode) while she is alone, with no protection or bodyguards around? Oh, never mind, call me nit-picky.

Saanvi wants to know what the Major discovered in her research for the cure, and unsurprisingly, the Major refuses to share any information with her. Thanks to our doctor’s slapdash idea of accosting the Major out of nowhere, it does not take long for the Major to figure out that not only is Vance alive and watching her, but also that Saanvi is freelancing at that moment without his approval. In short, a total failure of a move by Saanvi thus far.

Our good doctor ploughs on though, trying to play the ‘exchange’ card next. She offers the “complete medical file” of a man who was not on Flight 828 in return for the information she seeks, which also backfires when the Major informs her that she has known about Zeke all along. The Major does mention, for the sake of taunting Saanvi, something about a valuable discovery with regard to Zeke’s “exonic sequences.” Last but not the least, Saanvi resorts to the ‘going public’ card at which point the Major, in a not-so-subtle way, warns Saanvi that “those are the kinds of threats that get people killed,” before she leaves the ferry.

This one-on-one sequence is another tour-de-force by Elizabeth Marvel whose superb acting has embellished every scene that the Major appeared in, which makes it that much more of a shame, in my opinion, that her character remained vastly underused and was written off at the end of the season. In this 90-second-long scene alone, she manages to sprinkle in ample moments sarcasm, arrogance, spite, humor, and hostility, switching from one mood to another with the ease of a seasoned, five-star performer.

Vance gets Saanvi access to a lab, even recovering some of her research from her old lab at the hospital, so that she can study Zeke’s exons to learn about the Major’s discovery. Am I missing something here? If Vance had the ability to get Saanvi a lab on a whim like he did here, why did they wait until now? She loads Zeke’s data into the simulator to search for a cure, but the machine estimates six days for results to appear. This doesn’t help Zeke’s cause and Saanvi is crestfallen. Vance, for his part, is mad at Saanvi for going rogue with the Major and blowing his dead-man cover. This is not the end of Saanvi’s saga either, but first, let’s get back to saving Cal.

The exchange of meth stash for Cal between the skeevy trio and Michaela is set to take place in a public square, with Jared and Drea observing from the roof of a building (Jace specifically wanted no cops at the scene), and a fidgety Ben present at the exchange point. Someone please tell me which genius had the idea to place him smack in the middle of this exchange when anyone could have predicted that he was going to have conniption fits even before the skeevy trio appeared on scene with Cal. Was Michaela seeing this through by herself not an option? Honestly, this precarious set-up spelled disaster from the beginning.

Ben is not, however, the one to ultimately cause the collapse of the exchange. Michaela leaves the duffel bag containing the stash under a bench for Kory to collect and begins to walk away, while Jace and Pete stand with Cal on the other side of the overpass. Some good Samaritan (Sheri Effres) yells at Michaela that she forgot her bag and gets suspicious when Michaela asks her to be quiet in return, flashing her badge. The Samaritan suspects that it’s a false badge and notifies a police officer nearby, which is all Kory needs to see before warning Jace that they are “being played.” The exchange goes haywire, the skeevy trio flees the scene with Cal while Ben tries to pursue them but succeeds somehow to run and bump into every pedestrian on the overpass.

This public fiasco has the Captain’s feathers ruffled to say the least. She furiously scolds Michaela, Jared, and Drea in her office, wanting to know how “a duffel bag of meth that’s supposed to be in the evidence locker was part of a failed hostage exchange.” Let’s put aside for a moment the implausibility of Jared and Michaela having survived their past ordeals and held on to their badges. This one alone should earn them an immediate suspension, if not dismissal. Like I said though, let’s put that aside, because a pissed-off Captain Bowers is a worthy watch at any moment of any episode. I can only hope that Andrene Ward-Hammond sticks around for a long time, even longer than Marvel – yes, I’m bitter, can you tell?

Michaela is not willing to follow the rules laid down by Bowers, however, when it concerns Cal’s safety. She drops her badge and gun on the Captain’s table and resigns. Except that Bowers is not accepting her resignation. She wants to help. It’s just that, “from here on out,” they have to do things her way. Somehow, that makes it okay, I presume, because we later see the group working together at the Stone household, although I am scratching my head and wondering, didn’t Michaela just say eight seconds ago that she was quitting precisely because she did not want to do it the Captain’s way? Anyhoo…

The skeevy trio are hiding in some shack in the woods and the trope of the ‘growing disaccord among the bad guys’ is abundantly present. Pete is the most fragile member of the trio, as opposed to the squalid Jace, and harbors enough sympathy for Cal to provide him with a blanket and let him secretly use his phone to send his sister a text message.

The message ends with, “Tell mom and Doug I love them.” It appears on Olive’s phone moments after Zeke sees once again the vision of him laying down on his back on ice, except that this time, Cal is looking down at him and calling his name. It does not take Olive long to figure out that the name “Doug” is a sign from Cal to indicate his location. It refers to a diner named The Dugout where Cal and Olive used to eat pancakes all the time when they went skiing as a family. Zeke recognizes the diner’s image on google from his calling and before you know it, Ben, Michaela, and Zeke are sneaking out the back door to drive there while Drea and Jared keep Captain Bowers and her officers in the dark.

Their scheme does not last long as the Captain busts them while communicating by phone with Ben who located the diner. Bowers had enough and decides to alert the state police so that they can set up a perimeter, at which point Grace steps in, grabs Bowers by the hands, and implores her not to do that… well, ok, the better wording would be, she ‘firmly requests’ the Captain to… well, no! That does not fit either. Let me just say it straight forward. She ‘explicitly warns’ Captain Bowers, for her own good, not to alert the authorities: “Captain, with all due respect, this is my son. If you do anything to jeopardize him coming home to me safely, I swear to God, you’ll wish you didn’t wake up this morning.” Oh wait, I found the right term: Grace ‘literally threatens’ the Captain! It works. Bowers will comply (and manage to keep her dignity too): “You’re lucky I’m a mother. I can keep them offline for now.” If you are a fan of intense stares, this whole sequence was made just for you!

Ben and Michaela are forced to continue afoot when they arrive at a gate of some sort blocking the road. They must leave Zeke in the car as he is no shape to walk (heck, he has barely been able to talk during the ride, with his head laying on Michaela’s lap). He and Michaela tell each other goodbye for the last time, or so they believe, before Michaela joins Ben to search for Cal in the woods.

Time to revisit Saanvi who, in desperation, accosts the Major one more time downtown at night, demanding to know the cure. But she came with a plan this time, and it’s a vicious one. She has some powder/cream rubbed on her gloves, I presume, and she uses it to infect the Major with anaphylaxis. Unless the Major provides her with the cure to save Zeke, Saanvi will not give her the antidote that she holds in a vial, and the Major will die within 90 seconds. The Major tries to grab the vial by force which leads to a brief scuffle causing the vial to fall to the ground and break. In her dying moments, the Major reveals that she has no cure because she was solely aiming to weaponize the mutation. Saanvi is in shock watching the Major die, frantically repeating “I’m sorry,” before she runs away. Just like that, the most enigmatic character in the show is killed off at the hands of the one character that appeared the least likely to kill anyone – yes, I’m still bitter!

Back to Zeke who is left alone in the car and freezing to death…

He gets yet another vision of himself lying down on the icy ground with Cal running toward him on a frozen lake this time. That vision must have transmitted superpowers to Zeke who could barely move his mouth to utter a word or two during the ride, because he is now suddenly able to leave the car and walk away. Well ok, he actually falls down after a few steps which, in turn, makes it that much more absurd that the next shot of him that we see is when he appears out of nowhere later in the frozen lake, running full speed toward Cal (never mind that he next jumps into the water and saves Cal). Is this type of inconsistency really inevitable simply because the tear-jerking emotional drama of the goodbye scene between Zeke and Michaela in the car must be allowed to take place? Is it absolutely necessary to have Zeke shock everyone with his superior athletic skills, after showing him on the verge of total physical collapse for hours, just to create riveting action-drama? I guess I am having trouble with the amount of suspension of disbelief that this scene requires from me just so I can absorb what is taking place on screen.

Having said that, the tale of how we get to that final running scene is quite unique.

It begins with Michaela and Ben locating the skeevy trio’s hideout in the woods and Jace noticing their flashlights by the trees while looking out from one of the windows. The bad guys plan to escape out the back, but disagree on what to do with Cal. The argument escalates when Jace wants Cal’s throat slit while Kory argues that he “didn’t sign up for murder one.” Pete, in the meantime, unties Cal and tells him to run before the others notice.

Thus, begins the most singular chase scene you’ve possibly ever seen in primetime drama. Below is my attempt at describing it:

Cal runs first, escaping from the skeevy trio. Jace who notices that the boy escaped, runs after him. Kory and Pete run after Jace, unclear as to whether it’s because they want to save Cal, or because they want to stop Jace, or simply because they wish to run away from Ben and Michaela who are approaching the house. Ben and Michaela enter the shack and see the back door open, so they begin running after everybody. To clarify, Cal is the locomotive, followed by Jace, followed by Kory and Pete, followed by the Stones. This quadruple-chase lasts until they reach the same frozen lake that Zeke saw in his vision earlier, where the previously 99%-dead Zeke joins the eccentricities, running himself at a 90-degree angle to the quadruple chase. End of description.

Jace finally catches Cal and holds him at gunpoint. At that moment, a powerful lightning (most likely, “dark lightning,” first mentioned in “Contrails“) cracks the ice and the skeevy trio falls in the freezing water along with Cal. Zeke jumps in behind them and saves Cal before being pulled out of the water by Ben. The underwater scenes mixed with the chaos involved in finding Zeke and Cal below the ice make for one of the most breathtaking action sequences of the season in my opinion, due in part to the fact that when such scenes are filmed in a season finale, one can never be sure if the main characters present in the scene will survive the ordeal or not.

