tek's rating:

Manifest, on NBC
IMDb; NBC; TV Tango; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Peacock; Vudu; YouTube

Caution: spoilers.

Season One
Flight 828 of Montego Air departed Jamaica on April 7, 2013, en route to New York. It arrived on November 4, 2018. To everyone on board the plane, the flight was perfectly normal, except for a bit of turbulence at one point. So of course they're shocked to be informed that they've traveled five and a half years into the future. Of course it's also shocking to the rest of the world, and the government is keenly interested in figuring out what happened, and that means keeping an eye on all the passengers and crew of Flight 828. The lead investigator is NSA Director Robert Vance. Meanwhile, everyone has to try to go on with their lives, which can be quite difficult, particularly since they've been considered dead all this time. What makes it even more confusing is that some of them begin experiencing unusual phenomena.

Michaela "Mick" Stone is a police officer in the NYPD, who had been engaged to another cop, Jared Vasquez, before the flight. Now she learns that, some time after she supposedly died, he married her best friend, Lourdes. Jared has also been promoted to detective, and it's awkward having to work with him. Meanwhile, Mick's brother, Ben Stone (Josh Dallas, whom I know from Once Upon a Time), has returned to his wife, Grace, who is naturally happy to find that he's alive, after all this time. However, it's complicated by the fact that she had been seriously involved with a man named Danny. Also, Ben and Grace had twin children: a boy named Cal (who was on the flight), and a girl named Olive (who wasn't). (She's played, in the present, by Luna Blaise, whom I know from Fresh Off the Boat.) So it's greatly disturbing to Cal that his twin sister is now a teenager. Of course, it's also difficult for Olive and Ben to get used to all these changes. Also, Cal has cancer. Before the flight, there was no chance of treating it. However, during the missing five years, a new treatment was developed, based on research by a woman named Saanvi Bahl, who was also a passenger on Flight 828.

We frequently see other people who had been on the flight, and how the time change has affected their lives. But Mick, Ben, and Saanvi are the ones we mainly see, and the ones who are trying to figure out what is happening to them since returning, while keeping it a secret from both the NSA and their loved ones. Meanwhile, the various phenomena they experience (which they start referring to as "callings") seem to be leading them to help others in unpredictable ways... and the things they see or hear are vague and hard to interpret, which leads to making mistakes along the way. Which can cause trouble for them and those around them, and also makes some (particularly Jared) curious as to why they (particularly Mick) are acting the way they do, and how they seem to know things there's no way they could know. Eventually, the returned do let their loved ones know what's going on. And Ben starts working with Vance to investigate the disappearance of some of the passengers, who had been taken by a secret group within the government or military, to be experimented upon. They eventually find and rescue them, though they're all catatonic. And Vance dies during the rescue mission. Also, Ben learns that the person in charge of the secret project is a woman called "the Major." And since Cal seems to be the one who experiences callings the most intensely, Ben is worried that he's a target of the Major's, and wants to do all he can to protect him. Meanwhile, the general public begins reacting to the passengers in very different ways. Some people see them as miraculous, saintlike figures, while others see them as potentially dangerous.

Toward the end of the season, Mick, Ben, and Cal meet a man named Zeke, who had been trapped in a cave during a blizzard a year ago, and now returns without being aware of the time that has passed. So it's not just the passengers of 828 who have experienced this phenomenon. And like the others, Zeke receives callings. A bit later, a bank robber and murderer named James Griffin, who had disappeared 82 hours and 8 minutes ago, is found alive when his van is pulled out of the East River. He should have been dead after spending all that time underwater, but it seems he also experienced the time displacement, and he gets a calling, which he uses to make a deal to get out of jail. However, he ends up drowning on dry land, dying exactly as much time after reappearing as the time he'd been missing. This makes Ben and his family worry that their own time is limited. (They could die on June 2, 2024.) Meanwhile, Saanvi suffers PTSD after having been held hostage by a woman who believed she could miraculously cure her husband's cancer. Which, of course, she couldn't. She eventually decides to go to a therapist recommended by a coworker, and the therapist turns out to be the Major, unbeknownst to Saanvi. Also, Jared becomes suspicious of Zeke, who has been staying with Mick since returning. The season ends with a fight between the two of them, with Mick rushing back to her apartment to stop them. A gun is fired, but we don't see who, if anyone, might have been hit. So, we have that cliffhanger, on top of all the other mysteries that remain unsolved.

Season Two
I'm not sure how much of this season I saw. At some point, my executive dysfunction made it impossible for me to keep watching any of my shows, so I missed a bunch of episodes. And eventually I decided this is one show I didn't care enough about to try to catch up online. Not to say I'm not interested in how everything turns out, but I can't muster the strength to fight my dysfunction for this show, as I can for some others. And I feel bad about that. But it can't be helped. So I'm afraid my review is over.


mysterious index