Requested By
Karasbroken on Discord
Note: This post is going to be a little bit different, because it was written twice.
Manifest was one of the shows upon which I tested the initial concept of the blog, before I even launched it, to see if reviewing a finale with no context could be done. The write-up was never meant to be posted.
Because Karasbroken requested it, I decided to put it up after all, with some editing for cohesiveness, and some more editing to bring it in line with the writing style I’m using now. But still in some ways it’s a throwback to how the blog was originally going to read.
What do I know about this series going into it?
I know that the central plot is a plane that reappeared and landed years after it took off, with the passengers on board not having aged. That’s about it.
Previously On
A plane goes through turbulence and lands. The people on board have been missing for 5.5 years! Then the plane explodes. There’s a dragon statue. There are trials, something about “being judged”. Three shadows, no just one shadow. A surviving piece of Noah’s Ark. The world is going to end and only 8 people will survive. DUN DUN DUN.
Recap
We see cracked concrete with a glowing blue river underneath it. It’s a dream, and the random people who had it all wake up, frightened.
A family in the middle of nowhere are camping. A child asks where “Cal” is. Somebody says they can still feel him, after which there’s a mild earthquake. This is apparently significant:
The child finds a rock in which is inscribed “Class of 1999” on top of a picture of a mountain with scales on it.
Opening credits.
The family discusses the mountain on the rock, which looks identical to one from a tarot card set. The fate of the world hangs in the balance - but those jerks from the Class of 1999 did their troll graffiti on top of the inscription and you can’t read it anymore. So Ben’s daughter Olive is going to race back home to get old photos of the campsite to see if the inscription appears in the background of any of them. Apparently this is the day Ben (the dad) is destined to die and it’s “not going to be pretty”. The kids head off with two adults, and afterwards the four remaining adults discuss how they had a premonition overnight of how they’re going to die.
Elsewhere, a group of obvious bad guys come out of a van and head into a barn. “What if we’re recognized?” asks one. “You doubt that I can protect the flock?” answers their leader, but as soon as the subordinate turns away she looks unsure. As soon as they’re all inside, another van pulls up next to the bad guys’ van; two guys come out and sabotage the Flock’s van, then drive away.
At Ben’s house, the adults burst in with guns to make sure nobody is waiting to kidnap the girls, who are named Olive and Eden. The girls go upstairs to look for the photographs, while the overprotective adult husband tells his pregnant wife, ridiculously, that she shouldn’t be climbing stairs. They turn on the news to discover that volcanoes are appearing out of nowhere, all over the world, in places volcanos shouldn’t be.
Back to the middle of nowhere, Ben hears about the volcanoes over the radio, when lots and lots of random people start showing up. These are other passengers from the plane that exploded, and they’re here to meet the camping family. The van with the two saboteurs also pulls up; turns out one of the saboteurs used to be part of the Flock cult but left. I’m guessing the cult is trying to bring about the end of the world.
The passengers converse with each other, catching up on what’s been going on in their lives. I don’t know who any of these people are, but I assume they’ve been recurring characters throughout. They point out that “Angelina” and “her 7 people” aren’t there – clearly implying that those are the prophesied 8 survivors of the end of the world.
Ben gets up and gives a speech. His son, Cal, is the one who “sent the beacon” that brought them all together to the middle of nowhere. Suddenly the blue glowing river bursts out from under him and a volcano erupts exactly where he was standing!
An airplane literally made of lava comes out of the ground, then solidifies. “It’s flight 828! It’s back, for us!” They decide they have to get on the plane and face their final judgement.
The plane seems in unusually good shape for having reappeared in a river of magma years after it exploded. And we’re following Super Mario rules here: it doesn’t matter how close you are to molten rock, as long as you don’t actually touch it you’re fine.
Back at the house, the adults (who it turns out are both detectives) and the kids are looking through slideshows of birds hoping to find one with a picture of the rock. The photos are organized by species of bird, with one slideshow labeled “silver drake”. Since “silver dragon” had been the nickname for flight 828 in the prophecy, they open that set of slides and find the photos of the rock. The inscription reads, “Forgiveness lightens the heart pixlaz”. Olive points out that in Egyptian mythology your heart is weighed against a feather, not against your bad deeds – so if you want to pass the judgement you need to lighten your heart by forgiving people. What about pixlaz? Well, “pix” means “pictures” and “az” is short for [something I didn’t quite catch but isn’t Arizona], so maybe it’s “[not-Arizona]’s pictures!” What about the L? Eh, screw the L, we’ll figure that out later.
Meanwhile, back at the lavaplane, Angelina and her 7 show up with a gun; luckily for them, the detectives aren’t here and none of the other passengers are armed1. Ben tries to convince Angelina that the plane is for all of them, but she and her glowing blue arm disagree: you guys aren’t boarding, only we are.
Meanwhile, the pilot’s getting nervous: “We gotta get this plane out of here, fast.” The lack of a runway doesn’t seem to cross his mind.
Back at the house, Detective Husband is chopping up ice for Detective Wife2. She’s going into labor but he doesn’t seem to feel any urgency to get her to a hospital or anything.