In this case, it’s a happy ending all around, but not before episode writers Jeff Rake and Matthew Lau throw one last curveball at the viewers with Zeke. He does indeed die moments after Ben pulls him out, while lying down in Michaela’s arms and looking up to Cal leaning over him, just like in his vision. After remaining dead for a good while (enough for the police to be alerted and their cars to arrive at the scene), the camera shows Ben and Michaela’s faces turning bright thanks to a glow coming from Zeke who (strangely) remains off camera. It reminded me of the bright light that Ben saw in “Emergency Exit” as he was carrying the injured Olive at the night club, or the one emanating from the Al-Zuras journal at Ben’s office at the end of that same episode. When the camera shows Zeke’s face again, we notice the ice covering it quickly disappear before he is essentially resurrected!

Happy scenes at the Stone household ensue as Cal and a healthy Zeke are reunited with the rest of the family. Grace thanks Michaela for her help, making up for the times she blamed her earlier in the episode. The mood of this scene stands in stark contrast to Saanvi’s state of emotional disarray (surely the result of both failing Zeke and killing the Major) when Vance finds her alone, in the middle of a nervous breakdown, crying and repeating, “What do we do? What do we do?”

Ben and Michaela have one last conversation down in the Agent-Mulder basement office before the end. Ben reiterates his belief that the callings must be followed, but he also admits that he no longer subscribes to Adrian’s gloomy theory about the passengers being agents of the apocalypse – he even says that they may be “miracles” of some sort. He is glad that the skeevy trio perished at the bottom of the frozen lake and that those “sons of bitches” will never bother them again. Or so he believes…

In reality, the bodies of Jace, Kory, and Pete are nowhere to be found when the police’s scuba units search for them in the lake, which points to their disappearance rather than death! It could also be, of course, that the dark lightning sent them to another timeline or reality. This is Manifest and the possibilities are endless!

The game-changing reveal, the mother-twist of them all, arrives at the very end when Ben sees the vision of Flight 828 exploding for the umpteenth time, meaning that his calling has yet to fully serve its purpose, followed by a Cuban fishing boat’s nets accidentally getting tangled with the broken wing of Flight 828 at the bottom of the sea somewhere around the Gulf of Mexico (I presume).

Two Flight 828s? in one reality? Echoes of parallel universes? Time shifts? Forces operating across centuries?

Bring on season 3 already!  

Last-minute thoughts:

— Just in case a new reader may get the wrong impression from this review (regular ones won’t), let me set the record straight. I am not a fan of last-second revelations and shockers, an obvious trend in modern-day TV (unfortunately, at least for me). It is too often used to cover up weak storytelling, or the lack of character growth, and in some cases, it even undermines the quality of writing because it excessively focuses on jarring the viewer’s emotions. That being said, in a serialized drama, I don’t mind it being used in season finales in the name of setting the stage for the next season and giving fans something to chew on over the long break. “Icing Conditions” passes that test with flying colors.

— The officer in charge of the evidence locker room specifically mentions the NYPD system saying that Michaela “left to get married,” apart from showing her “on leave.” Don’t you love it when the system of the place of your work goes into details about your off-duty or on-leave activities?

— In an earlier one-on-one scene taking place in Ben’s Agent-Mulder basement office, he lays it thick into Michaela again, blaming her for putting Cal in danger and not letting those “bastards” die in the explosion “like they were supposed to.” Holy shit Ben! Not that I disagree with the last part…

— When Grace puts the heat on Bowers not to alert authorities and the Captain looks around the room trying to wrap her head around Grace’s ultimatum, check out Drea’s expression. Priceless!

— Just to clarify, I do not mean any disrespect against any of the actors in the show by saying this, and it is obviously a personal opinion so it can be debated, but after two seasons, I would comfortably pick Luna Blaise and Athena Karkanis among the regulars as the ones setting the golden standard of acting for Manifest.

— Nit-pick time: I noted in the last-minute thoughts of the previous episode that the Major’s real name (Kathryn Fitz) was mentioned back in episode three of this season once, and that it had probably been forgotten by now. It seems that those in charge of subtitles don’t have it quite right either because it is spelled “Katherine” when Saanvi says it both times.

— In the amber alert announced on radio about Cal’s abduction, it is said that the Stone household is located in Hollis Hills, Queens. Is that the first time that the family’s location is actually heard on the show? I cannot remember hearing it before, but I bet there are fans out there who paid more attention to this than me. Let me know if I am wrong.

Until the next season…

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“Call Sign” – Aired on March 30, 2020
Writer: Simran Baidwan & Ezra W. Nachman
Director: Joe Chappelle
Grade: 2,5 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

Hang on a sec! Zeke has only two more days left to live? What? How? Did I miss something? I thought he still had a couple of months at least, give or take a couple of weeks, maybe? Or something like that? But… two days?!?

Let me get this straight. Zeke had less than three days to live when he proposed to Michaela on his knees in last week’s stellar “Unaccompanied Minors” and nobody mentioned it? Michaela had time to stake out Jace and co. for who-knows-how-long in a car, bust the house, and arrest them, knowing during all that time that Zeke had less than three days to live, and yet in this episode, she suddenly cannot continue the interrogation because he has two days left and she MUST spend them with him? Ah yes, the wedding! How dare I forget?

The way this news gets dropped on viewers in the first few minutes of the outing, with zero hint of Zeke’s death date having drawn so near in anything seen previously – no, him saying, “I don’t want to spend my last days hooked up to tubes […] I want to spend it with you,” to Michaela at the hospital doesn’t count, especially when he then takes a day-long trip to Jones Beach while he only had (apparently) little over 48 hours left to live –, represents a microcosm of the larger issue tainting this hardly profound penultimate episode.

It’s flagrantly lop-sided plot-over-character balance, stemming from a series of narrative shortcuts, rushed occurrences, and inconsistent behavior by familiar faces, barely allows space for substantial drama to shine through and gives the impression that the writing room vowed to get from point A to B, at any cost.

Is this yet another outcome of ‘penultimatepisode-itis,’ the disease that has been crippling the TV entertainment arena for as many decades as I have been a viewer? The one causing penultimate episodes to be treated like fleeting after-thoughts, with little tender-loving care, because they solely exist to arrive at some variation of the announcement, “next week in the season finale…”? — Side note: Both the term and the diagnosis are my own, no credible source cited (read: Love it or leave it). In case you wondered how season 1’s penultimate episode fared, see for yourself.

Consider Jared, for example. Here is an hour that could have centered on him and finally served as the key stretch of his redemption arc by putting the emphasis on his respect toward Michaela, and his mature acceptance of her decision to move on. Instead, the episode spotlights his whaaat reaction to learning about the death date during a stake out for a meth ring and his inability to handle seeing Michaela in a wedding dress later. It could have also put aside a minute or longer to give Jared and Zeke a meaningful one-on-one scene about understanding each other, one that foregrounds how far Jared has come in terms of emotional magnanimity. Instead, we get a 20-second-long hey-we’re-buddies-now chit-chat + a handshake and a pat on the arm (and to think that the first season ended on the cliffhanger that had these two come to blows and shoot Michaela by accident).

Daniel Woodrell, one of the most respected novelists of the last few decades (his Tomato Red and Winter’s Bone have both been adapted for the screen) once said, “I’m always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.” As with Jared’s example, it appears as if “Call Sign” did the opposite, dealing the deck of cards from the bottom and even quitting on that halfway through. His is not the only example either. The episode’s main concern is to tick the predetermined boxes to advance the plot to point B in preparation for the finale. It seems to show zero interest in fleshing out human stories.

The shadow-trio’s hammy bus-escape scene (the mediocre version of an eerily similar one in The Fugitive) followed by their wondrous appearance outside the Stone household several hours later while the three detectives smack in charge of investigating them are present inside, but somehow have not heard a word of their escape, is another product of this disjointed narrative race to get to point B. Never mind how the trio even knew where the location of the wedding or what Michaela’s cell-phone number were.

Then, there is also Saanvi’s odd behavioral shifts. She frantically runs around having conniption fits throughout the episode in an effort to reach Vance or to regain access to her research, only to suddenly turn giddy and jolly at the wedding, eat cake while chit-chatting with others, watch people dance, and cheer the newlyweds on. Oh-kay!

That being said, all is not lost. There are a few bright spots.

Cal and Zeke, for instance, share genuine moments of heartwarming connection. In their first scene together, Cal expresses his innocent confusion about weddings, in the adorable way that children often do at that age. Weddings are “supposed to be fun,” or so he thought, but “what’s fun about…,” his voice trails before Zeke finishes the sentence for him, “… me dying?” Zeke has plans for Cal though. He wants his younger buddy to throw him a “killer bachelor party.”

Cal’s idea of such party consists of sugary foods, soda, and a game of monopoly! At one point, in an effort to cheer Zeke up, he reminds Zeke that nobody believed he could beat cancer before Flight 828. “But here I am,” he adds before giving Zeke a delightful hug. Zeke reciprocates as tears form in his eyes: “You threw me the best bachelor party I could ask for.” Now, there is a dialogue with bona-fide sentiments and insight.

The opposite case is the conversation between Michaela and Zeke the night before, when she attempts to convince Zeke one last time to go for a quick round of treatments.

In glaring contrast to the profound dialogues the two had in “Unaccompanied Minors” on this topic, this one comes across unnecessary and theatrically sentimental, with its conspicuous intention being to pull on the viewers’ heartstrings. It had the opposite effect on me, frankly. I cringed in the same way I do when I hear similar lines in soap operas when Zeke said, “No more meds. No more needles. Just an epic wedding, a honeymoon, and a last night in your arms.”

A second bright spot laboring hard to shine through in this otherwise mishmash of an hour is the interaction between TJ and Olive. TJ’s application for a grant to do research in Egypt has gone through and he will be leaving soon to dig deeper into his research on the Al-Zuras journal.

Olive is devastated to hear the news at first and takes it as a sign of a break-up. TJ makes it clear to her, thankfully, that he has zero intention to lose her forever. The reason why he is so adamantly pursuing the journal’s trail is precisely because he wishes to solve the death-date puzzle and secure their future together. He even asks her to join him in Egypt, but Olive refuses, citing her desire to spend time with her family. They are not giving up on each other and you simply have to love how these two – who could give summer clinics to adult couples on decision-making – handle these moments.

