After a turbulent, but routine flight, those onboard discover the world has aged five years, and soon a deeper mystery unfolds.
I tend to watch more TV shows today than in previous years and most of that is due to Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu. On regular TV you watch an episode and then have to wait another week for the next one but with streaming services, you can binge-watch anything you want. TV shows become available instantly and you can watch an entire season in one sitting if that’s what you want to do. We’re really spoiled for choice these days but with “Manifest,” I remember seeing the previews on NBC and the premise alone intrigued me but with reviewing so many movies, Blu-rays and DVDs, it got lost in the shuffle. I’m actually glad it did as the few previews I saw didn’t give away too much, in fact, they gave away very little so when I was sent the first season to review on DVD, I was delighted.
“Manifest” has to be one of the best TV dramas I have seen in some time. Even with streaming shows such as “Stranger Things,” “Orange Is the New Black,” and “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” shows I really like, “Manifest” seemed to come out of nowhere and with its captivating storyline and top-notch performances, it pulled me in from the pilot episode. The plot is very simple: a group of people aboard Montego Air Flight 828 from Jamaica to New York City experience severe turbulence mid-flight but it only lasts a few minutes. When they finally land sometime later, they are greeted by police and government officials who inform them that their flight has been missing for the past five years. Family members and friends who thought everyone on board was dead, come to the airport in droves, wanting to see them with their own eyes. The NSA interviews everyone and they all say the same thing: their flight took off, they experienced some turbulence, and then it landed. Naturally, the NSA has a hard time believing them but with everybody giving the exact same account of what transpired, they are all released to go home to their families.
Our central protagonists are Ben Stone (Josh Dallas), an associate professor, his sister Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh), a New York City detective, and Ben’s young son Cal (Jack Messina). All three were in Jamaica with extended family, Ben’s wife Grace (Athena Karkanis) and Cal’s twin sister Olive (Luna Blaise), along with Ben and Michaela’s mom and dad, Steve and Karen (Malachy Cleary and Geraldine Leer). While waiting in the terminal, an announcement is made that the flight to New York City has been overbooked and that the airline is offering vouchers worth $400 for anybody who is willing to catch the next available flight. As Cal has terminal cancer and Ben and Grace are trying every possible treatment obtainable, Cal agrees to wait for the next flight along with Ben, figuring that the money they’ll receive from the vouchers will help towards the medical bills that are racking up and Michaela decides to stay behind with them as well. Everyone else leaves and when our three protagonists arrive home a few hours later, five years have passed.
Initially, everyone is overwhelmed with emotion but more so for those who had to accept that their loved ones were dead for five years and tried to move on with their lives the best they could. Grace met a new man, Danny (Daniel Sunjata), who has taken care of her and Olive, who is now sixteen-years-old, in the years since, and Michaela’s fiancé Jared (J. R. Ramirez), is now married to Michaela’s best friend Lourdes (Victoria Cartagena), as they found a connection together in their shared grief. It all sounds like a daytime soap opera but believe you me, it plays out wonderfully. Just watching these characters trying to come to terms with what has transpired would have more than enough material to take up an entire season but this is just the tip of the iceberg. As everyone tries to get back to normal, those who were on board Flight 828, begin to experience strange goings-on. Michaela and Ben start hearing voices in their heads, warning them of what is to come while Cal experiences weird sensations, not voices but a gut-feeling that something is going to happen.
As the show progresses, it gradually brings other characters, people who were on Flight 828, into the fold and as they all get to know each other, they realize that they are all sharing the same strange phenomenon, voices or feelings inside of them, warning them of something that is going to happen but not necessarily to them, to those around them. Because of these voices, Michaela is able to crack a missing person’s case and stop a bus from hitting a young child. As she and her ex Jared are partners on the force, he tries desperately to understand how she is able to do these things but she is afraid to open up to him for fear of being ridiculed and being labeled crazy. When people from Flight 828 start mysteriously dying, Ben and Michaela meet with Saanvi Bahl (Parveen Kaur), a medical researcher who works at Mercy Hospital where Cal is now being treated for his cancer and also a passenger from their flight. She has been experiencing disturbing visions and shortly thereafter, Michaela begins to experience similar hallucinations.
After doing some research, Ben quickly realizes that eleven passengers from the flight never made it home and are unaccounted for. He and Michaela start to dig deeper but have to be careful as the government has been watching their every move since they got off the plane. When Ben discovers a research facility in upstate New York and fears that a secret government agency is experimenting on the passengers, he reaches out to Robert Vance (Daryl Edwards), the director of the NSA and the man who has been tracking their movements. After studying Ben’s findings, he reluctantly agrees to assist him. With Ben and Michaela receiving visions or voices in their heads, they are able to make it to the facility, only to find it abandoned but Vance unearths enough proof left behind that makes him think that something strange is most certainly going on.
When Cal begins to exhibit a mysterious fever and starts speaking Bulgarian, the doctors are at a loss for words. On the one hand, they want to give him medication to help reduce his baffling fever but on the other hand, if they do that, they will render the medicine he is taking for his cancer treatments null and void and he will be worse off. The passengers now call the visions and voices they hear, “the calling,” and when Ben hears another voice, he ascertains that Cal is channeling one of the passengers, a Bulgarian national named Marko Valeriev (Nikolai Tsankov), who is being experimented on. With time running out, Ben, Michaela, and Vance must find the new location in order to save Cal and Marko and set the missing passengers free but when they hit a snag, Cal begins drawing a strange building as part of his “calling.” It is the exact location they are searching for and Ben, Michaela, and Vance are able to track down the doctors conducting the experiments and the passengers but when an explosion levels the building along with many people inside of it, Michaela begins to experience new callings that lead her to believe that everything that has happened up to this point, is only the beginning!
“Manifest” holds your attention and is totally absorbing, with each character from the plane having storylines that intersect with other passengers, they are all connected. My biggest fear, like so many TV shows that start off promisingly, is that eventually, it will begin to lose traction. “Lost” is a show that could be compared to “Manifest,” from its exciting opening, it held viewers glued to their TV sets every week and also dealt with a passenger plane but ended with a whimper instead of a bang. “Heroes” is another show that started off with a compelling premise but a few seasons in, began to fall apart as it became overly convoluted which led to its inevitable cancellation. With “Manifest” having been renewed for a second season, I just hope the creators can challenge themselves to keep the show interesting and not get too elaborate with an overabundance of extraneous intertwining storylines and character arcs. As of this writing, I anxiously await season two.
Available on DVD & Digital July 23rd