Meanwhile, Olive finds her grandmother’s journal. They decide they got “pixlax” wrong: P stands for “page”, IX means 9, and L means 50. But we still don’t know what AZ means.
Back at the lavaplane, Angelina suddenly loses her God-given blue-arm powers, and her gun-toting henchman decides she isn’t the Messiah after all. She grabs the gun from him, and the earth rocks. Angelina loses her balance, falls over, and drops the gun; it fires and hits a dark-haired woman. With the threat gone, everyone gets onto the plane, but Ben runs to get Angelina.
Back at the house, Olive goes to page 50 of the journal. It has a picture of Ben carrying her through fire – but she realizes the picture isn’t of her, it’s actually Angelina. In other words, Ben needs to forgive Angelina to survive his prophesied death! She tries to call him but can’t get through.
Back at the lavaplane, Ben has the gun, shouting at Angelina at how she caused the death of his wife Grace. Angelina expresses regret, just in time for a burst of flame from the lava that injures her further. She tells Ben to leave her, but he lifts her up and walks through the spreading lava cracks in the ground, bringing her onto the plane and putting her in her seat, blood and all.
The pilot and a blonde woman are in the cockpit. We need to take off! “But don’t we need… a runway?” asks the blonde woman. As above, this apparently never occurred to the seasoned pilot – but luckily, a runway magically appears in front of them, and they take off above the volcano.
Outside the plane, the volcano apocalypse has arrived and the world is ending. And one by one the passengers are starting to choke from apparent lack of oxygen. “Release the oxygen masks!” they shout. The stewardess tries but the masks won’t come out. And then one by one the passengers start cracking with internal lava fissures and bursting into ash. “They’re dying from internal idiopathic causes!” says the dark-haired gunshot victim3.
The dark-haired woman begins seeing cracks of lava underneath her own skin too. They are being judged, one by one. “Paul just blew up!” says a flock-woman to Angelina, “Use your goddamn sapphire!” but then the flock woman dies too: Angelina couldn’t protect them.
But there’s hope: Black Saboteur starts to crack into lava, but White Saboteur asks God to take him instead. He gives Black Saboteur his magic necklace, and Black Saboteur survives – but then White Saboteur starts to crack into lava instead. “I deserve this, I’ve been selfish,” he says, but Black Saboteur tells him that being willing to sacrifice your life for somebody else proves he isn’t selfish. He’s right! White Saboteur survives, as the lava fissures in his skin resolidify.
Ben begs dark-haired woman not to die, telling her she’s a good person - and she ultimately does survive her judgment.
Back at the house:
Back on the plane, Angelina gets on her knees begging, but ultimately doesn’t survive her judgment. And then her ashes and those of the others who died fly into the air and combine into a giant smoke monster, which coalesces into an angel of death. Ben and the blond woman shout at the angel of death until it dissipates. They look outside – the volcanoes are all gone! They saved the world by shouting at the smoke monster!
Blonde woman goes back to the cockpit, where they see the same blue glow that swallowed the plane in the first episode and caused all this. Blond woman tells the pilot to fly directly into it, and he does. The plane is surrounded by white light, and it comes to a halt. The door opens and the passengers disembark into blinding white light, walking through it to find themselves in… an airport. “Are we in Heaven?” asks Ben.
It turns out they’ve gone back in time: it’s April 7, 2013, when the plane was supposed to land in the first place. None of the events of the series ever happened, but everyone on the plane keeps their memories and the dark-haired woman still has the gunshot wound. All the minor-character passengers who had died throughout the series are alive again too, disembarking behind the main characters, with the notable exception of Angelina and presumably the others who burst into lava.
Angelina’s father, poor guy, angrily and desperately demands of an airport employee that his daughter, whom he knows boarded the flight, is missing; the employee doesn’t know what to do.
There follows an extended series of wrapping-up scenes, in which characters I don’t know meet other characters I don’t know. The passengers react to seeing friends and relatives either long-dead or long-lost to them, while those friends and relatives react with confusion:
The dark-haired woman meets her wife and they hug and kiss, the gunshot wound not causing her the least amount of physical discomfort.
Cal is alive again and a child and has no memory of what happened, even though he was on the plane.
Ben meets Grace, telling her the dark-haired woman will “cure Cal”. He also mentions his “three kids”, which confuses her because Eden isn’t born yet.
Two old guys go out for a drink together.
Some 20-ish-year-old meets his mother.
The saboteurs decide to work together in this timeline as well.
Blonde Woman meets Male Detective, who was her fiancée prior to his marrying the female detective. She breaks up with him. Then later she suddenly realizes her future husband must be in one of the cabs outside right now and runs out to meet him.
The police show up to investigate a completely different mystery than the one that started the series: 11 people disappeared from an airplane in mid-flight.
As he’s leaving the airport, Male Detective meets destined-to-be-his-wife Female Detective coming into the airport, neither of them recognizing one another because neither are from the future. But they’ll get together in this timeline too, just you wait!