As for Saanvi, putting aside her wild behavioral shifts, her dilemma boils down how far the Major has gotten with her research. After seeing how the switchboard at the D.O.D. “lit up like a Christmas tree,” Vance believes that the Major must have cracked the code on the DNA anomaly research. She is therefore “cutting loose ends” now and Saanvi happens to be one of those. He advises her to go into hiding, but Saanvi wants to hear nothing of the sort: “I am not hiding from her! I am coming after her!” It’s a feel-good, hell-yeah moment for Saanvi fans that, in reality, makes little strategic sense, and that’s coming from a Saanvi fan.

Among the multitudinous narratives advancing simultaneously at thunderous speeds, the one with Ben having a vision of Flight 828 exploding is probably the most nuanced. Michaela, desperate for any sign to help Zeke, believes that Ben’s vision may have something to do with Zeke who was not even on the flight, to which Ben gently replies, “I think you’re grasping.” It’s a reasonable statement, considering that Michaela did not even have the same vision, but let’s not dwell on that here – On that note, the question of why the callings appear to all passengers at once, or only to some, or only to one, depending on the circumstances, has only one answer as far as I am concerned, until proven otherwise: Plot device.

Ben goes to the explosion site for the sake of following up on the calling and pleasing his sister, where he recognizes a man named Ward Attwood (played by Elliot Villar whose splendid performance as Vera was one of the standout stories of Mr. Robot’s final season) as one of the Flight 828 passengers from the pictures that he keeps on the wall of his Agent-Mulder basement office. Ward is admittedly guilt-ridden because he feels responsible for the flight’s disastrous outcome. He confesses to Ben that he was so “ready to hop in the jump seat and get home” that he rushed his pre-flight inspection in Jamaica to get the flight approved for take-off. He happened to come to the site because of the visions that are haunting him.

Ben, of course, understands exactly what Ward is going through. The seasoned expert of the callings that he is, Professor Stone conducts a Callings 101 crash-course to Ward, and he does so in such an efficient manner that before we even reach halfway point of the episode, Ward is convinced that he is indeed innocent and we never see him again. The post-flight inspection report that Ben provided matches Ward’s own pre-flight one, meaning he did nothing wrong.

As it turns out, Ward only happens to be a small link in the larger chain to uncover the purpose behind Ben’s calling because as he leaves Ward’s apartment, he is struck by the vision again, proving that its purpose has yet to be fulfilled. Ben notices a consignment store in front of him at that moment and stares into its window where, most likely (the scene cuts away), he sees a gift box belonging to his mother in which she kept her wedding veil for Michaela to wear on her own special day in the future.

This becomes quite significant later because doubts had begun to creep into Michaela’s mind about the wedding, making her question if she made the right decision to marry Zeke. Did she perhaps pull the plug on him by not insisting that he continue the treatments? She carries this train of thought so far that at one point she sounds as if she only said yes to Zeke in desperation, not because she necessarily wanted to, just to see if the callings would signal something about how he can be saved. Hours passed and nothing happened, so she is now getting cold feet. She finally reaches panic mode at some point and asks Grace to call off the wedding.

Luckily, this is when Ben walks in (what timing by our hero) with the box containing her mom’s veil that he recovered at the consignment store. Earlier in the episode, Ben showed some old taped footage of Michaela trying on her mom’s wedding dress when they were children. The dress was lost, because dad had gotten rid of mom’s stuff after her death. Michaela takes the fact that the calling (vision) ultimately led Ben to recover their mom’s veil as a positive sign and decides to move forward with the wedding. During the ceremony, she briefly has a vision of her mother sitting in the audience and smiling back at her, which solidifies her belief that she made the right decision after all.

There is nonetheless more gloom on the horizon for Michaela.

At the start of the episode, Michaela, Drea, and Jared are separately interrogating Jace, his brother Pete (Devon Harjes), and Kory, the skeevy meth-ring dudes with shadows caught at the end of “Unaccompanied Minors.” A million-dollar worth of meth is recovered at their operation site, but none of the three capitulate under questioning.

Truth be told, Michaela is only interested in them because she remembers hearing the calling “let him go” as she was arresting Jace in the last episode, and hopes that it may somehow have a connection to Zeke, thus help her save him. This is a stretch to say the least on Michaela’s part (similar to the situation with Ben’s vision) but let’s roll with it, right? Do we still roll with it though when Jared asks what he can do to help and she solemnly replies, “Get me conviction”? In what way does a conviction of the skeevy shadow-trio help Zeke, and how on earth can that conviction happen in less than 48 hours even if that were the case?

This leads to Jared’s bizarre accosting of Jace by the bus, a scene serving no apparent purpose, unless I missed something, other than to underline Jace’s horrid nature, in the same way that his extra four punches to the guard’s face are intended to do in the ham-fisted bus-escape scene later. Jace is on pace (rhyme unintended) to become the next hate-target of Manifest viewers, joining an elite group of flagitious one-dimensional characters such as Cody the jerkwad, Jansen, Griffin, and sleazy Billy.

The skeevy shadow-trio have the last word in this hour when they kidnap Cal in the evening who was hanging out (alone, mind you?) in the front yard after everyone left the wedding party. Reminiscent of the three shadows that haunted Cal in his room at night, their shadows first envelop him from behind before he is snatched away.

Jace calls Michaela, who is on her way with Zeke to their ultra-short honeymoon, and gives her the ultimatum that ends the episode in the most cliché’d way in the land of cliffhanger endings: “Now, you listen, bitch! You have two choices. You get us back our stash or you bury your nephew. […] I warned you. Now you’re gonna pay” [ominously humming sound getting louder, culminating in three drum thumps before the screen goes dark].

Last-minute thoughts:

– Cal gives a small toy car to Zeke to remember him by. Noted, just in case. Manifest has a track record of making good use of neat moments like this in later episodes.

– Toward the end, Ben has yet another vision of the plane exploding while checking on Eden at night, meaning that his discovery of mom’s veil was not the final chapter for that calling either.

– Zeke looked horrifying in the mirror scene. His skin color was metallic gray and… ice dropped from his body when he slapped his chest! He looked a bit improved in the later scenes, thankfully. More lighting, surely (!)

– Hello Dr. Cardoso (Joel de la Fuente)! His first appearance since “Pilot,” which aired 28 episodes and a year and a half ago! Talk about a nod to the past. Wow!

 – I only touched on the bus escape a couple of times in passing. No need to belabor a scene filled with contrivances, showcasing two of the dumbest guards in existence.

– Vance better get “the ticket to Havana” ready quicker next time someone urgently needs one/him.

– In another obligatory plot advancement brought on by the heavy-handed insertion of the ‘two-day-left’ addendum, Zeke had to reveal his death date to his mom Priscilla before the wedding. It undermines the brilliant dialogue the two had in the previous episode at the hospital, one day earlier I presume, during which Zeke visibly intended to hide his fatal condition from mom. We now learn that, at the same time, he wanted her to come to his wedding to be held the next day. He is forced to tell her the truth only after she tells him that she will not attend the wedding because she refuses (good for her, by the way) to be in the same room with Zeke’s dad. Soooooo, Zeke was somehow expecting to keep her mom in the dark about this although he wanted her to attend his wedding, two days before his death, with most of the attendees aware of his death date? Come on…

– Remind me again… Why did Mr. Stone get rid of their mom’s “stuff” after her death?

– Can you tell me from the top of your head, dear reader, if you remember the Major’s name? Yeah, I couldn’t either. Does it even matter? Probably not, considering that it was revealed ten weeks ago and hardly ever mentioned again.

– The shop where Ben found their mom’s box is named Sam’s Knitwear. Chalk one up for the category of “otiose details.”

– So, does Ward also continue, like Ben, to get the vision of the plane explosion after Ben leaves his apartment?

– The rector marrying Michaela and Zeke is played by Jim True-Frost, who also played “Prez,” one of the main characters in The Wire.

Until the next episode… 

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“Unaccompanied Minors” – Aired on March 23, 2020
Writer: Jeannine Renshaw & Marta Gené Camps
Director: Andy Wolk
Grade: 5 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

The best scenes of “Unaccompanied Minors” are three one-on-one dialogues, each loaded with emotional consequences, each written with care, each carried out with purpose by passionate performances. These scenes have another common denominator: they showcase Zeke as one of the interlocutors. In fact, Zeke is under the spotlight in this outing more than he had ever been in any of the previous ones. Everyone and everything seem to pivot around him, and as a result, the contribution made by the episode to his character development is nothing less than impressive. Naturally, for such an episode to click on all cylinders, a potent performance by its star would help.

And boy, does Matt Long deliver…
Let me rephrase: Long knocks it out of the ballpark.
This is patently Zeke’s hour!

If I am marketing Long’s talents, this is the episode I am placing on top of my vault, so to speak, to show as exhibit A if I need to champion his talents. And to think that he pulls it off while sporting dirty-purple ears!

The hour begins a few weeks ahead of where we ended “Course Correction,” with the prematurely born Eden now at home and the family aware of the shadows haunting Cal in his room’s walls. Ben’s position also seems to have shifted with regard to Adrian’s views of the 828 passengers being agents of the apocalypse. In a subdued dialogue with Michaela that kicks off the hour, he is no longer categorically rejecting Adrian’s gloom-and-doom interpretation. He is even quoting scripture, à-la Adrian, to advance that they could indeed be false prophets without realizing it, and that perhaps the callings are there to “lull [them] into obedience for some end-of-the-world scenario,” also à-la Adrian.

Michaela, for her part, is moving her own goalposts the opposite direction, questioning God as she pleads with him to save Zeke. “How am I supposed to believe that this is for some greater good if you just let him die?” she asks looking at the skies from a swing set, before adding, “I need to understand. I don’t want to lose faith. Don’t make me.”

Michaela is desperate for good reasons. Zeke is running out of time and Saanvi’s efforts have not stopped the spread of his frostbite.

