What’s Next for Flight 828’s Passengers? ‘Manifest’ EP Answers Your Burning Questions
Preview
Think you’ve had bad flights? The innocent passengers of Manifest‘s Flight 828 hit a patch of turbulence and — boom! — lost five and a half years of their lives.
Once the plane touched down, the hadn’t-aged-a-day people aboard and their loved ones were swept up in, not surprisingly, one big head-scratcher of a mystery. Survivors experienced voices, visions and other cryptic messages, dubbed “callings” — and then nonpassengers got ’em!
By the finale, there were all sorts of theories to explain this strange new world.
Ben Stone (Josh Dallas) and his sister, Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh), suspected they had more control over their callings than it had originally seemed. True?
“They are on to something,” acknowledges exec producer Jeff Rake. “The characters will continue to discover that the callings are raw tools to be utilized. It’s quite possible [they] can be harnessed for good or for evil.” And now that non-828 people — hiker Zeke Landon (Matt Long), criminal James Griffin (Marc Menchaca) — have joined the, uh, cosmic phone tree, it’s more important than ever to respond to the callings in a beneficial way.
Another mind-blowing question: Do the survivors have an expiration date?
It’s a faith vs. science coin toss. In Griffin’s case, Michaela saw a cause and effect: Thought to have drowned, he miraculously survived. But when he tried to use his calling as a cash grab, he perished for real. Number-crunching revealed a different aspect: Griffin had been underwater 82 hours and 8 minutes before he was pulled out of New York City’s East River, and he lived again for 82 hours and 8 minutes.
“There is a clean logic to Griffin dying at the exact amount of time he’d been gone,” Rake explains, adding, “That suggests [a] death date of five and a half years” for the passengers. Are they doomed to pass away on June 2, 2024? Or will do-gooding save them? “It’s an open question.”
(Peter Kramer/NBC/Warner Brothers)
What’s with the blood markers?
Similar, unusual markers were found in survivors and in Zeke and Griffin. In Season 2, medical researcher Saanvi Bahl (Parveen Kaur) will stay on the case, trying to “understand how the blood marker works, whether or not it can be transferred to others and whether [it can explain] the existence of the callings,” Rake says. “She’s going to make an important breakthrough in that regard.”
Just how much trouble is Saanvi in with her new “therapist”?
The PTSD sufferer took a step toward better mental health with a new therapist … revealed to be the Major (Elizabeth Marvel), the mysterious big bad gathering info about 828’s survivors. So Saanvi’s findings will make their way “exactly to the people who our heroes would never want to [grant] access [to],” Rake says.
Who’s Grace’s baby daddy?
Hey, good news! Ben’s wife, Grace (Athena Karkanis), is pregnant! But given the timing, the father could be Danny (Daniel Sunjata), the man she dated after concluding her husband was dead. Rake promises the characters’ personal stories will be “as front and center as anything mythological.”
Who took a bullet?
We last saw Michaela, Zeke, and her pre-828 boyfriend, Jared Vasquez (J.R. Ramirez), in a volatile situation — then heard a gunshot. Promises Rake: “The answer will be resolved early in the season premiere.”
Manifest, Season 2, 2020, NBC
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