Unresolved questions
What was with the smoke monster angel of death? The passengers freaked out upon seeing it and clearly didn’t recognize it - but they also knew enough about it to be able to claim that they did “everything it wanted”. Why did shouting at it solve anything?
Why did they need to save the world at the end if that timeline was going to be erased anyway by the plane going back in time? Could they have gone back in time without saving the world?
What happened to “only 8 people will survive the apocalypse”? Did they avert the apocalypse, or is still going to happen 5.5 years later? Do all the clues (tarot cards, rock inscriptions, grandmother’s drawings) still exist in this timeline, and do they point to anything?
What will the investigation into the missing people reveal? Are they recoverable?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 3/10. The plot had several holes in it and was ultimately reliant on magic: a magic plane, a magic runway, a magical return to the past. Shouting at the smoke monster to stop the apocalypse was anticlimactic and, ultimately, just silly4. And I don’t understand why we continued following the detectives at the house; we needed them to provide (to the viewers) the revelation that Ben needed to forgive Angelina to survive. But past that point, why keep going back to them? I imagine that the birth of their child would have been a massively significant moment, if it had happened. But we cut away from them before the baby was born, and then the timeline was erased.
Writing: 6/10. Better than average for television. The reunion scenes were very well done. I made fun of the first attempt to translate “pixlax”, but the fact that said translation was wrong made up for it. Unfortunately, the dialogue wasn’t without issues; characters stated the obvious, used cliches, or talked in ways that just didn’t feel natural. The “idiopathic” sentence bothered me in particular: I hate when writers overuse technical terminology in an attempt to make a character sound smart – and I hate it even more when they use it wrong.
Production: 9/10. Very good acting all around. Good score, lighting, and camera work, particularly in the transitional scene from white into airport.
But the special effects were the real star. The lava cracking inside the passengers’ skin was very well done, especially when the lights flicker briefly over Angelina as she’s begging to live – and for a moment all you see is face-shaped criss-crossing lava in the darkness. The production was showing off there.
Characterization: 4/10. With the exception of the reunions, I was able to glean very little about the main characters’ personalities. Said reunions undoubtedly held a lot more meaning for longtime viewers than it did for me, though; I imagine this would get a much higher score if I knew who everybody was.
Accessibility: 7/10. Superficially, I understand a lot of what was going on: the apocalypse is coming and the passengers (as a representative sample of all humanity, maybe?) are being judged based on good deeds and forgiveness.
There were a lot of leftover questions: why these people in particular were picked, why the rest of humanity was saved on their behalf, why the apocalypse came in the form of volcanos, what the airplane has to do with anything, who the angel of death was, and how the time travel (in both directions) intersects with all of the above.
Normally this many questions call for a very low Accessibility rating. But in this case they don’t– because I get the feeling that they were left unanswered for all viewers, not just for the doofus who didn’t watch the rest of the series. It felt like I understood about as much of the central mystery as I was supposed to. The writers either deliberately wanted to leave things mysterious or couldn’t come up with good answers to the questions they wrote.
The three missing Accessibility points come from the massive number of characters I had to learn - there was no hope that I’d get even half of their names - and from the heartwarming reunion scenes, in which I felt thoroughly lost watching one person I’ve never seen before tearfully embrace another person I’ve never seen before, over and over again. (Of course, the writers should not be expected to take a time-out from the show to explain it all to me. I’m merely noting the fact that they didn’t, no criticism intended.)
Closure: 5/10. The disembarking montage clearly was intended to show each of the side characters meeting people they missed, taking their lives in new directions, etc. I can only guess at whether any major threads of that type were left out, but didn’t see anything obvious. So I’m trusting that from a character standpoint those threads are all tied off neatly.
I can’t rate it any higher on closure, though, for two reasons.
The biggest reason is because of those aspects of the central mystery that were left unexplained, which I described above.
But there’s another dangling thread that will inevitably be pulled. In investigating the missing 11 people, the police will have to interview the other passengers: “Did you see Angelina board the flight? Who was she sitting next to? Precisely when did she disappear?” And sooner or later somebody the whole time-travel-apocalypse story is going to come out. So this actually isn’t as true a resolution as it looks.
Do I want to watch the series now?
From a strictly quality standpoint I would like to; the acting and production values were superb and the writing wasn’t bad. But I get the feeling that if I did I would be left disappointed by the ending, which explains so little.
This is America. The only possible explanation for 300 people all not having a gun is that it’s in their checked baggage.
Ice cravings in pregnancy are a sign of severe iron-deficiency anemia. He should be getting her a hamburger.
This is an awful, awful line, typical of when a writer tries to write a scientist character who proves they’re smart by using overly verbose language. “Idiopathic” is a medical term that essentially means “the body is not working properly and we don’t know why”. You’d never use it to describe somebody who turns to ash thanks to the magical judgment of the gods.
And also, in retrospect, contradictory. They went out of their way to say that forgiveness is more important than good deeds in this theology – so why was the climax resolved by listing good deeds?
Just found out about your project and I'm hooked. Very entertaining read. Would you consider reviewing the series 3%, a Netflix Original?