In a session with the addiction-recovery group led by the moderator (Allan Walker) seen previously in “Coordinated Flight,” Zeke confesses to having a hard time focusing on improving himself while knowing that his life will soon draw to close – which begs the question, do the people in the recovery group know the full story about his death date? The wise (and still nameless) moderator advises Zeke to make peace with himself and others to reach closure.

Next, we have three calling sequences in succession.

While Michaela is walking down some street, a teenager (Oliver Paris Gifford) runs out of a store with the clerk chasing him, yelling at him to stop. Michaela runs the thief down but stops short of arresting him when she suddenly hears the calling, “let him go.” Michaela does just that and lets the kid board a bus after he explains that all he stole was a candy bar. Except that it wasn’t, because the store’s clerk (Ricky Garcia) tells her that the kid actually stole cold medicine. Michaela’s curiosity is piqued because cold medicine is used to make meth, and when Jared informs her later that several other stores in the area have lately been robbed for cold medicine, the two suspect the involvement of a large ring of meth dealers.

They track down the driver of the bus (Dazmann Still) that the teenager thief boarded after Michaela let him loose. His name is Kory and he cannot remember the kid. He points them toward the person who can provide them with camera footage from inside the buses.

In the meantime, Ben is unable to stop Eden from crying at home, but Grace comes to the rescue by singing a lullaby that Cal has used before to put her to sleep. It also triggers a brief-but-horrifying vision for Ben, one of a subway train with three lights moving fast toward him, a vision that, by his own admission, made him feel like he was “going to die.”

Another calling comes TJ’s way when, walking with Cal in the city, he gets a vision of a series of murals, with the last one being a red phoenix, making him feel “sad and hopeless. Hearing TJ’s experience later at home, Grace reminds everyone that there are several murals in subway stations with phoenixes. A quick search on the web leads TJ to recognize the red phoenix on a mural in Bowery Station. Wait for it, this all makes sense in a compelling way by the end of the episode. But before we continue with Ben and TJ heading to Bowery Station, let’s visit Saanvi and Zeke at the hospital.

Following the debacle with the retroviral serum back in “Airplane Bottles,” Saanvi claims to move forward more cautiously with her research into reversing the DNA anomaly, while still making it clear as a sunny day that she will continue with her efforts to “fine-tune” the serum’s formula in order to bring them back to being “ordinary,” and ultimately leaving death dates and callings behind.

Surprised (and worried) that self-experimentation is still on the table for Saanvi as an option, Zeke reminds her of the passage in the Al-Zuras journal about people suffering from not accepting the callings. Saanvi dismisses the theory that the only way around the death date is to accept the callings and that all else is a “path to disaster.” And she should dismiss it, frankly, if she is indeed the unyielding woman of science that Manifest depicts her to be. “Medicine has come a long way since bleeding and leeches. There’s so many illnesses that were a death sentence and now have a cure. Why is this any different?” Yep, that answer screams Saanvi and totally fits the portrait of the nerdy, research-driven, scientifically awesome doctor that the show has so far painted for her.

She also has to deliver some bad news to Zeke whose MRI results show new damage to his muscles. He is still freezing to death and cracks are beginning to show in the poor guy’s resolve despite Saanvi’s visible determination to find a cure. Little does she know at that moment that she will soon find herself in a dire situation of her own in a much later scene, when her key card does not work while trying to enter her lab. According to two security guards who abruptly appear behind her – and spit out classic phrases such as, “I’m afraid we have to ask you to leave” and “Please, if you’ll come with us,” that would induce rage in anyone in Saanvi’s position at that moment – her hospital privileges have been revoked. We last see her frantically asking who authorized this decision, while being escorted out by the guards.

Zeke, for his part, is visited by his mom at the hospital (the first of the three dialogues I noted at the start). Mom is heartbroken to see her son’s physical condition, hooked up to machines, patchy skin, ears turning purplish-dark-blue, bloodshot eyes, etc. It’s nice to see that Zeke and her mother are finally on good terms, cherishing each other’s presence. At the same time, it’s hard to watch him hold back in some of his reactions to what she says because he has not told her about his terminal condition. She believes that he is recovering from burns and smoke inhalation at the nightclub. He must therefore moderate his emotional responses when she expresses her love for him with sentences like, “you’re all I’ve got” and “I just feel so lucky to have my son back.” The strain felt by Zeke is delicately conveyed here by Long, and Maryann Plunkett holds her own just fine as the happy, yet concerned mother.

Back to Ben and TJ at Bowery Station…

On the way down the stairs, TJ picks up a box of matches that an old man in front of him dropped and returns it to him in an act of kindness. Once they locate the wall with the red phoenix downstairs, they recognize the same man standing near it, looking despondent with teary eyes. They realize that he is about to commit suicide and tackle him to the ground before he can jump in front of the approaching train. They notice the matchbox again in a plastic bag of his belongings while he is asleep later in the hospital bed. It is actually a music box and when Ben turns its handle, it begins playing the same lullaby that he heard Grace sing earlier to Eden at the house!

We are still in the early stages here of a quite fascinating chain of coincidences, that amazingly manages to avoid coming across as pat or contrived, leading all the way to Zeke’s reunion with his long-lost dad! The intriguing way in which these randomly scattered coincidences tie into a series of meaningful connections, only proves that there exists no far-fetched sequences that a creative writing team and a dexterous director cannot render plausible.

Cal and Grace (and Eden) are also at the hospital, visiting Zeke. Ben tells them about the match box and the lullaby. As Grace begins to murmur it to remember the lyrics, Zeke recognizes it, quite shocked that anyone else even knows the song. It was his ‘long-gone’ dad (he had abandoned Zeke after his sister’s death) who wrote that lullaby and used to sing it to them at night. Zeke mentions that he even had a little music box for the songs he used to make up. Ben has heard enough. The man whose life he and TJ saved at the station must be Zeke’s father!

This gives way to the second of the three dialogues I mentioned in the beginning. Zeke refuses to see his father at first. He is bitter and angry with his dad for not only having abandoned his son after Chloe’s death, but also for blaming him for the tragedy! It takes a solemn and heartfelt effort by Ben to help Zeke come to the realization that he should nonetheless see his dad one more time, if for no other reason than for emotional closure, reminding Zeke of the moderator’s words of wisdom at the recovery meeting. Long is once again stellar here portraying the conflicted Zeke while Josh Dallas reciprocates the effort by playing a genuinely concerned Ben, doing his best to maintain the fragile balance between sounding caring and being pushy.

Back at the precinct, Drea found the footage of the kid in the bus and identified him. Jared and Michaela catch up with him at school and engage in a technobabble-oriented talk that only computer geeks can fully decipher. Apparently, some online individual with the handle name “Try3” was telling him to drop off the stolen cold medicine bottles at the bus itself. Drea tracks his online payments and they match the bodega thefts. “Try3” is likely associated with a meth ring and he has a name: Jace Baylor (James McMenamin, “Donuts” from Orange is the new Black). He is a bad dude with a history of violence, previously jailed for possession and sale of meth, etc. His release of four months ago, as noted by Jared, coincides with the start of the robberies in the area.

Back at the hospital, Zeke’s meeting with dad must have apparently been productive because when Michaela stops by to check on him, Zeke fills her in about his dad’s unexpected resurfacing and informs her that the two are going on a drive to Jones Beach.

He also drops a vital piece of news on her lap. He is stopping the treatments!

This launches the third of the the three dialogues noted above. Michaela is initially devastated to hear Zeke give up on treatments but she respects (and reluctantly accepts) his decision when he explains later that he would rather spend his little time left on earth with the woman he loves instead of being trapped in a hospital room. He simply wants to go out on his own terms. The profound bond between the two, as individuals and lovers, are on full display in this exquisite scene, played elegantly by Long and Melissa Roxburgh. If tears don’t form in your eyes, check your heartbeat.

Michaela holds another important conversation with Jared later in a car while the two are staking out Jace Baylor’s address. It is an honest, definitive talk about where their relationship stands, or rather, where it must stand. Jared seems to have made peace with the fact that Michaela’s heart now belongs to Zeke. Above all else, neither of them wants their friendship to end. The scene ends up being the copybook dialogue on how two mature adults should handle a conclusive break up.

Back to the task at hand, they witness Kory showing up at the location. Unwilling to wait for back-up, Jared and Michaela bust in the house and catch Kory and Jace at the basement in what seems to be a meth lab. As Michaela is about to handcuff Jace, she hears again the calling, “let him go.” It repeats a few times, but not enough apparently, because Michaela is just not willing to let these criminals loose!

Zeke is back at Michaela’s apartment following his day trip with his father and ready to share more of his plans with her. He wants no regrets left behind, so first things first. He gets on his knees and proposes to her. Her answer: “Yes. Yes, I will,” as she bursts with joy, puts on the ring, and kisses him.

But… but… this is Manifest and we shan’t possibly end on a serene note!

Hence, we find ourselves back in Cal’s room where he sees the three shadows on the wall again as the scene switches, accompanied by a terrifying score, to the police station where three identical shadows appear on the wall of a cell, belonging to Jace, Kory, and their yet-to-be-named third partner. We have evidently not seen the last of this skeevy trio.

Last-minute thoughts:

– No flashbacks or dreams to begin the episode? Stop the press!

– Ben tells Grace that he is locking up his Agent-Mulder office at the basement for a while, in order to spend more quality time with the family. Grace appears happily surprised. Dear Grace, I would not count on that pattern holding. Just a hunch!

– I would like to know Ben and Grace’s thought process about letting Cal sleep alone in his room while knowing that three creepy shadows have visited him more than once.

– Drea teases Michaela twice in this episode about Jared possibly trying to “get back in [her] pants.” Michaela blows both pedestrian attempts off saying that he is just a friend. The conversation in the stake-out car seems to confirm that.

– Jared’s brief-yet-snarky “yeah” followed by a low-key chuckle (when Drea jokingly reminded him that Michaela is just a “loaner”) drew a loud laughter from me!

– Is Drea settling into the cliché’d role of the computer-geek at the precinct? I hope not.

– Jared is at a loss for words when Michaela tells him about Zeke’s condition. He is also not about to accept that Zeke, Michaela, and others are walking around with death dates stamped on them.

– The camera work in the meth-lab bust scene is terrific. Credit to director Andy Wolk for making the episode’s only action sequence as exciting as possible. Note: I am not counting Micheala chasing the kid or Ben and TJ tackling Zeke’s dad as action scenes. Battle me if you will.

– The phoenix is a symbol of rebirth, renewal, and strength (source: TJ). Add that to your separate file of useful Manifest anecdotes.

– Michaela’s malaise about disobeying the calling by arresting Jace confirms the obvious: the writing room plans to continue exploring Al-Zuras’s prophecy about how fighting the callings will result in calamitous consequences.

Until the next time…

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“Course Correction” – Aired on March 16, 2020
Writer: Laura Putney & Margaret Easley
Director: Michael Smith
Grade: 3,5 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

Following two episodes of not starting with a flashback, Manifest makes a return to tradition with “Course Correction” (fitting name in this context) when the hour kicks off with a brief scene showing us inside Flight 828 before its take-off at the airport in Montego Bay.

A lapsed version of Adrian is in his seat, shrugging off an elderly woman’s attempts to preach him quotes from scripture. Couple that with the episode’s “previously on Manifest” intro revisiting the briefing by Captain Bowers at the precinct when she informs everyone that Adrian is still at-large, and one can easily guess at that point that Adrian has an essential role to play in this outing. He does indeed, and the intricacies of his connection to the Stone-family drama unfolding at the hospital constitute the highlights of the outing.

That storyline begins with a new calling when Grace turns on the water in the kitchen at her house and finds herself under a bridge by a river, hearing the voice of a man utter the words, “Help me.” She and Ben locate the spot, High Bridge at Harlem River, after a quick search on the web. Once there, they run into Adrian (in hiding since the nightclub incident in “Emergency Exit”) because he also followed the same calling there!

Ben is keen on believing that this particular calling’s purpose was for them to find Adrian so that he could be taken to the police, but the more cool-headed Grace – always nice to see common sense triumph over zeal – thinks otherwise. There must be a deeper meaning to the calling bringing them to this spot, so far away from the precinct. She doesn’t get much time to ponder on the issue though as her water unexpectedly breaks!

Ben hurries to take her to the hospital as Adrian showcases one of the most rage-inducing selfish-behavior moments of the series so far with his temper-tantrum toned question, “What am I supposed to do now?” I would like to thank whoever decided to extend the scene a few more seconds before the commercial break, allowing Ben just enough time to dish back at Adrian the answer his harebrained question deserves: “I don’t give a damn what you do Adrian! I am going to get my wife to the hospital!” And remember to take this as the network-restricted version of what anyone in Ben’s situation would have actually said!

As for Michaela, we find her back in jail where she was left fuming at the end of “Airplane Bottles.” Her lawyer arrives so Jared lets her out, and as he is doing so, he slips a note to her hand and reminds her with a mutter to keep her mouth shut. With Michaela’s lawyer present, Officer Dibacco, Simon’s plant who had been posing as Michaela’s union rep, can no longer implement his plan that entailed, as he tells Jared quietly, giving her a ride to the neutral interrogation side and getting lost in a rough neighborhood, one from which Michaela would never find her way out! Jared reassures Dibacco that he knows “how to deal with Michaela Stone” and that he “got this.”

Sandwiched between the Michaela-Jared and Ben-Grace-Adrian stories is what I would call a ‘footnote story’ involving Cal and Olive, one that occupies little time in this episode but serves as a prelude to a much larger narrative in the upcoming ones.

Being the charming siblings that they are, the two are deciding which one of Cal’s drawings they should use to introduce the callings to their soon-to-be-born sister. As they are shuffling through them, Cal recognizes the first one he ever drew and remembers not ever being able to figure out the meaning of the creepy pencil drawing. It shows his family members standing hand in hand, with a gray shadow looming behind them. As he stares at it longer, the shadow grows larger on the page. In a similar scene later, Cal sees the shadow grow to scary proportions and hover over the whole family right when Olive receives a call from their dad, informing them of Grace’s condition and urging them to come to the hospital.

Before we delve into that intriguing, multi-layered storyline at the hospital, let’s rewind back to Jared’s note to Michaela at the cell…

The note reads, “our place,” referring to the bench at a park where the two used to meet back when they were lovers, and where Jared eventually proposed to Michaela on his knees, in the presence of the whole Stone gang. We know these details thanks to a beautiful flashback capturing this rare moment of perfect bliss for everyone involved. We also know, however, that the spot has since represented a place of sorrow for Jared who has been frequenting the bench by himself to reminisce about Michaela not only during her absence of five and a half years, but also after their relationship fell apart following her reappearance.

Following one of those visits, Jared entered a bar to drink his agony away and met Tamara and the Xers, soon realizing that he “was in the belly of the beast,” as he tells Michaela in the present day. It makes Michaela feel for a second as if it were her fault that Jared joined the Xers, until Jared reveals that he has been infiltrating the Xers as an undercover operative (with the Captain’s knowledge), partly because he knew she would never feel safe with those nutcases running around freely.

While this may come as a dramatic revelation to Michaela, I am not sure that it has much of an impact on the audience for a number of reasons. For starters, last episode gave away that Jared and Bowers were at least in cahoots, if not working together to expose the Xers. Secondly, for a storyline that has extended through seven episodes – we first saw Jared and Tamara flirting at the bar in “Black Box” – Michaela’s quick acceptance (in less than 30 seconds) of the revelation-bomb Jared just dropped on her lap, and her subsequent embrace of his mission, diminish the magnitude (and plausibility) of the moment, especially considering that she asks a perfectly valid question at first: “Why didn’t you tell me?” Let’s explore that matter for a moment. Here is a short list of how the undercover operation’s time span impacted our detective duo:

(1) It led Jared to tip the Xers about an upcoming police raid (“Coordinated Flight”) in order to gain their trust. Could anyone have guaranteed that it would not have resulted in a knee-jerk reaction by the Xers to take revenge and accelerate their operations, thus put lives in danger?

(2) It led Michaela to not only lose any feelings that she may have left for Jared, but also to harbor feelings of disgust toward him, ones that cannot simply be washed away with a revelation.

(3) It allowed Zeke and Michaela’s relationship to grow deeper, essentially eliminating any chances of Jared and Michaela getting back together.

(4) It put Michaela’s life (and Zeke’s) in danger. Remember that sleazy Billy and his two asswipe pals paid a visit to Michaela’s apartment with the intention to eliminate her in this episode, but happened to run into Zeke first, thus taking him hostage.

(5) Oh, and by the way, are we supposed to forget that Jared actively participated in assisting Simon and the Xers dump information about Flight 828 passengers onto the web (reference: Jared getting mad at Simon for changing plans in “Airplane Bottles”)? Is that also excusable under the “gain their trust” bill introduced by Senator-Agent Vasquez?

Yet, it takes less than thirty seconds after Jared dropping the bomb on her lap for Michaela to forgive and forget the gigantic ramifications resulting from it. She just smiles and offers her full support for his cause. You would think that an explanation with the ability to generate that kind of magic reaction would carry more substance than the flimsy “I needed you to believe I was in so deep that they’d believe,” answer that Jared spits out. Is Michaela’s ability to go undercover, hide her feelings, or fake an identity, so dismal that she needed to be kept out of the loop in order to convince the Xers? Would it not have been worth bringing her in on the scheme anyway, and avoid the trauma resulting from weeks and weeks of anguish (see the above list)? I am simply having trouble buying both: Jared’s explanation and Michaela’s lightweight reaction to that explanation.

Anyhow, this ultimately leads to the denouement of the Simon-Xers-Jared saga, one that wraps up so neatly that it left me wondering if that was really all that the writing room could muster up as a pay-off to what had otherwise been a well-constructed story arc over the ten-episode-old second season.

I am talking about how the whole Simon and the Xers movement collapses in a midsize room in the back of a bar where, not only its key players suspiciously find themselves in the same room yet suspect nothing, but they also conveniently – and loudly – narrate, in the presence of a hostage and Jared, all the harm that they had caused until that point and plan to cause from that point forward, including the details of who, how, why, and when! Frankly speaking, that part of the conversation could have been entitled, “the race to the best in verbally incriminating oneself in less than two minutes,” and nobody would have raised an eyebrow. Talk about the feeling you get when you watch the denouement scene of a procedural show among dozens on network and cable TV where the perpetrators magically give full accounts of their crimes, leaving no stone unturned (!), so that the protagonists can neatly send them to prison.

This ‘collapse’ also features the ubiquitous cliché of the ultimate genius in Simon who helms a masterful operation up to a point, only to turn into a low-IQ criminal at the last second. Until then, he had been the emblematic leader-figure who builds a loyal following using his convincing rhetorical skills and helps the movement gain momentum through patience and careful organization. Then, he suddenly develops enough lunacy in one day to ruin everything by seeing nothing wrong with reuniting with the key players of his movement in one small room, based on a last-second call from the most idiotic individual in his group. Heck, sleazy Billy did not even have to provide the reason why he wanted Simon to come to the bar, because Simon did not apparently insist on knowing! Just like that, Simon, Erika, sleazy Billy, and the Xers are caught. Oh-kay!

Speaking of Erika, do not feel awkward if you are one of those wondering who she is. She had received almost no character depth prior to this episode, not that she had any time to develop some in this hour either. She had appeared under her identity as a member of Simon’s group just once (“False Horizon”) prior to this hour, and only for a brief moment, with the only purpose being to create the whaaaat effect when Simon entered his car and the camera showed her sitting in the passenger seat. Forgive me if I care very little for this character when she oddly appears out of nowhere next to Simon in this episode and acts as his right-hand person.

I ended my review of “False Horizon” back then with the following words with regard to Erika’s appearance in the car with Simon:

“The reveal here being that Erika, with whom Grace clashed earlier, and Simon, the professor in the hiring committee, know about the Stones and have a secret agenda. The details of who they are and for whom they precisely work remain vague at this point, which is usually how episode-ending reveals work. As long as the pay-off is worth it, I am willing to wait.”

That was two months and seven episodes ago. This is one of those cases where the pay-off was not worth the wait.

In the far more captivating narrative with Grace going into early delivery at the hospital, Ben faces a crucial decision when Dr. Gutierrez (Mark Torres) informs him that he has to choose between Grace and the baby. Grace has a condition called ‘placenta percreta’ making the surgery life-threatening for her. There are only a handful of surgeons who can perform this delicate surgery and the only one in the area is not responding to the calls placed by the hospital. The next closest is five hours away. Unfortunately, that is not enough time as Grace faints and the baby begins to crash, but not before Grace makes a reluctant Ben promise that if it comes down to saving the baby or herself, Ben must choose the baby.

Left without a choice, Ben tells the doctor to save the baby, but changes his mind once he observes Cal and Olive hugging their mom who is faintly hanging on for dear life in the hospital bed. The family needs Grace, Ben concludes on the spot, and directs Dr. Gutierrez to make her the priority!

This is when the Adrian side of the calling makes its entrance in a striking way. You see, earlier in the episode when Grace and Ben left Adrian by the river, he heard the “help” calling again, except that it was this time an actual man in the river pleading for help. Adrian jumped in, saved him, and brought him to the hospital. That man is Dr. Chmait** (Nasser Faris), the only local surgeon specializing in the kind of surgery that Grace desperately needs! They could not locate him earlier because he fell in the river while kayaking before Adrian saved and escorted him to the ER.

**The name ‘Dr. Chmait’ appears once in the subtitles for the character. On IMDB, he is listed as “specialist surgeon.’

Nurse Vera (Gabrielle Reid), who made her first appearance in “Grounded,” recognizes him in the hospital as he is about to get discharged, and urgently brings him to help Grace and the baby. It leads to a happy ending when he performs the surgery and tells Ben and the kids later that both mom and the baby (named Eden) are going to be fine.

Adrian’s connection dawns on Ben once he hears Dr. Chmait tell the story about the “total stranger” who happened to be standing by the river and saved his life when his kayak flipped over under the High Bridge in Harlem River. Ben finds Adrian in the hospital and they engage in a heated, but thought-provoking argument about the true purpose of the callings.

Despite his rescue of Dr. Chmait, ultimately leading to the doctor saving Grace and Eden, Adrian still clings to the idea that the callings are manipulative, tricking the passengers into trusting them, in order to use them to achieve their demoniacal purpose. In a stark contrast to the pre-Flight-828 version of Adrian seen in the flashback, his current version is quick to embrace scripture to rebut Ben’s claim that the callings are helpful: “False prophets will arise from the dead to perform signs and wonders.” He thinks that the callings consider them to be agents of the apocalypse who have returned from the dead!

Yeah, heavy load Adrian is carrying around, isn’t he? More darkness comes his way when he leaves the hospital and runs into a large, dark shadow in an alley. It splits into three tall shadows and they hover over him, similar to the way that the gray figures hover over the family members in Cal’s drawing. Adrian turns around and runs away before they envelop him. Cal sees these shadowy figures one final time on the walls of his room at night before he turns the lights on and they disappear, as the episode draws to a close.

Last-minute thoughts:

– Jared Grimes, who is by the way an accomplished tap dancer, performs wonders here as an actor, representing the frustrated, yet confident, but fixated Adrian. It’s just my personal opinion, but I find his acting underrated and only wish there were ways to work him more into the story.

– Michaela’s newly acquired lawyer, whom we never get to see in this episode, is Teresa Yin who defended Zeke in “False Horizon.”

– Good news for Jared: Bowers left a surprise package for him on his desk, with the Preparation for Lieutenant Exam inside, the official guide to the NYPD’s promotion exam.

– Speaking of Bowers, for the first time ever, we get to see her smile, crack a joke, step outside the precinct, and participate in some action. I bet Andrene Ward-Hammond had even more fun doing that than I had watching the Captain finally break free of the ‘beastly captain behind the desk’ persona.

– As for the tear-jerker scene when Ben talks to Grace and the unborn baby with tears flowing from his eyes, I am not sure why it did not have the sentimental impact on me that such scenes usually have. Was it the choice of words? Could it have been Dallas’s over-acting maybe? Or perhaps it was because it was already revealed by then that the man Adrian saved and brought to the hospital was the specialist surgeon needed to save Grace? I dunno.

– Speaking of the surgeon, I had already felt that he was going to have a crucial connection to Grace the moment Adrian pulled ‘a man’ out of the river, considering that she had also had the same calling.

– Entertaining scenes at the precinct when Captain Bowers verbally abuses Jared and Michaela in front of others to keep up appearances. The captain sure appears to be cherishing these moments.

– The brightest junctures in the otherwise average Jared-Billy-Simon sequences at the bar occur once Jared pockets the hidden microphone left by Michaela and begins relaying information to her and Bowers using code words and sounds.

– Adrian tells Ben that Grace’s water broke because he saw her fall near the river in his vision, even telling Ben to verify that fact with Grace. “The only reason she was on those rocks,” he adds, “was because the calling told you to go there.” According to him, that is how the callings teach them to blindly follow them. I am sorry, but that makes no sense. You mean to tell me that Grace took the risk of going to the rocks while pregnant even though she saw herself fall there in a vision (and did not say a word about it to Ben)? Can I get a wut?

– Sleazy Billy found Jared in Zeke’s contacts and did not question for a second that it may be because they are acquaintances? That’s beyond stupid, even by Billy’s dimwit standards.

– I am not sure if I am supposed to feel sorry for Tamara or not. She is devastated at the end, having realized that Jared profoundly betrayed her. Yet, I cannot help but ask, how long did she expect her life to trod on forward without a major setback while she is simultaneously protecting a brother like sleazy Billy and maintaining a romantic relationship with an NYPD detective?

– Apologies to Jared fans, but I cannot feel sorry for him either. Isn’t he still officially married to Lourdes by the way, like he was when he pursued Michaela for weeks and even turned creepy when she did not reciprocate and fell in love with Zeke? Manifest has done a great job of portraying Jared as a loyal, magnanimous friend, but certainly not as a valuable romantic companion!

– Did the scene with Adrian and the shadows looming over him in the alley remind you of the movie Ghost (1990) for a moment?

Until the next episode…

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“Airplane Bottles” – Aired on March 9, 2020
Writer: Mathew Lau & MJ Cartozian Wilson
Director: Ramaa Mosley
Grade: 5 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

Another exceptional installment of Manifest follows the stellar “Carry On” from the week before, and while there is still the matter of sticking the landing in the last few episodes to follow, the latter half of season 2 may go down as the definitive period in persuading the powers that be at NBC of Manifest‘s potential as an established, long-standing sci-fi drama on primetime TV — a rare combination in the post-2010 era of weekly TV series.

“Airplane Bottles” is a unique entry in the show’s lore with a distinctive pattern in comparison to the 20+ episodes that aired so far. It manages to have ample plot advancements in the show’s overall arc with no action-packed sequences, while keeping its A, B, and C stories tightly compartmentalized. In fact, the storylines are so pigeonholed that the hour essentially takes place in three disparate – or even, ‘claustrophobic’ – locations with a small group of people engaged in lengthy, but meaningful, discussions.

It should also be noted that for the first time in a long while, the entire main cast of Manifest is full-tilt under the spotlight, with the Stone household and Saanvi’s lab sequences contributing to the overarching mythology of Manifest, while the precinct scenes advance the more grounded Jared-Michaela narrative.

For the second outing in a row, the episode begins with a dream sequence instead of a flashback, although Cal’s dream is indeed what the viewers saw as a flashback in season one’s “Connecting Flights” when he looked out the window of Flight 828, saw the glaring light in the sky, and uttered the words, “it’s all connected.” He wakes up in a sweat and anxiously walks around the house before we switch to a happier scene featuring Michaela and Zeke having breakfast and making rosy plans for the future, assuming that Zeke’s frostbite problem gets solved. Having passed the preliminary testing for Saanvi’s serum, Zeke is keen on moving to phase 2 of the treatment. Michaela, for her part, is not looking forward to her scheduled meeting with Internal Affairs (IA) investigators at the precinct with regard to Jared’s involvement with the Xers.

Back at the Stone household, Olive is ready delve deeper into the Al-Zuras journal with TJ. Ben and Grace find Cal in a room upstairs, frantically trying to put together parts of a crib to build… something. He makes a vague reference to a “spider web,” saying that “it’s all connected,” and wondering “why won’t it work? For now, let’s put aside the highly charged Stone household storyline and move forward with the two other locations.

Zeke enters Saanvi’s lab for phase 2 of the test but is alarmed to see her behave in a super-duper-wired manner. She brushes it off to the adjustment period from the sudden withdrawals of callings, saying they are “minor impulse-control issues,” but frankly, neither Zeke nor the viewers are buying it! After about two minutes of watching this off-the-wall version of Saanvi (slightly over-dramatized by Parveen Kaur), Zeke has seen enough. He is not proceeding with the injection and he wants Saanvi to see a doctor. The problem is that she would lose her job, thus access to her lab, if any doctor were to learn that she tested unproven meds on herself. Enter her ex-lover Alex who, upon Zeke’s insistence, agrees to help her. She gives Saanvi an injection to temporarily calm her down. They will have to wait and see for the long-term effects.

Matt Long puts on display one of his best performances to date as Zeke by meticulously walking the thin line between portraying the one who is genuinely concerned for his friend’s well-being and the one who is first and foremost looking out for himself. Both could be valid in this case and not mutually exclusive. Long makes it work beautifully because Zeke’s sympathy for Saanvi comes across as authentic as possible as he tries to help her in any way that he can, taking into account her sensibilities, even if it means delaying a possible solution to his existing conundrum.

Michaela arrives at the precinct where a less-than-thrilled Jared accosts her to make her change her mind, but to no avail. He represents, however, the least of Michaela’s worries. She is unknowingly walking into an ambush meeting during which the two AI investigators, Fong and Blandpied (played by Johnny WU and Chastity Dotson with the adequate icy tone of such agents) become increasingly antagonistic throughout the hour to the point of accusing Michaela of masterminding the disastrous fire at the club. This is conveyed through a series of interview-room scenes detailing with clarity each stage of Michaela’s growing frustration. It also helps that Melissa Roxburgh is decisively up to the task.

There is also a secondary dynamic in play between Jared and Captain Bowers in these precinct sequences. Our ex-good-now-bad Det. Vasquez is becoming fidgety because he is getting the impression that things are about to blow up in his face with the involvement of IA investigators. Capt. Bowers (whose ethical and by-the-book image has long since faded) says, “I’ve got all bases covered,” in an attempt to calm him down. Jared’s paranoia barometer skyrockets even higher a bit later when he learns that a union representative has also been added to the mix (more on the union rep. later). To make matters worse, Bowers does not sound as reassuring as before when Jared presses her a second time. Apparently, Simon made a last-second change of plans and turned Michaela’s files over to Internal Affairs. Bowers strongly advises Jared to ask Simon “how much of a hole” they are in!

Flirting with a nervous breakdown, Jared heads over to Simon’s office at the university. He chastises Simon for going beyond the initial plan, which was to merely dump information about Flight 828 passengers onto the web, and did not include feeding Michaela’s cases to IA. Simon explains it away by saying that they have new information about the passengers which called for a change of plan.

Jared is bewildered to say the least when Simon accuses the passengers of keeping the truth from everyone. He claims that they can see the future and that “they are manipulating the events around us.” He exclaims, “one of them is coming after us,” referring to Michaela. As far as Simon is concerned, she is a threat and he will “do what needs to be done” to neutralize her.

Despite the substantial amount of time spent on this particular dynamic, the intricacies of the Bowers-Jared-Simon connection still remain somewhat murky, perhaps by design. How exactly does Captain Bowers know that Simon gave Michaela’s case files to Internal Affairs? Did Simon directly tell her or did she find out through a third party? Why did Simon feel the need to do that? Or rather, did he really feel like they were in a “hole” or is Captain Bowers assuming the worst? Were the Investigators Fong and Blandpied part of the conspiracy against Michaela or were they simply doing their job?

What is perfectly clear, on the other hand, is that not only is Captain Bowers well aware of the ambush on Michaela, but also of Simon’s role with the Xers, as well as Jared’s connection with them.

At one point in the interrogation room, Investigator Blanpied explicitly mentions the possibility of a “long prison term” for Michaela, prompting her to ask for a union representative to be present. Enter Officer Dibacco (Lou Martini Jr.) who comes across as much-needed relief for Michaela at first, fiercely dishing back to the investigators everything that they throw Michaela’s way – more questions: what was Blanpied’s purpose in mentioning the prison sentence? Why did she think it was a good idea to completely put Michaela on the defensive? Dibacco even forces their hand into moving the meeting to a neutral site, accusing them and Det. Vasquez of setting Michaela up.

Except that Officer Dibacco is not the champion he appears to be!

This is an excellent twist and unless you are one of the most astute observers ever known to humankind (Jared is one of those, apparently), you missed that Dibacco was present at the Xers meeting led by Simon in “Carry On” and that he was the man who briefly appeared on screen to shake Simon’s hand before Simon and Jared had the private conversation about keeping a check on sleazy Billy. One of Manifest’s strongest assets is the effective use of nods to events and characters from previous episodes, and here, that skill is put to good use to create the wow effect. The twist takes place right when the audience is probably giving Officer Dibacco a hero’s welcome for busting the investigators’ chops.

Once he recognizes Dibacco, it dawns on Jared that with Dibacco by her side, Michaela may not even make it alive to the neutral site to continue the interview. His on-the-spot solution? Arrest Michaela to stop her from leaving the precinct. He handcuffs her and takes her to a cell while anyone and everyone, including Michaela herself, are screaming foul at him. Jared does not mince his words as he shoves Michaela into the cell: “you have to keep your mouth shut. I just saved your life.”

Now, let’s return to the Stone household!

According to his journal, Al-Zuras and his people arrive a decade later on a boat to their destination, although it appears as if no time had passed for them: “each of us was as young as when we left” (like the 828 passengers when they reappeared in 2018). He adds, “Only now, we could hear the word of God” (surely a reference to the callings). However, they believe it (them) to be a curse: “for every blessing a price must be paid”; “for every good that comes from the Voice, a trial must follow.” TJ believes that if they can learn what Al-Zuras and his people did to cope with the death date centuries ago, it could guide them in their own quest to solve the death-date puzzle in the present.

In the meantime, everyone except Olive appears to have suddenly grown a short fuse, throwing temper tantrums, as the storm outside gains epic proportions. They are either mad at themselves (Cal, TJ), or scolding one another (Ben with TJ and Cal), or feeling sick or lethargic (Grace). It dawns on Olive at that point that the others have made references to thunder and lightning outside. In another well-guided revelation scene – and well-directed, capturing the visceral impact of the revelation on each character –, we find out through Olive (the only one not privy to callings and visions) that the weather is actually beautiful outside. She even has her phone’s weather app to prove it to everyone else in the room.

The rest of them are indeed in the middle of an extended calling!

Apart from the storm outside, it also feels to them as if the house is rocking back and forth! Ben recalls Captain Daly (remember the pilot of Flight 828? If not, a re-watch of first season’s “Contrails” is highly recommended) mentioning seeing electrical storms (reference to ‘dark lightning’) as he piloted Flight 828 on that fateful night. According to TJ, Al-Zuras also talks of electrical storms in his journal. Olive and TJ told Ben and Grace earlier that Al-Zuras often talks of a silver dragon and in his journal. Silver dragon, spider web, electrical storms, what does it all mean?

There is a remarkable crescendo effect through the next few minutes as the episode builds the mystery up with great success, using brief shots of everyone turning progressively edgy, visual effects to make it seem like the house is rocking back and forth, and zoom-ins on pertinent images in the Al-Zuras journal. It all culminates in the biggest revelation of the hour. Ben, Grace, TJ, and Cal find themselves on Al-Zuras’s boat in the 16^th century (presumably), with thunder and lightning in the skies, and Flight 828 flying above them!

Once the vision ends, they are back in the house, and it’s sunny and beautiful outside. Ben murmurs the same question that everyone in the audience is probably asking themselves: did Flight 828 and Al-Zuras’s boat cross each other at a certain location, at the same point in time?

Ben and TJ draw a parallel between how they were growing agitated earlier and how Al-Zuras described some his men going insane and others committing suicide in their efforts to cheat their death date. Al-Zuras says, “There is no way to get rid of the Voice. The only way to survive is to accept.” He also writes, “all other paths lead to disaster.” Ben suddenly realizes that Saanvi has been working hard to cheat the death rate and even found a way to stop the callings. However, if what Al-Zuras says in his journal has any grain of truth in it, she will either go insane or die. Among the many deranged faces of people going insane in a particular image in the Al-Zuras journal, Ben is terrified to notice the face of a woman who peculiarly resembles Saanvi!

Couple of last-minute thoughts:

– Editing nitpick: In the early conversation between TJ and Olive, when TJ jokes about the Al-Zuras journal and ‘google translate,’ he finishes his joke with “great” as Olive has her head turned toward him, looking straight into his eyes. Cut to the angle where we now face Olive, and her immediate response to TJ begins with, “Well, I do […],” except that she is looking forward, away from TJ.

– I noted above Manifest’s dexterity in nodding to events and characters from previous episodes, and “Airplane Bottles” has plenty of them. I mentioned a few of them in my review, hopefully I did not miss any other significant ones.

– TJ has apparently moved in with the Stones, at least temporarily.

Until the next episode…

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“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…

PS1: Click on All Reviews at the top to find a comprehensive list of my episodic reviews.
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“Emergency Exit” – Aired on February 17, 2020
Writer: Jeannine Renshaw & Ezra W. Nachman
Director: Jean de Segonzac
Grade: 4.5 out of 5

Notice: All episode reviews contain spoilers

On the one hand, there is nothing particularly compelling about the untangling of the self-contained mystery in “Emergency Exit.” It follows the classic A and B story pattern and one might even argue that some of the early developments are either predictable (did anyone doubt that Isaiah had a role in the mayhem?), or near-rehashes of previously seen structure or material (another episode starting with a flashback, Olive and her parents reprising their shouting match à-la “Coordinated Flight” over the same overarching nodus).

The execution, on the other hand, is phenomenal. Once the set-up framework is established in the first twenty minutes, the emphasis shifts to a single location and a series of high-stake action scenes holds viewers captive until the end of the hour via apt camera work, editing, and score. The ride is engrossing and the events taking place leave the viewers with an immutable impression long after the hour is over. If you wanted to build a case on behalf the slogan “execution is everything,” this episode is part of your exhibit one.

The brief flashback at the beginning shows TJ saying goodbye to his mother before leaving for Jamaica. Back in the present, Michaela is questioning Zeke about the pills in his razor that she found at the end of last week’s “Return Trip.” Zeke is upset with Michaela for believing Courtney and doubting him. The fact that Michaela set a trap for him by replacing the razors only adds salt to the wound (although I do not quite understand how Michaela asking Zeke for a razor fits into this so-called trap. What was that supposed to accomplish?).

The Stone household, for its part, is in dire need of love and harmony. Cal is mad because his parents will not allow him to go to Coney Island for a friend’s birthday party. Olive is grounded because she skipped school without telling her parents. Her explanation is that she was helping out with the soup kitchen at Adrian’s church, probably the last place Ben and Grace wanted her to be at this point. As they are trying to wrap their heads around that, Olive delivers a bigger 1-2 shock-punch when she bluntly states that she quit school and that she intends to help Adrian with the Church’s outreach program. And just so they know, she is old enough to get emancipated. Take that, mom and dad!

The end result? You guessed it. The second edition of Olive vs. parents takes place, and it is as antagonistic as the one in “Coordinated Flight,” containing an equally riveting performance by Luna Blaise. I mean, does she have the wayward-teen rhetoric down or what? Ben storms out, pissed off at Adrian, but not before Olive storms out, pissed off at anyone and everyone.

Ben catches up with Adrian and warns him about the calling he had with the crashed plane and the dead bodies inside. Adrian plays along, acting as if he were not there in that vision (how did they not see him, don’t ask), and almost comes across as if he is trying to provoke Ben. Has Ben been checked for post-traumatic distress? Why is Ben choosing to live in fear instead of choosing to live in the miracle like Adrian and his followers? Hmmm? Anyway, the conversation marks Ben’s second failed attempt at talking sense into someone within a five-minute period.

At the center of the B story is Saanvi’s continuing efforts to solve the retrovirus problem. Her dad is visiting and he advises Saanvi to contact her immunologist friend for help with her serum trials. The said immunologist friend is Saanvi’s ex-married-lover Alex (Sydney Morton) who stood her up on the way to Jamaica (shown in a flashback in “False Horizon“).

Saanvi follows her dad’s advice and the two ex-lovers meet in an uncomfortable face-to-face. Alex tries, and fails badly, to explain away her no-show, which amounts to her getting cold feet at the last second because she feared destroying her family for “a fling in Jamaica.” As if labeling their relationship a fling were not clumsy enough, she next attempts to place some of the blame on Saanvi for being “all about work,” implying that she would have never considered Alex a priority (which, let’s be honest, fits Saanvi’s profile). Having heard enough, Saanvi switches to her professional posture and turns to the topic at hand, which is to solve the retrovirus issue. Alex is willing to help.

TJ’s research Al-Zuras bears fruit. He located the 16^th-century scholar’s journal at Yale University’s library, except that it must be requested by a current faculty member from an approved institution, like Ben.

Later, TJ flat out tells Olive that he agrees with her dad about Adrian being “full of it.” Olive dejectedly asks if he does not believe in the miracle, to which he replies, “I’m not an angel or some God. I came back the same person I left, except I did not have a mom anymore. Or friends or a home, for that matter.” It’s now his turn to ask Olive, “Tell me, how is that a miracle?” We cut away from the scene before Olive can provide an answer and she sure looked like she could use the time to look for one.

At the precinct, Michaela gets a call from Isaiah claiming to have some more information about the Xer attack on church, except that he needs her to come to him. As Michaela is leaving to meet him, Jared promises something to sleazy Billy on the phone and tries to login to Michaela’s computer, but to no avail.

In what can probably be referred to as the final scene of the set-up portion, Zeke finds his razor in his bag, with pills still in it. At that moment, he has a vision, along with Grace and Cal at their home, in which all three end up at some dark place with music playing. Someone is throwing gasoline on the floor to start a fire. Cal repeats, “save the passengers.”

Once again, nothing groundbreaking has taken place so far, but the course has been impeccably laid out for an entertaining race to the finish line. The main characters are, or will soon be, on their way to the night club. Set-up complete! Mission accomplished!

Olive and TJ are the first to arrive at the club and join Maxine at some back hall. Michaela shows up next to meet Isaiah who is working as the bartender in the main area. He asks her to wait, offering a glass of champagne, which she refuses only because she is on duty. Little does Michaela know at the time how crucial that “no” was to her survival.

Ben arrives next, expecting to meet Adrian. They texted each other earlier in the day, or so Ben believes, and decided to reconcile their differences over a drink. Except that Adrian, who also just arrived, insists that he never texted Ben. He was not even planning to be there until an hour ago when Isaiah asked for his help to fill the place due to some promotion taking place at the club. They begin to notice other Flight 828 passengers at the establishment such as Finn who was dead in the vision of the crashed plane. He tells Ben that some investor reached out to him for a meeting at the club.

It’s obvious to our heroes by this time that Flight 828 passengers have been tricked into gathering at the club for some sordid reason. Soon enough, it also becomes clear that Isaiah must play a role in this scheme, especially when Adrian, who thought he had misplaced his phone, begins to realize that Isaiah may have taken his phone.

This progression of events at the nightclub is presented through the use of brief shots, moving cameras, and up-close angles, each conveying with meticulous exactitude the sense of confusion invading one character after another. It also helps that sensible dosages of side stories are interjected here and there, allowing the chaotic narrative at the night club time to breathe, thus eliminating the chances of viewers experiencing sensory overload.

One of those side stories involves Jared and Conor (Jonathan Marballi), the tech guy at the precinct. Jared interrupts Conor’s online betting session to ask for some of Michaela’s files. Conor first cites department rules to refuse the detective’s request but quickly changes his mind when Jared threatens to expose his online-betting habits. Jared then texts sleazy Billy, “got what you need,” right before a very agitated Grace phones him, asking where Michaela is. She informs him of her ghastly vision with Zeke and Cal. Jared has heard enough. He is on his way to pick her and Cal up and find Michaela.

Saanvi, for her part, experiments on herself (again) with the tweaked formula of the serum. Her arm turns red and she collapses on the floor. She has a bizarre vision in which she revisits previous callings and events in reverse order, dating all the way back to the plane’s explosion that ended “Pilot.”

Deep breath. Back to the club!

Champagne glasses making the rounds trigger another vision for Michaela. She finds herself back at the crashed plane with Ben and Adrian where she spots a broken bottle of champagne with the same label. At the same time, it dawns on Ben that Adrian knew about the previous crashed-plane vision and did not tell anyone (how he went unnoticed in that vision is still beyond me). He chastises Adrian for having lied about it but its too late. Some passengers, already poisoned from the champagne, begin to faint and collapse around them. To make matters worse, Isaiah is already busy starting a fire in some back corridor as exit doors to the establishment get shut and locked – someone please explain how that happened, I am all ears. What did I miss? Who shut them? How did they get shut exactly as people began to head to the doors? Were secret forces collaborating with Isaiah?

Isaiah locks the door to the back hall where Olive, TJ, and Maxine are dancing the night away. Luckily, TJ had just left for the bathroom and noticed the mayhem in the main area. He rushes back to alert others but finds the door locked. Ben joins him and they force the door open. As everyone is attempting to run to the nearest exit, Isaiah grabs Olive, holding a knife to her throat. The numbskull believes that they will “transcend death” and miraculously survive the fire. “We’ll step into the light together,” he adds. TJ tackles him and frees Olive. He shouts at Ben to take Olive and leave as he tussles with Isaiah, with fire surrounding them. While Ben is carrying Olive and looking for a way out, a bright light shines his way prompting him to follow its path.

Zeke arrives at the location with Cal, Grace, and Jared, and immediately runs in to help. He finds Michaela helplessly staring at Bethany (remember her?) whose leg is stuck under a burning beam. No sweat for our hero Zeke who lifts the burning beam à-la Dr. Banner in The Incredible Hulk‘s pilot movie (1977). Jared appears and guides them outside to safety.

Having carried Olive outside, Ben is ready to go back in to save TJ but it’s too late. The building explodes, killing everyone still remaining inside (logical conclusion, which may not mean much in a sci-fi show filled with twists and shockers). Adrian looks unequivocally devastated and Jared Grimes offers one of the best (silent-)acting moments of the series. Adrian’s expression of despondency is worth a thousand words as he comes to the realization that his grandiose plans for his Church have just come to screeching halt.

Thus ends one of Manifest’s most ambitious – and audacious – action sequences to date. It acts as a denouement to the episode’s self-contained story of the mass-murder attempt by Isaiah, while creating ripple effects likely to travel well into future.

Saanvi wakes up back at the lab and immediately checks her DNA. No anomalies found, Alex’s modifications worked! This explains not only the reverse order of events in her vision as she collapsed on the floor earlier, but also why she did not get a calling about the nightclub fire (Michaela, unaware of her latest experiment, is surprised to learn that Saanvi did not get a calling when the two briefly talk at the hospital).

Once Michaela is back at the precinct, she runs into Conor the tech guy who was about to leave her files on her desk. She is surprised to find out that Jared asked Conor to print her case files. Her curiosity is further piqued when Conor tells her that Jared gave her promotion as the reason for which he needed access to her files. Conor may have just ruined, albeit unintentionally, Det. Vasquez’s chances to build on the few brownie points he had just earned for helping Michaela at the nightclub.

Saanvi checks Zeke’s hands and discovers frostbite on his fingers, similar to when he was in the cave during the time he was missing. That explains why his hands did not burn when he lifted the beam, but it also means that his death date could be approaching. He appears to be slowly freezing to death, in the same way that Griffin drowned on land when his borrowed time came to an end back in the season 1 finale.

Ben learns from Olive that TJ located Al-Zuras’s journal and had it sent to his office. The journal contains an image of a man carrying a woman with flames surrounding them, reminiscent of him carrying Olive to safety at the night club. The last shot of the episode consists of a bright light, similar to the one that guided Ben at the night club, emanating from the book and brightening up his office.

Last-minute thoughts:

– TJ and Olive share a happy moment in the photo booth at the night club when TJ tells her that meeting her and Ben feels like a miracle for him. He offers her his mom’s bracelet with a dharma wheel on it, signifying a circular life with no beginning or end. I wonder if that symbol will play any kind of a role in solving some ‘xyz’ puzzle along the way, in the same way that the peacock and the tarot card already have. In any case, it is a heartwarming scene between the two youngsters, one that was surely intended to amplify the emotional impact of TJ’s soon-to-come demise.

– The champagne bottles are labeled “Maison du revenir” which literally translates as “House of coming back (or comeback)” and does not make much sense in French. I am not even sure it’s worth mentioning. If you are reading this, it must have somehow made it to my review’s final draft.

– Good move by Jared to give up on the login attempt to Michaela’s computer after two tries. A third one would have probably led to some type of alarm signal or computer lockdown.

– There is a shot of Finn passed out on the floor as Ben leaves the burning club with Olive. Talk about a guy who can’t catch a break for his life (literally).

– Saanvi and Alex conclusively separate after a final hug following their successful collaboration in modifying the retroviral serum. If I were to guess, I’d say that this was Alex’s first and last appearance in this season, if not for the remainder of Manifest.

– I am not 100% certain but I believe this is the second appearance of Saanvi’s dad. If memory serves, he showed up briefly when Saanvi returned after missing for five and a half years (from his perspective) in “Pilot.”

Until the next episode…

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